School Police Patrol Superintendent’s Home

The Los Angeles Unified School District police force, which administrators say is so short of officers that it cannot protect schools from widespread burglaries and vandalism, has assigned patrol units for the past three years to keep watch over the Bel-Air home of school Supt. Sid Thompson.

Thompson told school board members Wednesday that the practice was appropriate because of “hate mail and threats against my person and family.”

School police watch commanders were directed to have a marked patrol car make a drive-by check on Thompson’s house twice a night, according to an April 1993 memo obtained by The Times.

The memo was written by Larry Hutchens, assistant chief of the school district police. It ordered watch commanders to maintain a confidential weekly log of the patrols for Hutchens and submit a written report if the duty could not be performed because patrol units were unavailable.

“There was some concern for the safety of the superintendent,” Hutchens said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

“He’s a very highly visible public figure. When there’s units available, we ask them to swing by. I think there’s always some concern over his safety.”

Hutchens declined to elaborate on what triggered the security concerns or how often the patrols are actually carried out.

Thompson, who has a sign on his house saying it is patrolled by a private security firm, did not return repeated phone calls seeking his comment on the matter. But in a memo to school board members Wednesday, Thompson said he was informed by Hutchens that it is common practice for high-visibility officials to receive special protection.

“As you may know, from time to time I am the subject of hate mail and threats against my person and family,” Thompson stated in the memo. “It does not, therefore, seem inappropriate for school police to be performing this service while on patrol in the area.”

The Times received a copy of the memo ordering protection for Thompson’s house after publishing a report June 13 that more than $16 million has been lost to burglars and vandals in less than three years as a result of about 3,000 break-ins at school buildings each year.

School administrators said there are simply too few school police officers to effectively patrol the district’s sprawling turf, which covers 710 square miles.

Word of the patrols of Thompson’s home brought a denunciation from Helen Bernstein, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, who called for Thompson to end them and to repay the cost.

“This is absolutely disgraceful. They do these awful things and then people want to break up the district because of poor management,” Bernstein said. “What a message it sends.”

But in his memo to board members, Thompson said that the cost of patrols to his home is insignificant when compared to the bills run up by previous school superintendents, who had full-time officers assigned to them for security and as drivers.

Los Angeles Unified superintendents had been assigned bodyguards after the 1973 slaying of Oakland schools chief Marcus Foster. But controversy over the policy cropped up in 1989 after it was revealed that then-Supt. Leonard Britton’s bodyguard-driver had earned tens of thousands of dollars in overtime in a single year. When William R. Anton took over as superintendent in July 1990, his first official act was to ask the school board to reassign his bodyguard.