14% of Students Have Carried Weapon to School, Study Says

By RICHARD LEE COLVIN

March 10, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES EDUCATION WRITER

Citing the threat of random street violence and the menace of gangs, one in seven Los Angeles high school students say they have carried a weapon to school for protection, according to a detailed new study.

The weapons of choice for most are knives, sharpened screwdrivers, razor blades and the like. But in the survey scheduled for release today, 2.5% of the students questioned at 11 high schools said they have brought a gun on campus. And a tiny but frightening percentage--1.4%--said they bring a weapon every day, making it as much a part of their school routine as a textbook or a calculator.

They clearly have not been deterred by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s policy of making random checks with metal detectors. Nearly half of the high schoolers were unaware their schools had such a policy.

The survey, which covered 1,802 Los Angeles Unified School District high school students, was conducted in 1995 and ’96 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California with the help of researchers from Cal State L.A. and USC. The schools represented the geographic diversity of the district.

Titled “From Words to Weapons: the Violence Surrounding Our Schools,” the study took nearly two years and was financed in part by the California Wellness Foundation.

The issue of school safety has been high on the national agenda since U.S. Senate hearings in the mid-1970s. In 1994, the national Council of the Great City Schools reported that 83% of urban superintendents and school board members listed violence and gang activity as their top concern.

Such findings have caused many to believe that schools, particularly those in areas such as Los Angeles, are dangerous. The new survey does little to dispel that perception, finding that 14% of students admitted taking a weapon to school at least once.

Nevertheless, the survey depicts the schools in the nation’s second-largest district as relatively safe islands compared to their surrounding communities, where violence is pervasive and guns plentiful. About 49% of the students said they could “easily” get a gun and 25% said they would have to pay less than $50 for it.

Los Angeles school officials who were briefed on the new survey said it was reassuring that students feel safer at school than outside of it. The survey’s authors agreed, but said the issue of violence must be addressed more broadly.

“We as a region and society need to get serious about what we are going to do to mitigate this kind of background violence that our high school students have to put up with,” said the ACLU’s Allan Parachini, one of the authors of the report detailing the findings. “It’s not as simple as buying a few cheap metal detectors.”

Students interviewed Friday at schools included in the survey agreed with its findings, saying they worried more about violence off campus.

Nicole “Rainbow” Ramirez, an 11th-grader at South Gate High School, said fights might stem from disputes that start in school but usually don’t occur there. “They plan it in school and take it elsewhere . . . so they won’t get caught,” she said.

Tiffany Sanchez, a sophomore at South Gate High School, said students sometimes bring weapons to school to prepare for such off-campus confrontations. “You can’t run to your house . . . and pick up a [weapon] after school,” she said.

Only 14% of those surveyed said weapons are a means of repelling on-campus attacks, while 39% said it was fear of gang-related violence that led students to arm themselves. Another 30% said a weapon offered protection getting to school and back home.

It’s not always necessary to use a weapon for it to be effective, said one ninth-grader at South Gate. He said he once brought a knife to school “because I was gonna get jumped by a bunch of people.” All he had to do was show it, he said, and they left him alone.

Officials at South Gate said they randomly search lockers, sometimes turning up small knives, but rarely guns. They also offer rewards to students who report seeing other students carrying weapons. In addition, they talk about weapons and violence at monthly assemblies.

In December, however, students witnessed one man repeatedly stab another in the arm across Firestone Boulevard from the school. Two years ago, several people were injured in a drive-by shooting behind the school.

The survey found some differences by race in whether students had armed themselves. While 9% of the white students said they had carried a weapon to school, 13% of the Asian-Pacific Islanders and Latinos and 22% of the African American students said they had.

“The students that attend here know nothing but how to be violent,” one respondent from Jordan High School in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles wrote in the survey. “I also think the biggest cause of violence . . . is where the students live and how they live.”

A chilling 70% of the students at Jordan said they had witnessed a drive-by shooting near campus. More than a third of the respondents in the entire survey had seen a fellow teenager shot in their neighborhood, and 41% had witnessed a drive-by shooting.

“You’re not gonna get blasted here and you could get blasted out there,” said 16-year-old Marco Carranza of Reseda High School, one of the schools that participated in the survey. “There are not drive-bys here. If someone is coming after you, they have to wait till you’re on the street.”

Reseda High School student Michael Ensley was shot and killed in a campus hallway in 1993. In response, the school organized a group of students to educate their peers about the dangers of weapons.

LAUSD Police Chief Wesley Mitchell said such rare incidents generate enormous publicity, while off-campus shootings are given less attention. Educators alone, he said, cannot keep children safe.

“Kids should be able to leave their house and feel very comfortable walking that short trek from front door to school and back, and it’s every citizen’s responsibility to make that a reality for kids,” Mitchell said.

In 1993, after two Dorsey High School students were shot on their way to campus, city and school district police worked together to clear out nearby gang and drug hot spots and increased patrols during times students were coming or going. Attacks on students dropped, but three teenagers were wounded a year ago in a shooting around the corner from Dorsey.

In one of their most disturbing conclusions, the survey’s authors said the Los Angeles school district “has clearly been unsuccessful” in implementing a consistent policy for using metal detectors to deter pupils from carrying weapons. In 1993, after fatal shootings at Reseda and Fairfax high schools, the district began requiring administrators to conduct daily, random searches of some students using a hand-held metal detector.

The idea was not to find all weapons, but to make students worry that, if they brought one to school, they might be caught and face expulsion.

In addition to nearly half the surveyed students saying they were unaware of the policy, two-thirds said the devices had no impact on the number of weapons on campus.

“The fact that so many students are unaware that we use them does bother me, because it means . . . we’re not doing much deterring,” Mitchell said.

The survey compares the responses from the 11 participating schools. But the campuses differed in how they administered the questionnaire, and some schools had too few respondents to make the comparisons among all of them meaningful.

Some clear differences do emerge, though. Racial tensions are far higher at some schools than others, with more than half of the students at Hamilton, Jordan, Hollywood and Fairfax saying they feel racial tension.

White students are the most likely to respond that way, with over two-thirds sensing racial animosity at school. Sixty-one percent of Asian-Pacific Islanders and 54% of African Americans reported racial tension. Less than 39% of the Latino students felt that way.

A white Fairfax student wrote in the survey that “at my school people won’t even talk to you if you are different. Sometimes I feel tension from the black kids just cause I’m white. I feel hated because of that.”

Nearly 40% of the students said training in how to resolve conflicts peaceably would reduce campus violence, and 46% said classes to increase racial and cultural sensitivity would help.

Times staff writer Lucille Renwick and correspondent John Cox contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Weapons on Campus

A survey of 1,802 students at 11 comprehensive campuses and continuation schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District focused on weapons and violence on campus and in the community. On the whole, fewer students arm themselves than had been seen in recent national surveys.

How Often Weapon is Brought to School

Always: 1%

Frequently: 2%

Occasionally: 10%

Saw Teen Shot in Neighborhood

Yes: 35%

No: 65%

Do Types of Clothing Put You at Risk?

Don’t know: 11%

Yes: 57%

No: 32%

Percentage Who Arm Themselves by Weapon