With its armed and highly trained school force, Houston offers a substantially different model of school policing than Philadelphia, where leaders are pondering how to cope with widespread school violence. An Inquirer series, "Assault on Learning," documented 30,000 violent incidents over a five-year period.
In April, following the series, Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey raised the possibility of putting regular city police in some schools, which are now guarded by 400-plus unarmed school police officers, who are trained for just four weeks before going on the job. Officers are not screened for drug use, and mentoring students is not part of their job description.
"We can't ignore the fact that we have a problem, and we have to regain control of the schools," Ramsey said at the time. So far, the city has shied away from introducing armed officers, opting this week to recommend better training and screening for school police.
This approach makes Philadelphia an exception among America's 10 largest cities. An Inquirer survey found that eight of them deploy armed police in schools in some form, and a ninth city - New York - uses fully qualified, but unarmed, police officers.
Houston's school system is similar to the Philadelphia district - the overwhelming majority of its students are African American or Hispanic, many of them impoverished. Its enrollment of 202,000 is about a quarter larger.
Yet, its school police force is much smaller than Philadelphia's - only 186 sworn officers, 105 of whom are school-based and responsible, not just for keeping order in the schools, but for tracking down truants. The rest of the officers are administrative or assigned to mobile squads.
