CAMPUS COPS : They Walk School Beat as Truant Officers, Counselors--and Police

Hunched over his desk in a bare Century High School office the size of a broom closet, Santa Ana policeman Dennis Pierce was on the phone, trying to help a colleague figure out what charges they could use to arrest a student at another high school.

The kid was carrying a BB gun, but it was concealed. If he brandished it, even if it was a toy, he could be arrested, Pierce said, but no luck. If it was a firearm, he could be arrested even though it was concealed. But it wasn’t classified as a firearm under the penal code.

Muttering, “It’s stupid to bring one of those things to school,” Pierce thumbed past the section barring weapons like “dirks” and “daggers.” Finally, the cop at the other high school found what he needed, a section of the state education code barring possession of a “dangerous object on campus.”

Satisfied that the arrest could go forward, Pierce hung up.

For anyone who remembers high school in the ‘50s, the ‘60s or even the early ‘70s as mostly homecoming rallies, senior proms and pop quizzes, there’s another reality nowadays in some schools: cops.

Each of the four Santa Ana high schools and each of the five high schools within the city of Garden Grove has a city policeman on campus. Sometimes they function as truant officers, sometimes as counselors.

And sometimes they function as cops--even though Pierce, for one, tries to keep his arrests low key, taking the offender out the back door.

“I don’t parade kids,” Pierce said. “I don’t believe in that. A kid messes up, he knows he messed up, he made a mistake. I don’t hold that against him. He’s just going to have to pay for making that mistake. It’s part of growing up. This is real life. This is reality.”

Reality didn’t include cops on campus when Pierce went to high school 30 years ago, nor when Joe Avalos attended high school in Anaheim.

“We didn’t have the gang problem we’ve got now,” said Avalos, who patrols Valley High School in Santa Ana and who nabbed the student with the BB gun. “You’ve got kids from one block who belong to one gang, kids from another block who belong to another gang.”

And it is gangs that dominate the cops’ talk when they discuss their efforts to make sure that students comply with school edicts barring the flaunting of gang colors or insignia, spray-painting of gang graffiti on school walls or neighborhood buildings, and above all turning the schools into battlegrounds between rival factions.

Even when he knows a student belongs to a gang, Pierce said, so long as he’s in his student role on campus, that’s fine. It’s easier for the teen-ager, too.

“If you’re not identified as a gang member, you don’t have to always look over your shoulder to see what’s coming at you,” he said.

From the perspective of 14-year-old freshman Jason Welty, there aren’t any gang members at Century any more. “They got rid of them in a big hurry” last September, Jason said.

The high school opened its doors for the first time that month, taking in freshmen and sophomores. Next year will include a junior class, and the next year the first senior class.

Because the school is so new, “every day 10 to 15 businessmen in suits are walking through” the halls to see what the newest educational facility in town looks like, Jason said. That keeps the students on their toes. In addition, the administration has done “a pretty good job of eliminating the troublemakers,” the freshman added. “I think Officer Pierce is doing a pretty good job.”

Cops and teachers stress that few weapons of any kind appear on campus. Arrests are usually made for fistfights. One teen-ager whom Pierce arrested had slugged her mother, who was performing the embarrassing task of publicly escorting her daughter back to the class she had caught her skipping.

Drug use by students on campus, another worry for parents, teachers and cops alike, doesn’t appear to be a problem on campuses where there’s a cop around, according to students and police.

Bruce Leamer, the Santa Ana cop at Saddleback High School, says that in more than three years on campus he has made only two drug arrests. One was for attempting to sell marijuana; the other, which took place not at Saddleback but at a continuation high school run by the school district, was for cocaine possession.

“I haven’t heard of anybody selling drugs on campus,” Avalos said. “Most of the time the word gets out if someone is selling drugs.” He said most of his arrests have stemmed from campus fistfights, with a “very few” for carrying knives.

Santa Ana began stationing police on campus in the mid-1970s against a backdrop of increasing problems that included racial fights on and off campus, brief boycotts of classes by minority students dissatisfied with conditions, and concerns about increasing gang battles in school neighborhoods that sometimes carried over into the schools.

Conditions became bad enough that in the 1975 school board elections, discipline was one of the issues that conservative candidates used to oust their more liberal opponents and seize a 4-1 majority on the board.

Pierce said the program was originally financed by federal funds and was intended “to try and settle down some of the problems the schools were having: gangs, graffiti and different crimes that were either on or about or around the campus.” When the financing ran out, the police considered the program important enough to pick up the tab.

The genesis of the Garden Grove program was different, according to Police Sgt. Kevin Raney.

“It was not done as a reaction to crime on campuses or anything,” Raney said. Rather, it was the brainchild of former Police Chief Frank Kessler, who was concerned that not enough was being done for the city’s youth.

“He made a commitment to work with youth, provide a service, with the hope that we could deter some from getting involved with criminal activity or even deter some who were already involved,” Raney said.

Garden Grove Police Capt. David Abrecht said that “rather than be the security guards, (the police on campus) try to deal with the administrators and the kids to try to anticipate problems before they become a police matter.

“They’ll go out and do truancy sweeps,” Abrecht said. “They refer a lot of kids to counseling services, diversion cases before a student gets arrested. And of course, they do have some arrests.”

The program “was never intended as simply a security force,” Abrecht said. “It was always intended to be a high-profile, preventive, multidimensional program.”

Abrecht said the cops assigned to the schools--who, unlike their Santa Ana counterparts, are usually in civilian clothes--make about 80 drug arrests each year in the area of the school, including off campus.

“The sales are not as pronounced around the campus as you might think,” he said. “Certainly, simple possession (of drugs) is still a problem. The officers do branch out around the campus and respond to complaints of drug sales and drug activity.” Drugs on campus “are not the serious problem you might think.”

The more usual security force at high schools elsewhere in Orange County is typified by Newport-Harbor High School, which has two security officers in civilian clothes who patrol the campus.

The school has no special gang problems, according to Serge Beltran, the assistant principal. The main concern, he joked, was “maybe some truancy when the surf goes up.”

Beltran said he was unaware of major drug use on campus and added that Newport Beach narcotics officers periodically brief teachers on warning signs of drug use by students.

He said there are undoubtedly some students who use drugs, with the biggest problem drug being alcohol. Drug use on campus “is not rampant,” though, and “we’re really tight here” in looking out for it, he said.

The Santa Ana and Garden Grove police include intermediate “feeder” schools as part of their territory, too. They visit the other schools frequently, getting the younger students used to the idea that there will be a cop on their high school campus and familiarizing themselves with potential “bad seeds” who may come their way in a year or two.

The police say they like their jobs not just because it’s usually Monday through Friday, daytime shifts, with occasional extra duty at night for basketball games or dances. They say it’s a chance to act as “cop on the beat,” getting to know students and getting known themselves, finding out what’s going to happen and stopping it before trouble starts. On patrol, they usually show up after the accident has happened, after the victim has been mugged.

The cops often function as much as truant officers (“I hate that term,” Pierce says) and counselors as they do as cops.

On one recent Friday afternoon, a football coach came in to Pierce’s cubicle with one of his players to report a group of kids who had cut afternoon classes for a “ditching party.”

Where, Pierce asked.

“They said behind McDonald’s somewhere on 17th Street . . . the one by Toy City, back there.”

“And that’s where all our kids are?” Pierce asked.

“I guess. That’s what they said. The ditching party’s over there. And people were leaving during math.”

Pierce set off to find the party, first pulling his black-and-white patrol car over to help sort out a traffic collision at 17th Street and Grand Avenue. After collecting a license and registration and talking briefly to a driver, he turned the mess over to a motorcycle cop and took off again, party-bound.

He swung down a street where he once lived (“See those trees over there? I planted those.”) and up another in a hunt for lots of cars, maybe lots of noise, and a party. No luck.

Still, he was glad to see the student who came to his office with the tip. The student “could be a problem kid,” Pierce mused, just like his older brother. And how does he know the older sibling? “I just know the brother. You’ve done this job 17, 18 years, you know who your problems are. After a while you get to know families, offspring of families. It’s amazing.”

A tall, well-built man with a mustache and thinning hair, Pierce said a cop on the school beat needs more patience than the policeman on regular patrol and, unsurprisingly, has to be able to get along with teen-agers.

Pierce was at Valley High School for seven years, then was promoted to corporal and switched to a regular patrol job. When Century was about to open, his bosses asked him to return to school and supervise his colleagues at the three other schools.

“I’m glad they brought me back, because I missed it,” he said. “I missed the camaraderie with the faculty and the school excitement, the kids, contacts with the kids.”

“When I first went down to Valley High School . . . there were a lot of problems there, a lot of gang things, a lot of crimes that were occurring both on and off the campus,” he said. “And by my second year I’d pretty much settled the gang situation down, through mutual cooperation with the kids.

“You get out there and you talk with them and you work with them and even arrest them once in a while, but they understood after they were arrested, why,” Pierce said. “The kids after my first year there, on their own, took up a petition to stop graffiti in the school. And there were something like 2,000 signatures. . . . And from that point on, there was very little graffiti in the school.”

Even before Century opened, Pierce said, he went along an alley not far from the school that was a hangout for drug addicts to shoot up, day or night. He said he warned them that teen-agers would be passing by en route to their new school soon and he didn’t want to see them there. To back up the notice, the Police Department instituted sweeps of the alley before school opened, booting the addicts out and cleaning up the area.

Several times a day Pierce climbs into his car and swings around the neighborhood, checking to see that area merchants are getting along OK and monitoring gathering spots for youngsters to make sure there’s no trouble.

At school he keeps tabs on people he doesn’t know, keeping outsiders off campus.

“You get the older guys that want to see their girlfriends,” he said. “We did that too. But these guys come around with four or five other guys. ‘Hey guys, that’s got to stop.’ ”

Pierce is also available to handle off-campus crimes if there’s no other police officer around, and occasionally winds up doing regular cop stuff on what starts out as a cop-related school assignment.

That fact was never more apparent than the Friday afternoon after the hunt for the ditching party.

Pierce drove his patrol car across 17th Street and was just at the entrance to the Santa Ana Freeway when word came over the radio that a motorcycle cop was chasing a motorist south on the freeway right at the 17th Street entrance. When the motorist stayed on past the exit, Pierce made a left turn onto the freeway entrance ramp that took inches of rubber off his tires, put the gas pedal to the floor, switched the roof lights and siren on and roared up and onto the freeway.

The motorist got off at Grand. So did the motorcycle cop. So did Pierce.

“Where’d he go? Where’d he go?” Pierce wailed, eyes sweeping right and left. Picking the car out within seconds, Pierce floored it again, roaring right, left, right, braking so hard that accumulated debris slid out from beneath the front seats and tumbled every which way on the floor.

The motorist pulled into a parking lot, the motorcycle cop and Pierce in pursuit. But there was no way out except to bend around the parked cars and use the exit only 10 feet from the entrance to the U-shaped lot. Pierce slammed the gear shift into reverse, hit the gas, scorched rubber and bounced the police car backward out of the entrance like it was a pogo stick. Then he gunned the car forward a foot to block the exit and slammed on the brakes to halt the car with a shudder. He bolted out of the car, gun drawn.

At which point, the fleeing motorist did the only smart thing he had done since the chase started: He stayed in the driver’s seat and held his hands over his head in the “I surrender” pose.

Pierce helped arrest the motorist, then, with half a dozen cops now at the scene, drove back to Century High School to watch the kids go home.