Miami-Dade Plan Expands Officer Jurisdiction

By Adrienne D. Coles

Florida's Miami-Dade County district is a step closer to giving its school police officers the power to do something most of their colleagues elsewhere cannot: make arrests off campus. That proposal, however, has raised concerns about a possible shift in the officers' focus away from the schools and into the community.

The plan by the Miami-Dade school board to expand the jurisdiction of its school police force to areas near its schools may be enacted before the end of the school year, but many questions about how the program would run are yet to be answered.

A mutual-aid agreement between the district and local municipalities, which was approved by the state legislature for all districts in the state in 1996, gave school police officers the power to make arrests up to 1,000 feet from a school campus and...