4 Arrested in Racial Melee at High School : Violence: Police officers in partial riot gear break up a fight between blacks and Latinos at North Hollywood campus.

Police in partial riot gear surrounded North Hollywood High School for three hours Monday to quell a racially motivated melee that left students shaken and administrators fearful that the violence could spread to other schools.

Black and Latino students threw food, shouted insults and, in some cases, came to blows during the school’s recess and lunch periods, police and students said. Estimates of the number of students involved ranged from 200 by the school’s principal, Catherine Lum, to 700 by Los Angeles police officers at the scene.

No one was hurt, but four male students were arrested.

“It was total chaos, food flying everywhere,” said Christopher Portillo, a 10th-grader. “When the police came, everyone started throwing everything at the police.”

Students said the disturbance grew out of a clash between black and Latino students over what kind of music to play at the school’s annual homecoming dance last Friday night, which ignited racial tensions that had been simmering all year. School district officials said they plan to take steps to prevent the fighting from spreading to other schools.

“We need to sit down and analyze why this is happening,” said Supt. Sid Thompson. Tensions on the campus, he said, are a reflection of greater, communitywide racial and ethnic tensions.

“There is frustration in the community about the economy, frustration within families,” Thompson said. Under other circumstances, minor incidents would lead to “a fistfight and end at that,” he said. But “in this environment a kid lashes out and it gets interpreted as being one ethnic group against the other.”

Thompson said crisis counseling and security teams will be sent to the campus today, and that the district will set up a program to teach students to deal peacefully with ethnic tensions.

School board member Roberta Weintraub said she was afraid students, many of whom are bused to the school from other neighborhoods, will take reports of the fighting “back to their home communities. My concern is that when a situation like this happens it spreads, and we’ll get copycat situations.”

Los Angeles police moved quickly to quell the disturbance, calling a tactical alert for the six police divisions in the Valley Bureau, and then for the entire city, said Lt. John Dunkin.

Between 90 and 110 officers, dispatched from all parts of the city, rapidly surrounded the school with patrol cars and motorcycles.

The officers began breaking up knots of students and closed off roads and a freeway off-ramp leading to the school at Magnolia Boulevard and Colfax Avenue. The only people allowed to enter the building were parents who were picking up their children.

Dunkin said the tactical alert had nothing to do with recent criticisms that police did not respond quickly enough to the April rioting throughout the city. He said the alert--which among other things keeps officers on duty after their shifts end--was merely a way to get additional officers into the area, and was canceled shortly after school closed at 3 p.m.

“This is what we would have done under those circumstances anytime,” Dunkin said. “This was not just a fight among a couple dozen kids where we could send in a few officers to get a handle on things.”

As with school officials, police remained concerned that tempers could flare again. The LAPD and Los Angeles Unified School District police force planned to send additional officers to North Hollywood High today to keep the peace, said Dunkin and Richard Page, assistant police chief for the school district.

“It’s obviously a concern to us; tensions must be very high for the students to erupt the way they did,” Dunkin said. “There will be a continued police presence to prevent this from reigniting. Nothing like today, of course, but a significant police presence.”

Three 16-year-old boys were arrested on suspicion of interfering with a police officer, challenging to fight and failure to disperse, respectively. Also arrested was Juan Medina, 18, a 10th-grader booked on charges of interfering with police as they tried to restore calm, Dunkin said. All four were released to the custody of their parents, he said.

Throughout the afternoon, police in partial riot gear maintained police lines near the school and patrolled neighborhoods to quell fights among students. Police also were deployed in cars and on motorcycles along bus routes in case fighting broke out on buses when students left the campus.

Lum downplayed the seriousness of the incident, saying she was surprised to “look up and see police in riot gear” surrounding the school. The fight, she said, was between just a few students, with about 200 more running around, pushing and shoving just to see what was going on.

Lum stopped short of suggesting that the police overreacted; however, she said repeatedly: “I did not call them.”

To students, however, the incident was serious and frightening.

“I was hit by males, females, teachers, whoever was in the way,” said Tamika McKinon, a senior who said she was accidentally struck on the jaw by a police billy club as she tried to pull a friend out of the fray.

Several students said racial tensions had been simmering even before the homecoming dance.

“It’s not just one little thing,” said one senior who asked that she not be identified. “There is a lot of racial tension. It’s been going on since September. Friday, it all blew up.”

Reports of what prompted the fight differed. But many students said fighting broke out across the street from the school after the dance, when black gang members who do not attend the school attacked the school’s Latino homecoming king. School officials said he suffered facial injuries.

That student, whom school administrators declined to identify, was said by black and Latino students to have made a reference to Latino power. Tensions had escalated throughout the evening, the students said, beginning with a struggle over whether to play the techno-style music favored by the Latino students or the hip-hop preferred by blacks.

Weintraub, one of two school board members who wants schools shut down in the event of a teachers strike, said the fight points out the dangers of keeping the schools open with reduced staffs. United Teachers-Los Angeles voted overwhelmingly last week to authorize a strike if negotiations aimed at softening a pay cut fail.

“I don’t think it’s safe for children to be at schools without teachers,” she said.

School board member Jeff Horton, who visited the campus Monday, said resolving the school’s tensions will not be easy.

“This has opened up a lot of feelings among students and staff,” Horton said. “Restoring order is just the first step.”

Times staff writer Stephanie Chavez contributed to this report.

RICARDO DeARATANHA / Los Angeles Times