NEWS ANALYSIS : Foes Exploit Brown’s Omission on School Crime Issue : Campaign: In TV ad, candidate fails to mention her tenure on L.A. Board of Education. Records show she voiced conern about campus violence in the ‘70s.

Television viewers who watch state Treasurer Kathleen Brown’s ad on school safety will learn a few things about the Democratic gubernatorial candidate.

For starters, Brown has grown children. “When my kids were little,” she says in the ad, “my big worry was they’d get hurt during recess.” For another, she is fed up with crime in schools. “Now, 12,000 kids a day bring guns to school. It’s an outrage,” she says, before proposing a few solutions: boot camps for juvenile offenders, “real” after-school programs and anti-drug education.

What viewers will not learn from the 30-second spot is that Brown has nearly five years of experience wrangling with school issues--not as a mother, but as a member of the Los Angeles school board from 1975 to 1980. Since the ad hit the airwaves late last month, Brown’s opponents have been eager to point that out, seeking to show that her record as a board member contradicts the proposals she is making in her bid for governor.

“Kathleen Brown’s Rhetoric vs. Reality,” began a one-page critique of Brown’s safe schools ad that Gov. Pete Wilson’s campaign sent to reporters. Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi faxed information about Brown’s allegedly “disastrous” record to the media and then skewered Brown in public last week.

“When Kathleen Brown’s kids were little and attending L.A. schools, she . . . was an elected member of the school board,” Garamendi told several hundred members of Town Hall, a nonpartisan civic group meeting in Los Angeles. “When she had the chance to stop rising school violence, she failed.”

Whether or not such attacks have merit, they indicate that school violence is an issue that every gubernatorial candidate wants to claim. The specter of danger in the classroom marries two of the greatest concerns to California voters--crime and education.

Donna Lucas, a Republican political consultant, said Brown’s safe schools ad may be a “preventive strike” in the battle for control of a thorny issue.

“She is very vulnerable on the death penalty,” said Lucas, referring to Brown’s contention that even though she personally opposes capital punishment she can vigorously enforce the law. “There are some who believe that if she can define the crime issue on school safety, on issues she has some credibility on, that could help her.”

Does Brown have credibility on the school safety issue? It depends on whom you ask.

When Brown’s school safety ad premiered, George Gorton, Wilson’s campaign manager, was quick to point out that as a school board member, Brown had opposed the use of undercover officers to track down drug dealers on school campuses. Gorton did not mention that Brown’s opposition was short-lived. After becoming convinced that campus drug use was widespread, she changed her position.

“I think it is a sick, sick situation” when police must infiltrate school campuses, Brown told The Times in 1975. But if traffic cannot be otherwise controlled, she added, the police were the best antidote. “Who else,” she asked, “is left?”

Darry Sragow, Garamendi’s campaign manager, promptly claimed that Brown “has the rare distinction of having been sued by the attorney general of the state of California for failing to protect students from a rising tide of violence in the Los Angeles school system.”

In fact, the distinction was not so rare. The 1980 lawsuit, filed by then-Atty. Gen. George Deukmejian, listed as defendants eight city, county and school governmental bodies and 32 individuals, including Mayor Tom Bradley, Dist. Atty. John K. Van de Kamp, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and all members of the school board, City Council and County Board of Supervisors.

The suit, which alleged that it was “cruel and unusual punishment” to force children to attend violence-scarred schools, was dismissed--a fact that Sragow’s blistering facsimile did not mention.

Judging from the minutes of school board meetings during Brown’s tenure, the 48-year-old grandmother has been voicing concern about school violence since the 1970s. She established a policy of zero tolerance for violence on campuses, proposed a standardized record-keeping system to assess the scope of the problem and, in 1979, declared reduction of campus violence her top priority.

“Some (school administrators) have said: ‘Don’t make a big deal of violence’ and ‘Let’s not focus on the negative,’ ” The Times quoted Brown as saying. “Until the powers that be--administrators, the board, law enforcement--focus attention on this problem, we won’t get the resources and energy committed to its reduction.”

How much she accomplished toward that goal--and how much could fairly be expected of her--is difficult to assess. Even today, no school board has licked the problem of crime on campus, and educators hold out little hope that administrative bodies can do it alone.

“We have to view the safety problem as a community problem, not just a school problem,” said Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers, which has endorsed Garamendi. “Because if we view it only as a school problem, we’ll never get safe schools.”

Both the Garamendi and Wilson camps note that during Brown’s years on the school board, crime on campuses went up. According to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s school police, the number of robberies, assaults and sex offenses in public schools rose during that period, even as enrollment fell. But Michael Reese, Brown’s campaign spokesman, said Brown should not be judged harshly based on the statistical increase.

“Her record overall shows that she was proactive on this issue. What was missing in those years was any help from Sacramento while John Garamendi was serving as a legislator,” said Reese, who last week sent reporters a biting facsimile of his own titled: “10 Things John Garamendi Doesn’t Want You to Know About His--and Kathleen Brown’s--Safety Record.”

So, why does Brown’s ad not even mention her time on the school board? Reese indicated that future ads will discuss her record in detail. “Stay tuned,” he said.

State Sen. Tom Hayden has said he will not use 30-second ads in his gubernatorial campaign because the format is too brief to truly educate voters. Brown’s school safety ad is an example of how the format can be confusing. In it Brown says: “We’ve got to get the violent kids out of here--into boot camps--so that those who want to learn can.”

In fact, Brown does not support boot camps for juveniles who have committed violent crimes. She has called for the creation of a statewide network of boot camps for first-time nonviolent offenders and has proposed disciplinary academies for troubled nonviolent students.

Reese acknowledged that the ad is confusing. “It’s technically accurate,” he said. “In her education speech she talks about disruptive violent kids that have no place remaining in classrooms. There are two alternatives under her plan, either boot camps or disciplinary academies.” But he reiterated that juveniles convicted of violent crimes would not be eligible for boot camp.

Meanwhile, the one statistic Brown used in her ad--”12,000 kids a day bring guns to school”--has sparked some curiosity. Reese said the number came from an August, 1993, report, “Weapons in Schools,” published by the National School Safety Center based in Westlake Village.

But Ronald Stephens, executive director of the center, said that although the number is “probably pretty good” for the state of California, he has never published it in his reports because he lacks the data to support it.

Reese said the statistic in the ad was an estimate derived from the 1987 National Adolescent Student Health Survey, which was excerpted in the “Weapons in Schools” report. That survey found that nationally, as many as 100,000 students carry a gun to school every day. Based on its proportion of national population, California’s share is about 12,000, he said.

In Brown’s policy addresses on crime and education, she has made several proposals to remedy crime in schools. Among them: $50 million a year for anti-drug education programs, $75 million a year for after-school programs, in-school mentoring programs and disciplinary academies for first-time juvenile offenders.

At least two of Brown’s proposals--creating gun-free school zones that provide tough penalties for those who carry guns within 1,000 feet of a school, and trying violent teen-age criminals as adult offenders--also appear on Wilson’s list of safe school priorities.

Wilson is proposing, among other things, to expand the attorney general’s weapons hot line statewide to report guns on campus and to enhance penalties for selling or giving a handgun to anyone younger than 18.

Garamendi, like Brown, is an advocate of boot camps for nonviolent offenders. As a legislator, he authored bills that funded drug prevention programs and expanded gang violence suppression programs. He believes that idleness is one of the major causes of juvenile criminal activity, and he is an outspoken supporter of more funding for after-school programs.