SRO accidentally shot himself before a high school football game. How often does this happen?
As more schools have police officers on campus, there are more officer-involved shootings and 'accidental discharges' by police at k-12 schools.
Before the Friday night football game at Marble Falls High School in Texas on September 20, a school police officer shot himself in the leg. Three JROTC students jumped into action and applied a tourniquet before the officer was airlifted to a hospital.
The next day, officials in New York announced that a Frankfort police officer had been arrested for accidentally firing an unregistered handgun at the Frankfort-Schuyler Elementary School open house on September 3. The sound of a gunshot during the back-to-school night event sent parents into a panic and locked down the building.
These two officer-involved shootings this month are not the first time that a police officer has accidentally fired a gun on a k-12 school campus. In 2022, an SRO in Florida was “dry firing” a gun in his office when he accidentally fired a shot that went through the wall of his office, across a hallway, through the wall of an occupied classroom, and lodged in a bookcase.
Accidentally firing a gun on campus isn’t a problem that is exclusive to police officers. In the past six years, the number of accidental shootings on campus has significantly increased. These accidents range from a gun falling out of a grandfather’s pants and firing while he was picking up an elementary school kid to an adult spectator dropping his backpack with a gun inside that fired during a high school wrestling match. In 2021, Giffords Law Center published a report with the details of 100 accidental shootings on campus.
I classify an incident as “officer-involved” when a police officer, SRO, or armed security guard was the only person to fire a weapon. These incidents were rare from the 1960s to the end of the 1990s. As school policing has become more widespread, the rate of these shootings has increased.
Analyzing Officer-Involved Shootings on Campus
Within the “officer-involved” classification, I filtered the incidents for just the accidental shootings. I found 3 accidents with officers between 1966-2017. There have been 11 accidental discharges by officers at schools since 2018.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.