As Crime Grows, School Police Become Fixture in City’s System

Early each weekday morning, Chet Bruzy pulls into the faculty parking lot at Crawford High School, adjusts his tie and goes to work as a school police officer.

Depending on the day--or the hour--Bruzy stands in the campus lunch quad during passing periods and jokes with students, investigates possible crimes by students threatening their peers, confronts adults coming onto the grounds to sell drugs, or positions himself after school at nearby Colina del Sol park as a visible deterrent to group fights.

About the time Bruzy goes home in the late afternoon, school officer Chuck Duschel gets into uniform, climbs into his squad car and begins patrolling more than 200 square miles containing 180 city school facilities. Until the wee hours of the following morning, Duschel and half a dozen of his colleagues dash from one silent alarm to another, attempting to minimize the soaring cost of property crime in the San Diego Unified School district.

The two officers’ jobs are as different as night and day; theirs are two among the varied worlds of the 33 sworn officers who belong to the city schools’ police department, which has been a vital but, until late last month, little-known cog in the nation’s eighth-largest urban district.

On April 28, a bomb-carrying teen-ager was killed by an officer in the first fatal shooting in the department’s 20-year history. The 17-year-old Paradise Hills youth was shot once in the chest by two officers responding to a silent burglary alarm at Zamorano Elementary School. The officer also wounded his colleague in the left arm before firing the fatal shot as he wrestled with the muscular youth on a classroom floor. The San Diego Police Department is investigating.

Veteran Officers

Although school police believe their officers acted properly, they are distressed, both because their operations manual goes to great length to de-emphasize the use of weapons and because they believe the officers enjoy strong credibility among students and faculty.

“The two officers are seasoned individuals, and one just went through recertification,” said Duschel, the department’s patrol sergeant who oversees the nighttime anti-crime operations. “As a team, we have great confidence in them.”

Department director Alex Rascon said he recruits most of his officers from other departments because he prefers to have employees with several years’ experience. The average officer has 14 years of experience on a municipal police force and eight years with the school district, Rascon said. Although employed by the school district, they are enforcement officers under California law and have the same powers of arrest, investigation and right to carry a weapon as any city police officer.

“I’ve never had any problem recruiting people for day work, because they like the idea of working in a school environment and in plain clothes,” Rascon said. “There’s very little turnover on the day shift.”

Salaries and benefits are comparable to those of city police, he said, and the officers do not have the constant exposure to the dangers of regular street patrols.

“But, for the first time now, I’m having to advertise for someone on the night shift, perhaps for someone directly out of the police academy,” Rascon said.

Duschel worked two decades with the San Diego police before joining the school force, which he said “has less stress and which I think can lead to a more positive working environment.”

Rascon said he looks for officers who have good judgment and who enjoy working with children.

“I do get the principal involved in selection because I don’t want some frustrated cop in the schools, or someone whose head I wonder about, whether that person can handle stress.”

Rascon has instituted a new physical fitness program to improve the health and agility of his force. All new officers, even if retired from another force, will be required to pass a physical agility test, and current officers will be given a period to work themselves into better shape.

Sophisticated Warning System

Of the total force, only the 11 nighttime patrol officers wear uniforms and drive marked cars. Depending on the night of the week, one to three cars work the entire district, guided by a central dispatcher whose terminal instantly displays the triggering of any of the thousands of alarms wired throughout every school in the district. The sophisticated warning system scans the entire district every 3.2 seconds for sign of fire and break-ins.

“I’m asked from time to time why the district needs its own force when there’s the regular San Diego city police,” Rascon said. “In large part, it’s because they have street crime--crimes against people--as their highest priority, not silent alarms in a school building.”

Rascon said that quick response by a specialized force is the key to keeping losses from theft and vandalism from becoming even greater than the $500,000 recorded in 1988. He said his small force is sometimes stretched beyond reasonable limits and cannot always get to every alarm during the late-night and early-morning hours after custodians have secured their campuses.

“The biggest complaint I get from principals is that I don’t have enough coverage,” Rascon said. “There’s nothing worse for a teacher than to come into a classroom in the morning and find it trashed.”

Three-fourths of all property crime is committed by non-students, Rascon said, and Duschel estimated that, of that number, three-fourths are committed by people stealing electronic items to sell to support drug habits. The bulk of the break-ins occur at 26 schools on a fairly regular basis, Duschel said.

Little Malicious Damage

“Generally, we find that most of our burglars have some advance information” on where valuable equipment such as computers and videocassette recorders are located, he said, “since we usually don’t see them going aimlessly from class to class looking for things.

“And we don’t really have a lot of malicious damage or real threats to persons, since these people are going in with tools of their trade, not as blatant robbers.”

In his almost five years on the force, Duschel said, he has never been threatened and has never unholstered his gun.

Although most patrol time is spent responding to silent alarms, the officers also make preventive sweeps of campuses when time permits, checking doors, vending machines and windows at schools, all of which are deliberately kept dark once the night custodians leave. At San Diego High downtown, police regularly roust transients who pick isolated corners of the campus to bed down in for the night but who move docilely when officers flash their lights at them.

“There really is security for us in darkness,” Duschel said, “because if the place is lit up, a burglar can see me coming a mile away.” And people used to use the lights for gun and rock practice, he said.

“Also, children are afraid to be on the campus in the dark, so they don’t hang around once the sun goes down, either.”

Rascon estimated that property crime would increase 30% if the campuses were lighted throughout the night.

Different Type of Work

For Rascon’s 22 remaining officers, their assignment to either an individual school or to a cluster of schools--depending on the security needs of a campus--involves a much different type of policing.

“They wear a wide variety of hats, ranging from counseling kids informally to talking to classroom groups to making arrests, collecting evidence and solving crimes that take place on the campus,” Rascon said. “They’d better have good knowledge of and rapport with juveniles and excellent communication skills, and a high tolerance for verbal abuse.”

Crawford Principal Nancy Shelburne compares the job to that of a city beat officer.

“Doesn’t a good beat officer counsel and offer support and give a kind ear to a person and help calm situations, referee disputes, as well as handle legal violations?”

For example, if a fight takes place on campus, the officer will investigate to determine whether it was an unprovoked assault by one student or mutual combat. If the attack was unprovoked, the officer could make an arrest and notify the parents; that would be followed either by punishment in the Juvenile Court system or by the individual school, depending on a student’s record. If the confrontation was mutual, the officer would turn the case back to the school’s vice principal.

Rascon asks his site officers to maintain high visibility “in the lunch areas, in the parking lots and especially to minimize outside influences.”

“Perhaps the most important thing they do is to make challenges to people coming onto campuses,” he said. “That is the real benefit to having constant supervision.”

The officers have working under them anywhere from two to half a dozen hourly assistants, hired by the principal and equipped with walkie-talkies.

Shelburne praised her officer, Chet Bruzy, for his credibility with students, many of whom share information with him about trouble they see brewing. Bruzy, a self-effacing man with a Rodney Dangerfield sense of humor, said it took him more than a year to establish the rapport.

“After you do that, however, you’ve got things made,” said Bruzy, who called campus work “a lot more interesting” than night patrol.

Rascon would like officers full time at each of the district’s 28 secondary schools, but he lacks the manpower to staff more than 11. The rest of the secondary schools share officers with elementary schools in their area, although the officers spend the bulk of their time at the junior and senior highs.

The district’s integration services department pays for seven community service officers--individuals with some police training but who are unarmed and have no power of arrest--to staff seven magnet elementary schools in Southeast San Diego. These officers are meant to keep non-students off campus through their visibility alone, Rascon said, in large part to reassure parents from other areas that they can safely bus their children to the magnet schools.

“But I’ve got a waiting list of 10 schools which want these CSOs as well,” he said.

‘These Things Happen’

Shelburne, a 20-year veteran of city schools, said officers are needed because changes in society have affected campuses in major ways.

“I can’t remember when I was in high school that someone would walk onto a campus with the idea of doing harm to a child,” she said. “Now these things happen, and some situations can be handled much faster and much cleaner than with school vice principals or counselors.”

School board member Jim Roache, a San Diego County sheriff’s captain who commands the Lemon Grove substation, would like to see officers at all secondary schools.

“They are proving increasingly valuable, as any principal will tell you--beneficial not only for the school but for the community as well in fighting crime,” he said.

“I know that educators and the public at large are suspicious when they hear of a cop on campus, because they get the idea of a heavy-handed enforcer,” Roache said.

“But that’s not what I’ve observed. They are a hybrid between educators and law enforcement, and we need more resources for them.”

In the rare cases in which an intruder storms a school and starts shooting--as happened at Cleveland Elementary in 1979 and at a Stockton school earlier this year--the presence of a school officer could make a difference, Rascon said.

“You never know, but if there were an officer on campus, there might be enough time to react,” he said.

The district has given Rascon authority to equip all schools with two-way radios to his office that could be used in such emergencies.