It is a highly unfortunate truth that every year, courts convict law enforcement officers, including school resource officers (SROs), of sexual abuse of juvenile victims. A Washington Post investigation published in 2024 found that between 2005 and 2022, police arrested nearly 1,800 colleagues for allegedly committing crimes related to child sexual abuse.[i] The newspaper found cases in which more than 200 elementary, middle and high school police officers were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse during the same period.
For many years, the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) has recommended the careful selection of law enforcement officers for SRO assignments. NASRO recommends that communities seek experienced officers who have exemplary employment records and proven success working with children, for example, as youth group leaders or athletic coaches. The statistics above demonstrate, however, that it is not always possible to screen out applicants who will commit sex crimes.
Strong Policies can Reduce Sexual Abuse
The good news is that in addition to careful selection, law enforcement agencies can enact and enforce policies that help prevent child sexual abuse by their officers. The policies that NASRO recommends mirror those used by school leaders to help prevent abuse by educators. While some of the following guidelines might seem simple and even obvious, it is possible that leaders of some law enforcement agencies have not fully realized the value of implementing them.
NASRO recommends that SROs receive sexual misconduct awareness training and that law enforcement agencies implement robust policies and procedures to reduce the chances that officers will perpetrate sexual assault of children.
Because no policy can prevent a bad actor from carrying out an illegal or immoral act, many of the organization’s recommendations are aimed at preventing situations that could facilitate sexual abuse. Just as importantly, these guidelines can enable leaders to recognize early signs that grooming might be occurring or that abuse might be imminent.
Avoiding the Appearance of Impropriety
An important key to making sexual abuse more difficult is to require officers to behave in ways that avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Relationship building is an essential role of every SRO. It’s a primary way that the officers receive information that helps them intervene before violence occurs. Building such relationships requires interpersonal contact between officers and students. This is why agencies must erect effective guardrails for such contact.
Agency policies must establish clear expectations of officers regarding all the following.
- Appropriate social media interactions. NASRO encourages SROs to use social media appropriately to publicly communicate important information, to become aware of information that could portend school violence and to help the school community get to know the SROs as people. Abusers frequently use social media, however, to groom their victims. Agency policies should therefore require that all social media interactions be transparent, accessible to supervisors and professional in content and tone. For example, officers should be prohibited from private, one-to-one online conversations with students.
- Personal cards, notes and email messages. Policies should prohibit SROs from sending cards, notes or email messages to students that contain unprofessional, overly personal content, especially compliments regarding the student’s appearance or sexual innuendo. SROs should not be permitted to give students their personal mobile phone numbers or to text students.
- Physical contact. Agencies should prohibit officers from intimate physical contact, including frontal hugging of students.
- Verbal conduct. Policies should prohibit SROs from making sexual comments or questions, jokes, taunting, and teasing.
- After-school interactions with students. Agencies should provide clear expectations that prohibit one-on-one interactions after school, including providing rides home from school, etc.
The list above is representative, not comprehensive. Agencies should refer to resources like those listed below as they draft or update their conduct policies.
- A Training Guide for Administrators and Educators on Addressing Adult Sexual Misconduct in the School Setting, published by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Safe and Healthy Students.
- Model Policy Resource: Law Enforcement Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Accountability, published by the nonprofit organization End Violence Against Women International.
Educating the School Community
To promote the effectiveness of their policies, law enforcement agencies should work with school administrators to ensure that all educators, other school staff, and students know what the policies include and how to report suspected policy violations. They should ensure that multiple reporting methods exist and that they have processes to fully investigate and follow up on every report of possible sexual misconduct by officers. Agencies should develop and maintain organizational cultures that encourage and empower officers to actively intervene when needed to prevent colleagues from committing unprofessional, unethical, or criminal conduct.
School resource officers have similar access to children as educators do. It is therefore imperative that law enforcement agencies establish at least the same behavioral guardrails for SROs that schools have established for educators.
Mo Canady is executive director of the National Association of School Resources, a position he has held since 2011. Canady holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Jacksonville State University. He served as a law enforcement officer with the Hoover (Alabama) Police Department for 25 years. During the final 12 years of his career with that department, he was supervisor of its School Services Division, retiring with the rank of lieutenant.
[i] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/12/19/police-officers-child-sexual-abuse-investigation-explained/
Reprinted with permission from Sheriff & Deputy magazine, a publication of the National Sheriffs’ Association. Copyright ©2026, all rights reserved.