Court Backs Authority of School Guards

Security guards at schools may stop and question students as long as the detentions are not arbitrary or intended to harass, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Monday.

The ruling will substantially broaden the power of security guards to detain students, legal experts said. It comes at a time of increasing efforts by civil libertarians to curb searches of students by security guards and attempts by schools to identify troublemakers and prevent violence.

Until Monday’s ruling, most officials assumed the law required school security officers to have a reasonable suspicion that students had engaged in criminal activity or violated a school rule before they could stop them. That is the rule that applies for police who want to stop adults.

The high court, however, said school security guards should be free to question students without having to meet any such requirement.

“The broad authority of school administrators over student behavior, school safety and the learning environment requires that school officials have the power to stop a minor student in order to ask questions or conduct an investigation, even in the absence of reasonable suspicion,” Justice Marvin R. Baxter wrote for the court.

Reasonable Suspicion Still Needed for Search

“We will not interfere in the method by which local districts assign personnel to monitor school safety,” Baxter wrote. School officials, he added, “must be permitted to exercise their broad supervisory and disciplinary powers, without worrying that every encounter with a student will be converted into an opportunity for constitutional review.”

But a lawyer for a student who sued after a security guard in 1999 pulled him from a classroom, questioned him and then searched him with his consent said the ruling would open the way to abuse.

Until now, guards had to have a good reason to detain a student, said the lawyer, Robert S. Gerstein.

“Now it can just be a hunch,” he said. “This can lead to very serious abuses where students are singled out because of who they are or what their past is or their background, rather than what they have done.”

Controversy over security guards has been particularly acute in Los Angeles, where the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Los Angeles Unified School District of violating constitutional protections by searching students without reasonable suspicion.

Monday’s ruling does not directly affect that case--the court ruled only on the circumstances under which a guard can stop students and detain them, not the requirements for searching them. For now, guards still need reasonable suspicion to conduct a search.

But Robert DeKoven, a law professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego, said the ruling “is opening the door for random searches” of students.

“If a security officer can stop and detain a student, the officer will inevitably have cause to search the student,” said DeKoven, who specializes in education law.

Teachers and school administrators, but not law enforcement officers, should have the right to detain students, DeKoven said. “Police officers can now do in a school what they can’t do in a public street,” he said.

Under Monday’s decision, detentions of students by guards are only illegal if they are conducted in what the court called “an arbitrary, capricious, or harassing manner.”

Although the ruling does not directly affect the lawsuit against Los Angeles Unified over searches, “it does suggest the law is moving in the direction of allowing broader authority on the part of the schools and security officers and less concern with the rights of students,” Gerstein said.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Richard S. Moskowitz said the ruling properly gives school districts discretion in security matters “in light of recent incidents involving guns and bombs at schools.”

“There was a recognition that the school authority had to have a lot of flexibility and a lot of discretion to deal in an effective and safe manner with the security concerns that might arise,” Moskowitz said.

The case, In Re Randy G., S089733, stemmed from an encounter at Montebello High School that began when a campus security officer saw two boys in an area where students were not supposed to congregate.

The officer said one of the boys, Randy G., as he is referred to in the case, “fixed his pocket very nervously” when she looked at him, and left part of the pocket lining sticking out. She said she asked Randy and his friend if they needed anything and then told them to go to class.

The guard said Randy had acted “very paranoid and nervous,” and she decided to notify her superior. She agreed to summon another security officer. The pair went to Randy’s classroom and asked him to step outside.

Once in a hallway, the guard asked Randy if he was carrying anything. He said he wasn’t. The second officer asked Randy if he could search his bag. Randy agreed. The officer then asked if he could pat down Randy. The search uncovered a small knife with a locking blade in the boy’s pocket.

“During the 10 minutes the minor was in the hallway being questioned by [the guard] before the consent to search was given, he was not free to leave,” the court said.

Randy eventually was declared a ward of the court and placed on probation for carrying a weapon on school property.

The state Court of Appeal in Los Angeles upheld the conviction, saying the security guards had a reasonable suspicion for holding the boy.

The Supreme Court, however, went further, saying that the issue of whether the guards had reason to stop the boy was irrelevant because students by law are under the supervision and control of school officials and have little freedom on school grounds anyway.

“The intrusion on the minor student is trivial since . . . the minor is not free to move about during the school day,” Baxter wrote. “If the school can require the minor’s presence on campus during school hours, attendance at assigned classes during their scheduled meeting times, appearance at assemblies in the auditorium and participation in physical education classes out of doors, liberty is scarcely infringed if a school security guard leads the student into the hall to ask questions about a potential rule violation.”

ACLU Sees Little Gain From Security Measures

Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote a separate concurring opinion, saying she agreed with the ruling because she does not believe it forecloses the possibility that a teacher or school official may be found to have violated a student’s 4th Amendment rights in different circumstances.

Dan Tokaji, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, said recent school shootings have produced a “hysteria” that is leading to security measures “that interfere with civil liberties without appreciably increasing school safety.”

“It’s easy to understand why students who are being instructed about the meaning of the Constitution should not at the same time be subjected to practices that violate their basic rights,” Tokaji said. “It sends the wrong message, the message that constitutional rights are more theoretical than real.”