The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board of Trustees voted on Feb. 16 to pass a resolution to use the reduced police budget to support black students. Pictured are Los Angeles police officers sitting in a car on duty in front of Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, on Nov. 15, 2019, as the school remains closed due to a shooting on campus the day before.
Following last year’s $25 million budget cut to the Los Angeles School Police Department (LSPD), the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board of Trustees voted Tuesday, Feb. 16, to use that cut in the police budget to support black students. It also cuts 133 school police positions and bans the use of pepper spray by school police officers on students.
The new resolution will cut nearly 28 percent of the police department’s force, including 70 sworn officers, 62 non-sworn officers and one support staff member. The school district will then be left with a police force of 211 officers. The district is reportedly replacing the sworn police officers removed from the secondary school campus with Climate Coaches, or community members.
The $25 million cut in school police funding will be used to support the Black Student Achievement Program. The $36.5 million program is designed to improve the health development and Education of black students.
During a special meeting of the school district at the line, one participant questioned who would be responsible for maintaining campus safety and protecting students if all security guards and police forces were removed.
George McKenna, an African-American board member who was opposed to the removal of police, also said, “Parents want us to have a safe school, and if you think the police are the problem, then I think it’s you who have the problem.”
In response to the school board’s final decision, the Los Angeles School Police Management Association (LASPMA) and the Los Angeles School Police Association (LASPOA) later warned, “There is no question that this will impact the safety of students and staff.”
Rob Taylor, president of the Los Angeles School Police Management Association, said, “As a police officer with 25 years of experience in school policing, I am saddened and deeply concerned by today’s action. It is worrisome that the school board has chosen to ignore the views of the voters and act on its own political desires. It is even more disturbing that the school board chose to lay off security officers while promising all other unions in the district that they would not lay off officers during the pandemic.”
He cited an independent survey of students, campus employees and parents conducted by Evitarus that showed a majority believe school police help keep schools safe and oppose any reduction in school police.
Board members Kelly Gonez, Monica Garcia, Nick Melvoin, Jackie Goldberg and Tanya Franklin blatantly chose to ignore the survey in which the majority supported campus police,” Taylor said. Moreover, this likely places liability on the school district when unavoidable tragedies occur that could have been prevented or mitigated.”
The Los Angeles Campus Police Association Board of Directors also said in a statement, “Dramatically eliminating school police officers will result in a slower response Time for our children and staff when they need it most.”
As the second largest public school system in the nation, the Los Angeles Unified School District has a campus police department dedicated to campus crime, and the six police departments under its jurisdiction are responsible for protecting the approximately 650,000 students and all faculty and staff within the district.
However, due to the “Black Lives Matter” movement, on June 30 of last year, the school board voted 4-3 to cut the department’s budget by $25 million, a 36 percent reduction. The following day, Police Chief Todd Chamberlain publicly resigned and said he could not support the decision, which was harmful and could endanger the lives of students, staff and the community. Another 20 police officers subsequently resigned.
Ex-cop: Cuts to school police funding are stupid
The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Trustees has been discussing cuts to the school police budget for more than eight months. When the motion was proposed by school board member Monica Garcia last year, it caused a major divide among board members.
Under Garcia’s original motion, which called for a 50 percent budget cut to the district’s police department in fiscal year 2021-2022, a 75 percent cut the following year and a 90 percent cut by fiscal year 2023-2024, the cut would have been used to support African-American students, which she argued was a matter of “systemic issues of race and class,” but most board members disagreed.
Among the major cuts to police funding proposed by the plan would be the complete elimination of night and weekend patrols, the withdrawal of all on-campus stationed police officers, and a shift to officers patrolling the perimeter and being called in to campus when needed.
Supporters of the campus police department at the time mentioned that in 2019, the L.A. School District Police Department responded to 100,000 emergency calls, many of which were reports of mass shootings, bomb attacks, robberies, sexual assaults, burglaries and other serious crimes.
McKenna also said at the time that campus police have been unjustly demonized and that while public safety on campus needs to be improved, that doesn’t mean school police should be removed.
The school board also voted Tuesday to ban the Los Angeles School Police Department from using pepper spray on students and to establish an oversight and accountability committee. School police officers who have not been laid off are also required to remain on standby and must be on the scene within three to five minutes if an emergency occurs on campus.
Burton Brink, a former L.A. County police officer with a decades-long background in law enforcement, believes the cuts to school police are foolish. “Our children will be more vulnerable to outside felons because (criminals) know that there are no more police officers on campus, and it will also lead to a greater likelihood of mass shootings on campus.”
The Los Angeles Unified School District’s campus police department is reported to have a budget of about $70 million a year, less than 1 percent of the district’s annual budget. Liu Rongwen, president of the Southern California Chinese Parent-Teacher Association, believes, “As long as the funding has allowed, having school police inside the school is certainly good for the safety of students, and certainly good for emergency or on-scene response.”
This reporter has asked seven board members of the Los Angeles Unified School District about the matter, but no response was obtained before press time.
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