The Games People Play

I was hanging around a schoolyard the other day watching kids play.

They were cavorting like wind sprites between storms, their eyes fixed on a ball kicked high into the cold and vivid air.

I don’t know what they were playing or if they were playing any organized game at all. Second-graders don’t need a lot of reasons to kick a ball.

I was there because I’d read that crimes in and around L.A. schools were slightly up, and I wanted to look into it. But first I had to connect it with real people. Statistics alone just don’t do it for me.

It was necessary to see up close who the potential victims were, so I stood outside that schoolyard watching second-graders playing games that lacked even an iota of danger.

I needed to absorb their laughter, their innocence and their vulnerability before I could place them in the context of crimes being committed against students in areas under the jurisdiction of the L.A. Unified School District’s police department. That includes the schools themselves, routes to and from school and school-sponsored activities.

I had to begin thinking about what an old-time police reporter called “the ugliest crime”--crimes against children. And I had to start thinking about the kinds of lethal games prevalent in today’s “outside” world.

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School crimes were up over last year in categories that included battery, assault with a deadly weapon and homicide, but the increases were minuscule. Generally, crime is down significantly compared to the highs of 1970.

The category concerning most parents, the possession of weapons, showed only a slight decrease from last year, but also was down dramatically from previous peaks.

What we’re seeing now in that category of weapons possession are not so much guns, but knives. This comes from L.A. Unified Police Chief Wesley Mitchell. He says it’s a weapon of choice for kids walking about in a scary world.

While crime statistics rise and fall among the district’s 900,000 students, the factor of fear is increasing quietly and steadily. The kids are afraid not of being in school, but of walking to and from school. For some, the route has become a dark pathway through a new kind of jungle.

“Most of that fear is associated with the gang culture,” Mitchell, 54, said the other day. “And there’s a growing sense in this country that you face danger with a weapon. Statistically in schools, that weapon is now a knife.”

Oddly, he says, it’s the students’ way of cooperating with the zero-tolerance policy toward guns in L.A.’s 910 schools, and it shows in the dwindling incidents of firearms on the campuses.

“Their fear is well-placed,” the chief adds, talking about the route to and from schools. “It’s real. It doesn’t exist just in their heads.”

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Mitchell was born and raised in South-Central L.A., “in a neighborhood others fear.” A father and grandfather, he recalls his own school days as being peaceful. Mine were, too.

The only thing I feared in school were pimples and algebra. Well, I had a few anxious moments with girls (they terrified me) and an occasional bully, but fear wasn’t a constant companion.

We all walked to and from school, sometimes a couple of miles each way, without being afraid that something was going to get us. But it’s different now. This is a violent age, and the world around the schools bristles with danger.

Mitchell’s department is trying to address the danger by beefing up its forces on school routes. And groups like Kid Watch L.A. are working to lessen the peril of the “outside” by recruiting parents to watch from their porches and frontyards during the times children walk to and from school.

It’s a noble effort but fails to address the real problem of violence in society generally. I don’t pretend to know what all the factors are, but I’m sure that among them is our celebration, our worship, of cruelty on so many levels.

Movies, music, sports and television shows involve themselves in varying forms of violence as though it’s all a game . . . but the games they play in a make-believe world have pierced the borders of reality. Blood is the color of a society nurtured on fire and bullets. Is it any surprise then that children grow up afraid to walk to school?

I keep thinking about that day at the schoolyard, watching second-graders enriching the chilly air with their laughter. They played games of exhilaration and innocence. We play games of pain and cruelty. I wondered, as I watched, at which point our games of cruelty would darken their exuberance. I wondered at which point the purifying laughter of their childhood would sound no more. I wondered.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.