When I was student teaching at Beloit Memorial High School late in the last millennium, I stood one morning at the second-floor windows of my cooperating teacher's classroom. With us was the school resource officer, a plain-clothes Beloit PD officer, wielding a pair of binoculars and a camera.

We were overlooking the school parking lot, and the resource officer was watching the student section for students dealing drugs in the minutes before school started.

I was young and naive and not yet a card-carrying member of the ACLU, so what I was seeing here was not alarming to me in the least. Indeed, it was rather comforting, as the resource officer was there, it was explained to me, to help keep anything criminal from interfering with the primary mission of the school. He was there to keep us all – students and staff alike – safe and focused on the learning.

This was pre-Columbine, and no one at the school gave a second thought to having an armed presence in the school to deal with the kinds of criminal issues that often plague high schools – drug use, theft, bullying, truancy and the like. The officer was not there to stop a shooter, to intimidate weird kids into conformity or to entrap students in schemes they would not have themselves engaged in.

He was certainly not there to use physical force to coerce obedience to schools rules, and in my time at Beloit Memorial, I never once considered, and never heard the other teachers there consider, calling him in to deal with a student creating a disruption in class.

The video of a school resource officer in South Carolina that went viral last week, showing the officer flipping a passively resisting girl half his size over her desk and dragging her across the floor for not putting away her cell phone, shows what has become of the school resource officer in the years since. At least, it shows what SROs are like in the public consciousness, even though the ones I have known personally here in Milwaukee would never do such a thing.

It doesn't help that the officer in that video is white, and the young woman he attacks is African American. The current public consciousness is also well aware of the Black Lives Matter movement and the names Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Dontre Hamilton and more. While race may have been a factor in this incident, I think it could become a dangerous distraction in the necessary larger conversation around the way we have begun to criminalize adolescence in our schools.

The research on the so-called "school-to-prison pipeline" is clear: the way we treat students in schools, particularly students of color, presages the way those students will be treated once they leave school. When schools think of children as suspects first and students second, it makes the larger world's treatment of them as suspects first and citizens second feel natural instead of abominable.

The mouthy kid, the ADHD kid who can't sit down, the kid glancing at his neighbor's test paper, the kid who won't stop texting or Candy Crushing or even talking on her phone – none of these kids are criminal. None of them are even doing things that we, as adults, probably do on a daily basis. For example, writing this column, I have gotten up and walked around this coffee shop for one reason or another a half-dozen times; I can right now still hear the voice of Mr. Smoot, my 7th grade math teacher, berating me for daring to stand while I have work yet undone on my desk.

I'm not going to pretend that I am some sort of absolute saint here, and that I haven't, in my weaker moments, had my own fantasies of throwing the occasional disruptive student across the room so that maybe I can have control of the classroom again for a little while. I never actually would, nor would I voluntarily put the student, no matter how much I may hate him in the immediate moment, into any situation where I thought someone else would, either.

Yet the data is pretty clear: When resource officers are placed in schools, arrests increase. One study found that the biggest increases tended to be in schools that served primarily poor and minority students.

As many people, including the authors of that study, have noted, the presence of an officer these days seems to promote the idea that what used to be violations of school rules are now violations of the criminal code. "A scuffle between students becomes assault or disrupting class becomes disorderly conduct," they write. The girl flipped and dragged in that video from South Carolina was apparently charged with "disturbing schools," not for the disturbance that resulted from the over-reaction of adults to her talking on her cell phone, but for talking on her cell phone in the first place.

Yet the guidelines for best practices, both from the federal Department of Education and the National Association of School Resource Officers, say officers should not be used to enforce classroom discipline. Both groups also call for extensive training of resource officers in how to handle adolescents and, in particular, students with special needs. It also seems to me like school personnel need training about when and why to call in the officers, given the data about school discipline being turned into criminal matters.

In Wisconsin last week, in an unrelated move, State Rep. John Jagler (R-Watertown) introduced a bill that would require the state to add statistics about crimes committed on school grounds to the state's school report cards.

It is hard not to see Jagler's move as an attack against the Milwaukee Public Schools in particular. Pro-voucher advocates, knowing they can't win on the merits of their academics overall, have been working the angle that MPS calls 911 more often than voucher schools do. Jagler claims he just wants parents to have more information, but forgive me if I don't trust the state legislature anymore when it comes to Milwaukee's public schools.

But the impact of such a measure is likely to be felt all around the state, not just in MPS, if it passes without some serious reform around the way schools use police, whether as resource officers stationed in schools or by calling 911. Many parents, I imagine, will be surprised to learn that the officers aren't there anymore just to stop drug dealing or theft, but to be the heavy when a teenager has a teenager moment and rubs the teacher the wrong way.

If Jagler wanted to make a difference, he should take up a different cause related to crime in schools: stronger guidelines for how to use school resource officers, strict penalties against adults who pursue criminal charges for mere adolescent misbehavior, and other reforms that would help break Wisconsin's school-to-prison pipeline.

Of course, that would mean actually investing in our public schools and in our poor and minority students, not trying to turn parents against them.