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Police officers have returned to Denver high schools after a years-long hiatus, but new data suggests they are arresting and ticketing students less frequently than before.
In the first semester of this school year, school resource officers — or SROs — stationed at 13 Denver high schools arrested five students and ticketed 25, according to district data that Chalkbeat obtained through an open records request.
In 2019-20, the last full school year that SROs were stationed in Denver schools, there were 30 student arrests and 160 tickets issued on those same 13 campuses, according to data from the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice.
It’s not clear from the 2019-20 data how many of those actions took place in the first semester, but it seems that the pace of ticketing and arrests has slowed this school year.
A similar slowdown occurred in the final two months of last school year, when SROs were temporarily reintroduced following a shooting inside East High School , which set off a heated debate about safety in Denver schools.