Michael was a seventh-grader in a south Los Angeles middle school when he got his first ticket from the police. His crime? Being late for school.
“One day I was walking in and an officer stopped me and said I was late and took me to the principal’s office,” Michael told researchers with the Community Rights Campaign of the Labor/Community Strategy Center. The principal told him to “straighten up” and the officer wrote him a ticket for ditching.
Michael, who is of mixed black/Salvadoran ethnicity, is now in 11th grade — and already a veteran of encounters with officers of the Los Angeles School Police Department, the largest police agency dedicated to campus law enforcement in the country. “I have been stopped by police, questioned by police, yelled at by police, had my bag searched, been patted down, put in a police car and taken home by police,” he said.
But Michael’s experience is far from unusual. During the 2011-12 school year, L.A. school police dished out 7,740 tickets to students for fighting, daytime curfew violations, and other minor infractions. A February 2012 amendment to Los Angeles’ daytime curfew law, which ended the morning “tardy sweeps” by police, helped reduce the number of tickets to 3,499 in 2012-13.
But in a recent report, the Labor/Community Strategy Center — which has been campaigning to shift student disciplinary actions from police to schools and communities — questions how much progress has really been made in reducing the flow of the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
“Today, the Los Angeles public school system is at a parallel moment of hope and contradiction,” the report warned. While overall citation numbers have come down, it said, “the intense racialization of tickets and arrests has worsened. A Latino student continues to be more than twice as likely to be ticketed and arrested at school than a white student. Over the past year, a black student went from being four and a half times more likely to almost six times more likely to be ticketed and arrested at school than a white student.”
The center also noted that tickets and arrests continue to be for minor incidents that schools traditionally handled without criminalizing youth prior to the onset of school policing, such as skipping class, smoking, drinking, writing on desks or walls, and getting into fights.
Los Angeles Unified School District and school police officials did not respond to requests for interviews. In an earlier statement, the district downplayed racial disparities, saying tickets to black students dropped by 22 percent, and by 44 percent to Latinos in 2012. “Each year, we continue to reduce crime, reduce arrests, reduce suspensions and increase positive relationships with students,” the statement said. “For that, we deserve an A, not an F.”
But Community Rights Campaign organizer Ashley Franklin said the disparities are a big concern and a reflection of broader social and economic policies that — all over the country — have led to increased school police budgets and sharp cuts in the infrastructure of support that is provided by school guidance counselors and others more qualified to address student misconduct than police officers.
“Officers are trained to follow the law,” Franklin said. “What we are seeing is the criminalization of school discipline.”
With 655,000 students, L.A. Unified is the second-largest public school district in the U.S., trailing only the New York City Department of Education. Its school police force, though, is the largest, with more than 350 sworn police officers, 126 non-sworn school safety officers, 34 civilian support staff, and an annual budget of more than $52 million. According to the Community Rights Campaign, it leads the nation in criminalizing students. In 2011-12, its rate of tickets and arrests per 100 students was five times that of New York City, and almost nine times that of Miami-Dade County, the fourth-largest school district.
Like other districts, L.A. Unified turned to zero tolerance school discipline policies in the wake of the Columbine massacre in April 1999. In response to widespread truancy and a historically high dropout rate, the Los Angeles City Council in 2003 enacted the Daytime Curfew law, which imposed a citation of up to $250, plus court fees, on students found outside school without a valid excuse. Students complained of police sweeps right outside inner-city schools, with some teens being led away in handcuffs for being only minutes late. In 2010-11, more than 10,700 tickets were issued, of which 26 percent were for daytime curfew violations.
The Community Rights Campaign assisted in the five-year battle to amend the law, arguing that it was racially discriminatory and had “significant mental health impacts” on students who experienced shame and humiliation when being ticketed in front of their peers. “It was a huge victory,” Franklin said of the unanimous city council vote that directed school police to stop citing students on their way to school or running late.
But that victory appears to have been a somewhat pyrrhic one. “In spite of the progress of the past year, school policing is still a daily reality for the black, Latino, and low-income youth of L.A.’s public schools,” the CRC said in its report, “Black, Brown and Over-Policed in L.A. Schools.”
Over-policing “overwhelmingly impacts black and Latino youth,” the report stated, describing L.A. Unified’s tactics as “an extension of what is happening in poor and black and brown communities throughout the nation. Students are being preemptively policed at school in ways that can be likened to New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, where race, not crime, is the significant factor in predicting police contact.”
“You have this constant fear that you are going to get caught for doing something, or that you are going to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and get caught up,” a Latina 11th-grader told the campaign.
The CRC favors a “holistic” approach to school discipline that emphasizes public health, mental health and emotional well-being as the foundations for school environments. It also imposes limitations on police involvement in school-based incidents that should be handled through administrative, not criminal, responses.
“Even if officers are trained to interact with young people, why put money [into policing] when there are others who are trained to address these issues without handcuffs and tickets and arrests?” Franklin asked. “We really believe in building the infrastructure of support.”
There have been signs of a shift in attitudes within L.A. Unified and its police department. School Police Chief Steven Zipperman has said he and district officials have been discussing guidelines for when officers should refer cases to administrators, rather than issuing tickets — especially for incidents like fighting. He also joined a reform “partnership” that first met in September 2012 following protests over police intervention in school discipline. The head of the school police officers’ union said at a school board meeting in May that the L.A. School Police Department recognizes it’s 2013 not 1999, and that they have made significant changes to bring their practices and philosophies current in order to reduce the number of citations and use discretion whenever possible.
But the union is unlikely to endorse a model of school discipline that marginalizes its members or even makes them redundant. Over the past four years, it has contributed $23,000 to the election campaigns of school board candidates, and the trend in federal funding is toward increasing school police budgets. Since the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy in Newtown, Conn., the CRC said the Justice Department has awarded more than $125 million to law enforcement, with at least $45 million of that directly tied to increasing police presence in schools. President Obama has proposed spending $150 million to add counselors or police.
L.A.’s school police do have a vested interest, Franklin said, but she believes the momentum is shifting, as the number of tickets has decreased and a change in school discipline appears to be emerging.
Some have mobilized behind the School Climate Bill of Rights, a resolution to roll back zero-tolerance discipline and implement resource-based alternatives that was passed by the L.A. school district in May.
As for Michael, Franklin said he has seen the whole trajectory of policing in his community. “When you put officers inside of my school, it makes me wonder if they were put there for my safety, or is it because I’m seen as a threat to others?” he said.