Cop on the Campus: L.A. District Officers March to a Different Beat

The night before, an alarm went off at a school in the San Fernando Valley. Two burglars were caught trying to break in through the roof. For the officers who protect Los Angeles public schools, this ranked as a routine matter.

Something else happened that night--a gang murder in the central city. Although Los Angeles police handled the homicide, it was a priority for school police as well. That morning, supervisors identified four campuses whose students included members of the rival gangs; security was tightened and patrols escalated. If there was going to be a “pay-back” killing, the school police didn’t want it happening on their turf.

Then, at mid-morning, school Police Chief Richard W. Green received a call that made him drop what he was doing and head to an Eastside high school. A coach, angry that a broken heating system had not been fixed, had torn up a cardboard box and set it on fire in the gym office, damaging some floor tiles. He would be jailed and face an administrative review. Cases involving staff are high priority.

These were three of many concerns in one 24-hour period for the Los Angeles Unified School District police, a specialized,little-known law enforcement agency that is finding itself shouldering a growing share of the county’s crime problem.

The statistics are telling. In the 1985-86 school year, crime reports were up 29% on Los Angeles public school campuses from the previous year. Much of this increase was the result of broader reporting policies, officials say, but there are indications of increasing violence.

School police seized a record 989 guns, knives and other weapons from students and trespassers, an increase of 11% from the year before. Robbery was up 23%, to 311 incidents. Arson climbed 37%, to 70 cases causing $4.9 million in damage.

These numbers are less surprising, perhaps, when one considers that the school force--with 380 personnel, including 302 sworn officers--ranks as the county’s fourth-largest police agency, after the Los Angeles police, the Sheriff’s Department and Long Beach police. Its duty: To protect 600,000 students and 65,000 employees scattered among more than 600 locations in the 710-square-mile district. The jurisdiction includes school property and the streets on the immediate perimeter.

The cop on the campus has a very different approach than the cop on the beat. Most roam high school and junior high campuses in street clothes, looking very much like faculty members, their holstered .38s and handcuffs hidden under sport coats.

Unlike the street cop, they deal with the same people day after day. School police are expected to develop a strong rapport with students and staff. In short, the campus officer is expected to be part cop, part counselor and all role model.

“We tell our people they’re being paid to take a few lumps from time to time,” Jerry Halverson, an assistant superintendent who oversaw the force, said in an interview before his recent retirement. “Our people are trained to accept hostile actions and calm people down rather than take aggressive physical action.”

“It’s easier to talk to somebody than to fight ‘em,” said Officer Tony Malone, who is based at Sylmar High School. “But if you have to go down with them, you go down with them.”

This job of keeping peace on the campus also requires judgment calls by administrators.

The school police cost the district more than $13 million annually--which means $13 million that is not spent on teachers and books. Under Gov. George Deukmejian’s proposed budget, district officials say, funds for the school police may have to be trimmed.

Chief Green doesn’t foresee his department getting gored in favor of direct educational programs. He has never had to lobby for more officers because school principals constantly ask for more security, he said.

Law enforcement wasn’t always regarded as a necessary element of the educational program in the Los Angeles schools. Less than a generation ago, police were thought to be unnecessary in the academic environment--and potentially disruptive.

The school security department that was founded in 1948 bore little resemblance to the school police of today. A small squad of watchmen patrolled school property during off-hours.

The 1960s changed that. In 1966--one year after the Watts riots--the school district placed its first daytime security officers at inner-city high schools. In the years that followed, the problem of civil unrest gave way to the menace of gangs, guns and drugs.

The relationship between school and police officials remained uneasy for many years. Part of the reason was that school administrators had no authority over the officers who would come onto the campus. Green recalled a remark from Ed Davis, when he was Los Angeles police chief: “If my men want to come on your campus and you lock the doors, stand aside.”

When Green, a Los Angeles native, took over the school security force in 1973, he brought 26 years of experience in the LAPD, with such assignments as narcotics, internal affairs, community relations and officer training. The school security force was still “in its infancy,” he said.

“There were a lot of ex-policemen. Some good people. I also had some others who were really not the kind of people I’d like to have aboard.” Those officers were too much cop, not enough counselor, Green said.

“An arrest isn’t the only answer,” he said. “We want to work toward solving the problem. . . . If you can turn a kid around, well, that’s another kid who won’t wind up being a statistic.”

The department also suffered from an identity crisis--and to a degree still does. For many years the Los Angeles school district has required its officers to be graduates of accredited law enforcement academies. But it wasn’t until passage of a 1983 state law that school districts were allowed to elevate their security officers to full police status. At about the same time, the district decided to put its patrol officers in police uniforms and marked cars.

As a practical matter, Green said, the new law did little to change the way his officers performed their duties. But it helped greatly with image. Previously, they had been known as “security agents”--a title many considered a stigma.

“When you said you were a security agent, they’d say oh, you’re a security guard,” Officer Malone recalled. “But when you say you’re a police officer--that word ‘police’ gets people’s attention.”

Their new name also “made a difference in our relationship with outside departments,” Malone added. “I can’t really say they looked down on us, but. . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“The rapport is good, but a lot of them (police from other agencies) still look at Unified as security,” said Officer Sylvester Wiley, who is based at Markham Intermediate School in Watts. “But they’re more educated to the fact we’re police like them. . . . The LAPD backs us up, and we back them up.”

The school police chief said that “even within the school district some people still don’t know what we are and what we can do. They think of them in the role of security guards, which is primarily property protection. And that’s not true.”

Today, all high school campuses in the district, and 50 of the 75 junior highs, are staffed by at least one officer, sometimes two. In addition, a mobile, uniformed patrol covers the remaining junior highs and elementary schools, and provides support for school-based officers. A night patrol visits campuses and responds to alarms. There remains a complement of 39 watchmen who don’t have full police powers.

Meanwhile, a staff of 17 detectives conducts follow-up investigations on burglaries, robberies and employee crime, such as embezzlement. One detective handles arson full-time.

The caliber of recruits has improved, Green said: “We’re now attracting the kind of recruits that the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department would like to have.”

As in other agencies, problems arise among individual officers--problems handled by its own internal affairs investigators. In 1985, one school officer was convicted of attempting to rape a mildly retarded, 16-year-old girl at Woodrow Wilson High School after luring her into an attic area during a lunch hour. Four years earlier, an officer took a voluntary leave after he was accused of infiltrating a group concerned with the murders of black children in Atlanta and urging that they “kill white babies.” That officer is now back on the job and performing his duties well, Green said.

There are some criminal matters that school police turn over to the municipal police. When a former Fairfax High School student was shot and killed by two students on the campus last September, the school officer was the first lawman to respond. However, murder investigations, which are rare, are automatically turned over to the homicide detectives in municipal police agencies.

The school district also now turns over all child molestation complaints to the municipal agencies to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Green said. This policy was prompted by the highly publicized 1985 molestation case involving teacher Terry Bartholome, who was accused and ultimately convicted of 19 felony and 11 misdemeanor counts. District officials were accused of a cover up and one administrator, Stuart Bernstein, was convicted of a misdemeanor for failing to report “reasonable suspicion” of child abuse.

The Bartholome case also prompted more stringent guidelines for reporting of sex offenses, child abuse and assault. Thus, the category of “all sex offenses”--which may range from rape to indecent exposure to job-related sexual harassment--jumped 97% from 332 to 653. However, Green and Halverson said this increase mostly reflected new reporting guidelines. “The hard-core sex offenses,” Green said, did not experience such a drastic increase.

Still, the increase in robbery reports and weapons confiscated suggests that violence has indeed risen on campus, he added.

Another area in which school police and Los Angeles police do not work together is on the undercover narcotics operations in which Los Angeles police pose as students. Secrecy is paramount in such an operation, officials say. The undercover operations and the high profile of school police are credited for helping curtail drug dealing on campus last year, from 828 incidents to 727.

“We have no reason to think students are using drugs or dealing drugs any less than they used to,” Halverson said. “We do think they’re not doing it on campus as much.”

Administrators and officers agree that much of the crime at schools, perhaps most, is not caused by students, but by other young people who gravitate toward the campuses. These may be recent graduates, dropouts, students who have been suspended or students who are truant from other campuses. “We’ve got gang members who cruise the perimeters and check out the other gang members and check out the girls,” Malone said.

The potential for problems seems high at Markham Intermediate, which rests on the demarcation of the rival Crips and Bloods territory. Four gang-ridden housing projects feed into the campus. It is one of the few intermediate-level schools that is staffed by two officers.

But on one recent day, Markham seemed peaceful enough. There was no evidence of gang graffiti, and students didn’t wear the symbolic shoelaces--red for Bloods, blue for Crips--favored by gang members. Such garb is banned on campus. Gang hand signals are banned too, although several students flashed the signals when they noticed a photographer on campus.

Apart from an uneventful patrol, Officer Lorenzo Thomas handled one case during a two-hour visit. The suspect did not resemble Public Enemy No. 1. The short, 13-year-old kid with baby fat on his waist was brought in for truancy and trespassing, making him a three-time loser at Markham.

The first time, Thomas recalled with a smile, “he had rolled a kid for his tennis shoes.” For that the boy was transfered to nearby Foshay Junior High. On the second arrest, he was truant from Foshay and trespassing at Markham. This time, ditto.

Thomas turned stern when the boy was brought in. When the teen-ager grinned, Thomas told him to stop; he looked at the floor. The officer put handcuffs on the boy--partly an object lesson, partly to discourage him from fleeing during the car ride back to Foshay.

“The main difference between us and the LAPD is they don’t have to educate people out there,” Thomas said. “Their job is to put people in jail. Our job is to make sure the educational process continues.”