Simi Valley Campus Officers Calm Fears, Search for Weapons : Safety: The slaying of a student prompted boost in patrols, but officers say much of their time is spent quelling false rumors.

Two weeks after the campus slaying of a 14-year-old boy prompted Simi Valley to boost its one-man school patrol to four officers, police say two things are certain: The schools are generally safe, but kids will be kids. And most kids are good.

The extra officers temporarily assigned to Simi Valley’s junior and senior high schools have been focusing on quelling rumors and seizing weapons, said Lt. John Ainsworth, their commander.

“Their primary responsibility is dealing with security issues, answering questions and looking for weapons on campus,” said Ainsworth, head of the Special Enforcement Detail, which has increased its school patrols to four officers until at least March 11.

Since the Feb. 1 stabbing death of Valley View Junior High student Chad Hubbard, the officers have been patrolling the schools on foot and in marked cruisers, trying to calm students, teachers and parents.

“The more we can keep down the rumors, the safer everybody feels,” said Officer Steve Ming. “There’s all kinds of rumors: ‘Everybody has a knife.’ ‘There’s going to be a fight.’ ‘Gang members have been involved in a fight.’ ”

Officers have confiscated pocket knives, realistic toy handguns and all types of graffiti tools--but the rumors far outnumber the seizures, Officer John St. Laurent said.

“Most kids have never actually seen a weapon,” said St. Laurent, who has been patrolling the city’s schools for three years and worked as the DARE anti-drug officer for five.

When word gets out about a weapon or a fight, Ainsworth said, “Kids may tend to embellish things and make it sound worse than it is, to impress their friends.”

Students at Valley View School applauded the extra patrols.

“It’s better if they’re here after school, because that’s when most fights happen and the kids, if they see them, they’ll stop,” said Christie Wilson, 13, an eighth-grader.

“The teachers say stuff like, ‘Even if there are cops on campus, it really wouldn’t have mattered’ ” in Chad’s death, said Joey DiFatta, a 14-year-old ninth-grader on the school’s safety committee. “But a lot of the kids feel safer.”

In addition to weapons searches and rumor control, the expanded patrol handles the same types of cases seen when St. Laurent alone patrolled the schools--drugs, graffiti, gangs and fights over girls.

Some days bring a rash of one type of case, other days a mix, he said. And every day, Ming, St. Laurent and the other officers check out tips and keep tabs on kids who have caused trouble in the past.

On Wednesday, Ming and St. Laurent began and ended their afternoon with tips on marijuana.

They came from a teacher at Hillside Junior High, to whom a student turned in an envelope full of suspected marijuana. Its contents turned out to be real grass, or as Ming jokingly put it, “freshly mowed schoolyard.”

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Later at Royal High School, the officers had a student pulled out of class and brought to them in the assistant principal’s office.

“I’m going to lay it out straight, flat and complete,” St. Laurent said, staring down the 18-year-old. “We’ve had not one, not two, but mega-complaints about your dealing.”

“Me? No, I’m not dealing drugs,” he replied, shaking his head.

So it went--calm accusations and increasingly firm denials--until the officers obtained the teen-ager’s permission to frisk him and search his backpack.

They found no drugs, just a pack of cigarettes that was confiscated by the assistant principal and a ballpoint sketch of a marijuana pipe emblazoned with the words “Hemp saves all.”

With a stern warning, they let him go, unconvinced he was innocent, they said.

“Basically, this is how the day goes, whether it’s gangs or drugs,” St. Laurent said after their interview and search of a second student also found no evidence to back a tip that he was dealing drugs.

Most kids are good, St. Laurent said, and the ratio of bad ones is about the same as adults--2% to 5% are breaking the law.

They moved on to Sequoia Junior High. There, Ming warned a girl he would come down hard on her if she got caught for gang activity, while St. Laurent tried to chill a rivalry over a girl.

Rejected by a former girlfriend, the boy had sent his older brother to another school to beat up a boy who was now dating her, according to yet another anonymous tip.

The boy had been arrested for tagging earlier in the year and looked to be headed for gang life like his older brother, St. Laurent said. But the officer lobbied to keep him on the school basketball squad, and the kid had been straight since then, he said.

The boy agreed to call off his brother.

“Don’t mess up like your brother did,” St. Laurent warned.

“Don’t worry,” the boy answered soberly. “I’m not.”

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The last tip led St. Laurent and Ming to another junior high. They asked that it not be named because of continuing investigations into marijuana dealing there.

They gently but firmly questioned a 13-year-old girl who first denied, then tearfully admitted, that she had been selling marijuana to schoolmates.

After calling the girl’s father and telling him she would probably be expelled, St. Laurent answered a call to his pager. It was yet another tip--that a student at Royal High School had been seen carrying a gun.

“It’s a constant influx of information,” he said. “Keeping track of who did what. The kids trust us. They have faith in us. They know I won’t break their confidence.”