A Frisk a Day Won’t Keep the Weapons Away

Patrick Reid, 15, was going from PE to science class one day when school officials pulled him aside and searched him.

Feliciano Vargas, 18, was at his desk in English class when they came for him.

The Locke High School nickname may be the Saints, but every student who walks onto the South-Central campus is a suspected sinner.

“They take you to a little room they have and they scan you with the machine,” Vargas said Tuesday, standing under Locke’s “Home of the Saints” sign. He was referring to a metal detection wand that’s used in random daily searches. “And then they pat you down.” The difference between those two students is this:

Reid doesn’t like being yanked from his routine without provocation and being treated like a criminal. But Vargas can live with it, he says, “if it’s gonna make the school safer.”

An “A” to each of them for framing the debate.

How much freedom should we surrender to feel a little safer?

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of six Locke students, saying the searches violate their constitutional rights. Searches are conducted throughout the Los Angeles school district, but the ACLU says Locke officials are out of control, frisking tardy students and storm-trooping classrooms.

“We were told to face the blackboard,” Elizabeth Perea, a junior, told the ACLU. A school official “told us to lift up our arms and open our legs. She patted down our pockets, ankles and pant legs. She told us to untuck our shirts and to turn around. Nobody found anything on any of the students. Nobody explained why they were searching us.”

The Rev. Ross Wells thinks he knows.

“They search them for no reason,” he preached at the entrance to Locke. He had come to get a transcript for a daughter he yanked out of school because of the pat-downs.

“They search them for the way they look, for the way they dress. These are some of the nastiest people on Earth. You don’t judge a kid because of something that happened somewhere else.”

It went on and on like this Tuesday out front of Locke High, people stepping up to offer passionate pleas for or against the searches. Even Supt. Roy Romer came by, and he compared the inconvenience to having to pass through the metal detector at the airport. Nobody likes it, he said. But if it deters some lunatic, it’s a small price to pay.

I told Romer the principal wouldn’t talk to me, and he went in and brought her out. Annie Webb did not seem quite the ogre she’d been made out to be. She denied the students’ claims of Gestapo tactics and said all she’s doing is following orders.

The truth is never as clean as you’d like it to be, so I don’t know exactly what goes on at Locke. But as a parent, I can tell you this:

If my sons were at that school, and I thought searches could save their lives, I’d volunteer for the metal detector squad and I’d gladly kick those ACLU moralists across Imperial Highway.

The problem is that when you wave that wand, you don’t get magic. You get a false sense of security.

We live in a culture that glorifies guns and celebrates violence, and there are not enough metal detectors to save us from ourselves.

When I had a chance, I circled the perimeter of Locke High. Students had told me that getting a gun on campus did not take any great work of genius.

I went down San Pedro Street to 109th, headed east to Avalon, then came back around on 111th.

Along this route, I saw roughly 6 million places to stash a knife or a gun. There are places where, if you wanted, you could park a cannon.

The point being that if someone is determined to do damage on that campus--or on any other, for that matter--they’ll find a way.

Go ahead and put a metal detector at the entrance, and have every student walk through it each day like you have to do at the airport or in court.

But after that, leave them to their studies.

Replace the security guards with teachers and counselors.

And for the sake of common sense, stop yanking kids out of class, of all places, to frisk them.

“We’ve created a jailhouse state of mind on campus,” said Kenneth Fowlkes, a Locke High social studies teacher. “We ought to be focusing on other ways to help these kids.”

Amen.

Steve Lopez’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.