Police Officer an Asset to School

The city of San Fernando’s decision to hire a police officer to work full time at the city’s high school, middle school and four elementary schools is a wise investment in a community’s greatest asset: its young people.

The city will pay the officer’s salary with help from a three-year, $125,000 grant from the U.S. Justice Department’s COPS in Schools program. Nationwide, officers funded by the COPS program, which is about a year old, teach conflict resolution, problem solving, crime prevention and substance-abuse classes. In other words, the program is not about making arrests. It’s about deterring violence through the officer’s presence and preventing violence through efforts to get to know and help troubled kids.

Such a program is especially welcome with today’s heightened concern about school violence and safety. But kids in the northeast San Fernando Valley were all too familiar with violence long before the rest of the country was stunned by the shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School and elsewhere. These kids fight battles every day of their lives, whether against poverty or the pressure to join a gang.

Positive police relationships with a community are critical to that community’s stability. A cop in the schools is an innovative way to get that relationship started.

Hiring a police officer is not the only innovation undertaken by San Fernando schools. San Fernando High alumnus Rick Munoz, now a successful producer of music videos, advertisements and live entertainment events, recently screened his first feature film, “No Mothers Crying, No Babies Dying,” for students at his alma mater. The gritty docudrama is based on stories told by gang members and mixes real-life interviews with reenactments of gang activities in the Valley and around Los Angeles.

Munoz knows the turf firsthand. Born in East Los Angeles, he was stabbed in the chest as a first-grader, so his family moved across town to a safer location--Pacoima. That punch line always draws laughs from Valley audiences.

But the film is no laughing matter. It forces students to take a serious look at the consequences of gang life and delivers a powerful anti-gang message, a message Munoz has taken to other schools in the Valley and throughout California.

Day after day we hear of the consequences of gang violence, from the murder of a 19-year-old by rival gang members in Panorama City last month to last summer’s slaying of a 16-year-old who refused to join a gang in North Hills. Such news makes these efforts at intervention not just welcome but vital.