School Police Work Has Graduated to Big Time

The first call came at 8:45 a.m.: an armed robber had burst into the student store at Bethune Middle School in South Los Angeles, grabbing $2,000.

At 12:43 p.m. officers patrolling near Polytechnic High in Sun Valley spotted a stolen Toyota Camry and chased it, eventually cornering a 16-year-old burglary suspect in an alley.

And at 3:30, less than a block from Franklin High School in Highland Park, officers caught a ninth-grader with a pearl-handled, .25-caliber pistol.

The responding officers weren’t LAPD, they were school police, and this wasn’t a typical day--it was too slow.

To spend a few shifts with these officers is to witness the evolution of the Los Angeles Unified School District police from night watchmen to big-city cops. Woefully understaffed, responsible for increasingly valuable property, they confront violence on a daily basis--a key reason for their recent request to start carrying shotguns in patrol cars.

The controversial proposal--to be considered by the Board of Education tonight--has put the normally anonymous department in an unaccustomed spotlight, even though it is the fifth-largest police force of any kind in Los Angeles County.

It is the largest school police force in the nation. Yet its 292 sworn personnel are charged with protecting 900 sites sprawled across the 710-square-mile Los Angeles school district.

Its blue-and-white patrol cars may be familiar sights on campuses, where 155 of the school officers work foot beats and 88 serve in patrol units. But the department is largely unknown outside the school district.

Even as officers respond on a regular basis to drive-by shootings, armed robberies, burglaries and other increasingly violent crimes in neighborhoods around schools, they still are viewed by some as little more than lumbering security guards--an image reinforced by the department’s own beginnings as a security service half a century ago.

Yet, although the words “school police” may evoke images of oafish truant officers or Police Academy rejects, the officers undergo the same training as all police personnel in the state, and, as a series of recent ride-alongs showed, they face the same perils.

“People don’t think you’re a real cop, yet when a criminal sees you, they see a cop,” said Officer Nathan Martin, a 13-year veteran, as he inspected the grounds of Jefferson High during his graveyard shift. “They don’t say, ‘Oh, you’re a school guard.’ They shoot at you.”

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School district statistics show that weapons-related crime on campuses has been on the wane--from 1,403 reported incidents in 1991-92 to 1,001 in 1995-96. But much of the violence seems to have spread into surrounding neighborhoods, where students--often armed--sell drugs, pick fights and wind up as victims themselves. In the last three months alone, four students have been killed just off campus.

Often, the first to arrive on the scene are not conventional cops or sheriff’s deputies but nearby school police.

Indeed, it was campus Officer Leticia Valencia, at Franklin High, who spotted the ninth-grader with the shaved head and pearl-handled pistol. She watched the boy--a known member of the Drew Street Avenues gang--pick up what appeared to be a gun from the pine brush across the street from school just after classes were dismissed for the day.

Valencia radioed for help. Three school police cars circling the campus converged on the student and two friends. The officers ordered the three to the ground face first and handcuffed them.

“Where you from?” Officer Kevan Otto asked the 15-year-old.

“Nowhere.”

“Why you lie to me like a Chiquito? You got any bazookas on you?”

Franklin Principal Sheridan Liechty hurried to the scene, a walkie-talkie in one hand and a pained expression on her face.

“Is that a real gun?” Liechty asked.

“It’s a real one,” Valencia said.

“Does it have bullets in it?”

“Fully loaded with a bullet in the chamber,” Otto said, as he gingerly removed the magazine from the tossed gun.

The boy, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and baggy pants, was placed into the back of a school district patrol car and booked on suspicion of possessing a handgun--a felony because it was within 1,000 feet of a school. His two friends were released after officers collected their names and addresses on field identification cards.

The incident was routine for officers who spend much of their time “jacking up” suspected gang members--searching, questioning and running names through dispatch for outstanding warrants.

Often, it lapses into a game of cat and mouse. A game that Otto, a former Army infantryman who joined the school police five years ago when the Los Angeles Police Department had a hiring freeze, is determined to win.

Two hours earlier, Otto had rolled up on four teenagers who were walking along the sidewalk outside Belmont High. School was in session. Checking for truancy, Otto asked for IDs.

“Why you harassing me?” asked one 19-year-old in the group when Otto began questioning and searching him and his friends. “Every time I go to school, I get stopped.”

Verbal defiance landed the youth in handcuffs. Otto ran his name for outstanding warrants. Nothing. The group was released.

Not everyone agrees such field inquiries are valuable, and some question whether school police routinely violate students’ civil rights.

“What troubles me is if there is a pattern of stopping kids after school hours for no [clear] reason,” said Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the ACLU of Southern California, “it appears as if the police are singling out kids, violating their constitutional rights and doing so with an expectation that these children are the least powerful in society.”

District officials said that a “handful” of complaints had been lodged over the last five years, but they could not say precisely how many. “They have been very few and far between,” said Richard K. Mason, the district’s chief counsel.

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It’s easy to mistake school police for the LAPD.

Officers from both departments wear gold-and-silver badges and carry 9-millimeter Beretta pistols. The deep blue uniforms of the school force are virtually the same shade as the LAPD’s outfits.

School district and LAPD officers undergo the same state-mandated training that is required of all peace officers in California. Nearly all of the school force’s officers attend the Rio Hondo Police Academy in Whittier, the same facility that trains police from numerous agencies across the county, including those in Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena and Beverly Hills.

Although the state requires a minimum of 664 hours of academy training for peace officers, school district personnel undergo 800 hours; LAPD officers get 1,064 hours.

School police also have to meet the same minimum hiring standards, which require extensive background checks, physical and psychological exams, written tests and oral interviews.

They are empowered to make arrests not only on school property but anywhere in the state, and they refer their cases to prosecutors. Those taken into custody are driven to the nearest jail.

School police argue that since they have the same training as other departments, perform the same work and face the same dangers, they should have the same equipment.

The 75 shotguns the department wants to buy for its patrol cars, officers say, are a common tool of the trade, a necessity for a job that can turn deadly at any moment. With its spreading load of pellets or balls, the shotgun increases the chances of hitting a target at short range, although the shot loses velocity and falls to the ground within a few hundred yards. Pistols, on the other hand, are more lethal at longer distances but require greater control to fire accurately.

School police Officer James Ream sees the sheer size of the shotgun and the menacing, steely sound of a round being pumped into the chamber as psychological deterrents that could save lives in one of the most common and hazardous tasks of the job: traffic stops.

In one recent incident, Ream approached a car blocking a traffic lane near North Hollywood High. Five youths sat inside and two teenagers leaned into the passenger’s side window. As Ream pulled up, the car sped off and the two teens took off running.

A chase ensued until the car pulled over and the occupants fled on foot. Ream caught up with the driver, recovering a loaded 9-millimeter pistol. Another school cop picked up one of the other occupants and recovered a knife.

Ream says he would have carried a shotgun during the initial traffic stop to deter the occupants from fleeing and to protect himself.

“If I have that shotgun,” he said, “those guys are a lot less likely to come at me. I can defend myself a lot more effectively.”

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In many ways, the battle over the shotguns is emblematic of the police department’s own struggle for credibility, a struggle rooted in the department’s history.

The police force was inaugurated in 1948 as the Los Angeles Unified School District Security Section. Fifteen armed “security agents” were given the job of protecting school property from burglars, vandals and arsonists on weekends and at night.

The section’s role was expanded during the social unrest of the 1960s, when the plainclothes officers ventured on campuses by day to protect students and staff.

Officers began wearing uniforms and driving marked cars in 1982 in an effort to establish a more visible presence. The security section became a full-fledged police department two years later--requiring officers to undergo additional training to meet more rigorous state standards.

But the expanding role has presented daunting challenges for a department that lacks the personnel to provide 24-hour service for a school district with more than 680,000 students from Sylmar to San Pedro.

Last year, the LAPD floated a proposal to take over the duties of school police, but the idea was abandoned.

The school force deploys just 31 patrol units during the day, about 10 on the swing shift and four or five on the graveyard watch--including as few as one for the entire Valley. It can take 10 or 15 minutes for backup units to arrive at night because of the thin numbers.

“Our backup is the LAPD or the Sheriff’s Department,” said Officer Jim Conner, who with partner Nathan Martin usually works the graveyard shift in the Valley. “Not that our guys don’t try to back each other up. It’s just too spread out.”

Graveyard is a spooky, forsaken shift, when a shadow can throttle the nerves and the sudden activation of a power generator stiffens the hair on the back of the neck.

This is the time when burglars and vandals clamber into schools and make off with petty cash, TVs, computers and VCRs--the trappings of a technological age that make schools ever more vulnerable targets. Every cracked window, every unlocked gate can mean an intruder hiding in the dark.

On a recent night, Conner and Martin quietly made their way through pitch-dark campuses in South Los Angeles.

They were searching for a burglar dubbed the Second-Floor Bandit--so named because he shimmies up drainpipes, enters second-story windows and ransacks classrooms.

Just after 12:30 a.m., the call came over the radio: a Code 30--silent alarm--in the second floor of the administration building at 66th Street Elementary.

Martin and Conner pulled up to the school and Martin dug through the clutch of school keys loaded in the trunk. He unlocked a thick steel chain and they quietly entered the campus, shining their flashlights on second-story ledges and windows.

The pair approached the front door and Martin ever-so-slowly inserted the key. The unlocked door creaked open. The officers winced, then entered with their flashlights shoulder high.

They found nothing out of place.

The officers climbed back into their patrol car. Moments later, another silent alarm. They sped into the night to repeat the drill all over again.