Do armed police make schools safer? Here's what the research says

Louis Mercer is a school law enforcement researcher based at the University of Illinois Chicago. But in 2007, he was a teacher in a public school in Arizona when one of his eighth graders was arrested during class. School police officers were conducting a random search for weapons when they discovered that one student had marijuana in his pocket. Mercer still remembers the arrest. 

“It was jarring and it was disruptive to the learning process," he remembers. "It certainly didn’t make me, as a teacher, feel safer and it definitely didn’t make the students feel safer.” That was nearly 20 years ago.

Since then, Mercer has thought a lot about that arrest as he studies how armed police started working in schools in Chicago and Milwaukee.

Read more on his findings