Here’s a sad secret from mothers of school-age children: When we drop our kids off at school, we often do a furtive scan of the grounds and think, what would happen to my kids if a school shooter arrived? The answer is more depressing than the question.
While the news cycle has moved on from the Parkland shooting, worries about student safety have not. Sadly, it’s only a matter of time before another school shooting occurs.
According to research by James Allen Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, there have been 22 shootings at elementary and secondary schools in which two or more people have been killed since 1990. Over this time, about ten students have been killed each year on average. (Some advocacy groups such as Everytown For Gun Safety place these figures far higher.)
Legislators mustn’t let their politicized proposals to reduce school shootings — gun control, on one hand, arming teachers, on the other — get in the way of non-politicized reforms that would make our schools safer.
At the top of the list of policy proposals that could draw true bipartisan support, yet have a major impact on student safety, is placing specially trained K-9 dogs at every school in the country. The dogs’ presence and sense of smell would act as strong deterrents to would-be school shooters.
K-9s patrolling school grounds would have a similar deterrent effect as dogs patrolling the yard of a house. The Justice Department finds that home break-ins are far less frequent when dogs are present, and criminals generally say that dogs are a much bigger deterrent than security systems. Dogs would transform schools from soft targets into a harder targets. Potential shooters would be forced to rethink and refocus their plans to avoid K-9 detection.
K-9s could also easily detect guns hidden in lockers and backpacks because of their incredible sense of smell. According to James Walker, former director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, dogs’ sense of smell is at least 10,000 times greater than humans’. For dogs, the smell of gunpowder residue is particularly noticeable, even if the gun hasn’t been fired in months.
Because dogs are pack animals, they are also very obedient. This means that when they are tasked with a job — such as sweeping lockers for weapons — they will do it without hesitation and until completion.
K-9s are a better way to detect weapons than mandatory clear backpacks or random searches. Not only are they more targeted but they also avoid violating privacy protections enshrined in the Fourth Amendment, which limits government officials’ ability to conduct sweeping searches. The use of dogs generally doesn’t constitute an illegal search under the U.S. Constitution.
K-9s already patrol hundreds of schools nationwide. To increase the deterrent, every school should have its own dedicated K-9 that is present for the entire school day. In addition to making the schools safer, this would help students see the dog not as an adversary brought in by outside authorities but as part of the school community.
This isn’t a policy proposal that is going to come out of Brookings. But it is powerful in its simplicity, effectiveness, and potential bipartisan appeal. Most importantly, it would make mothers like me breathe a little easier when we drop our kids off at school in the morning.
Adrienne Maloof is the co-owner of Maloof Companies and a national ambassador for American Humane.
