Trust key for Rock Hill school resource officer

John Aiton smiles as he scrolls through pictures on his Facebook page.

Some of them are of the volleyball and paintball teams he coached or sponsored at Northwestern High School. Others show him dressed like Santa Claus, giving presents to special education students with help from his “elves.”

There’s a recent one of a prank by some South Pointe High School seniors who painted a giant South Pointe for sale classified ad. Aiton said the photo was online for less than 30 minutes.

It is a series of different pictures of different students doing different things – and at some point, Aiton was responsible for keeping each of them safe as their school resource officer.

Aiton joined Rock Hill Police in 1989. He was working juvenile crimes in the detective division when a supervisor asked him to recommend someone because they were thinking of putting an officer in the schools. They weren’t called “school resource officers” at the time.

“They didn’t even have a name for it then,” he said. “They let me have a shot at it. I’ve been doing it ever since.”

‘They can call me, day or night’

He has walked the halls of several Rock Hill schools since becoming a resource officer in 1993.

Lately, however, there are more pictures of Aiton surrounded by South Pointe students at football games, with everyone holding up an arm and pointing with an index finger. He’s been assigned to South Pointe since it opened in 2005.

“I’ve got a collection of ‘pointing’ pictures,” he said with a chuckle. “We’re South Pointe, so we’re ‘pointing’ at something.”

Being where the students are, interacting with them and making himself available to them is essential not just for being a good resource officer, but keeping his charges safe, Aiton said. That’s why he coached volleyball while at Northwestern, and helped start a paintball team.

He also sponsors the Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter at South Pointe and each Friday morning brings biscuits for those who attends the FCA meeting before school starts.

“He is so kind and he always reaches out to the students,” said junior Scarlett Black, who is president of South Pointe’s FCA. Black said she was particularly touched by Aiton offering his cellphone number to students at their ninth grade school safety seminar, and showing the same compassion at their 11th grade meeting.

“He said, ‘Call me, even if you’re stuck on the side of the road with your car,’” she said.

Aiton passes out stickers with his cellphone and email address.

“They can call me day or night, seven days a week,” he said. “If I can’t come, I’ll send somebody.”

South Pointe principal Al Leonard remembered a student getting in a minor car crash near Clemson on the way to South Pointe’s state championship football game.

“They called his cellphone number and he came out and took care of them,” Leonard said. “He came out and made certain everything was taken care of, reassured them and got in contact with their parents.”

‘Kids are like bank accounts’

Working in schools is not for every police officer, Aiton says.

“If you don’t have the relationship with kids, they won’t talk to you,” he said. “You’ve got to be trustworthy. You can’t put on an act because they’ll see right through you.”

Some patrol officers can’t establish that trust. Aiton recalled a new resource officer responding to a fender bender in the school parking lot. He “handled it like a pro, like he was out on patrol.”

“The little girl was crying because she was in a wreck,” Aiton said. “I said (to the officer), ‘This is the difference: You saw that little girl was crying. Kids are like bank accounts – when you come into a school, you’ve got zero balance. You don’t have anything invested. How would you have treated your daughter if she was crying? If you’d took a little extra time and told her, “It’s gonna be all right, we’re gonna get through this,” now you’ve made a million-dollar deposit. You can come back to that account right there and withdraw someday.’”

Aiton tries each day to make those deposits at South Pointe, whether it’s eating lunch with students or riding the bus with the cheerleaders to a football game. Sometimes he’s had to draw on those accounts recalling instances where students gave him information to stop illegal activity. Football players, he said, have stepped in to help him stop fights.

One of the bigger returns came in 1998, when a shooting plot at Northwestern was thwarted because of information provided by students.

“He was gonna come in, pull the fire alarm and shoot kids when they came out,” Aiton said. “It was because of the kids that we stopped him. It’s because the kids heard it. And like we say: If you see something, say something.”

Aiton researches investigations of other school shootings around the country to prevent something similar at his school. He requested the diaries of the Columbine High School shooters “to know what they were thinking.”

“That wouldn’t happen here,” he said. “They’re not killing my kids – not until they finish me, because I’m gonna stop them. Nobody hurts my kids.”

‘I live for the boring days’

In his first year at South Pointe he made more than 80 arrests with a student population of 700 students, compared to 55 arrests in his last year at Northwestern, which had more than 2,600 students. Now South Pointe averages about 20 arrests per school year with a student population of about 1,300, he said.

Larceny is the most common crime, Aiton said, and it typically happens more in the freshmen class. After speaking with school administrators, Aiton created a freshman safety seminar where he talks about preventing thefts and some of the other common crimes in schools. He will be talking with new South Pointe freshmen this week.

“I live for the boring days,” he said. “We’ve got a good school and good kids. Every once in a while somebody will get rowdy, but for the most part I don’t think we need two (officers). If there was another officer here, one of us would be bored.”

Keeping in touch

Aiton stays in touch with the students he once protected by accepting their Facebook friend requests after they have graduated. As an ordained minister he has also officiated some of their marriages.

“One of my kids from Northwestern made my day when she asked me to marry her and her husband,” he said. “At her wedding, two more kids said, ‘Officer Aiton, we want you to marry us when our time comes.’”

Aiton was a sergeant when he became a school resource officer. He said he lost his “stripes” when he declined to take an administrative position overseeing the resource officer program because he wanted to stay where the students are.

He was with the students for back-to-back football games Thursday night, and again at Friday’s matchup against Rock Hill. After Friday’s game, South Pointe’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes was expected to hold its first “Fifth Quarter,” an outreach and worship event usually held after a sporting event.

Aiton says he will likely add more “pointing” pictures to his timeline.

“We’re already working on the history book for Rock Hill Police Department so I can’t start a book on all these years as a school resource officer,” he said. “I think that will be one I just keep to myself, and when I’m stuck in a rocking chair, I can go back and look at all of it.”

This story was originally published August 30, 2015 at 3:25 AM with the headline "Trust key for Rock Hill school resource officer."