LA school police work with community groups to cut down number of citations in new year
A squad car with the Compton School Police. Credit: Code20Photog/KPCCL.A. Unified’s school police issued nearly 34,000 tickets to students for minor offenses, from possession of tobacco to fighting, in the last three years. In 2011 they wrote up an average of 28 tickets a day — more than any other department in the country has reported. Most of those went to middle school-aged kids between 10 and 14 years old.
The volume of citations, and the fact that it’s black and Latino students getting a disproportionate number of tickets, mobilized local civil rights activists, who are now working with school police to reduce the number of citations issued.
Manuel Criollo, lead organizer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, has been part of a series of meetings with the chief of school police and district administrators.
He said their goals are simple: “That there will be clear protocols that would delineate in which cases law enforcement would be involved and in which cases school administrators would be involved.”
Criollo said he’s witnessed a disturbing new trend among school administrators: rather than resolving a problem