Metal Detectors and a Search for Peace of Mind

“Would it be all right if I asked you to empty your pockets?” Mike Summe, Belmont High School’s dean of discipline, asks in his sweetest voice.

The four students Summe faces--three freshmen and a sophomore--don’t hesitate. They already know the drill. Spread your legs slightly. Extend your arms out at the shoulder. And wait as Summe waves the metal detecting wand over you, looking for guns.

They know he won’t find anything. There may be the occasional firearm in school, but weapons rarely if ever show up in these searches. In less than five minutes, Summe will send the four back to class.

For eight years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has required that metal detectors be used daily on at least one class of students at each high school. The program was launched in 1993 after two campus homicides sparked concerns about guns.

How many firearms have been found in eight years of daily metal searches in Los Angeles?

“Not one,” says school Police Chief Wesley Mitchell.

So why bother?

The answer to that question offers a lesson in the strange calculus of promoting school safety at a time when public worry is on the rise but the actual rate of campus crime is declining. As a result of these two conflicting trends, many of the most publicized reforms at schools are designed more with the goal of attacking the public worry than crime.

On vast Southern California campuses with multiple entrances and miles of unguarded fences, keeping a totally secure perimeter is neither practical nor desirable. The sheer number of students in high schools--Belmont, for example, has 5,100--makes it impossible to conduct thorough metal searches. And civil liberty concerns prevent school officials from doing anything more than random searches; targeting truants or students with criminal records is forbidden.

Last year, Los Angeles Unified School District staff reported 52 guns in and around schools. Most either were left outside or hidden on schoolyards; in at least one case, a gun was brought to class by a teacher. The guns were found either by chance or on a tip; the daily metal searches weren’t a factor.

Nevertheless, Mitchell says, the district will continue its daily searches. Metal detectors, he says, “are one of those things that parents and students have come to expect as part of a safe school in this day and age. It’s one response to the public hue and cry.”

Mitchell, the chief since 1988, says the detectors have symbolic value “because they send a message that the adults and the school system take the matter seriously.” If the searches stopped, “that message might not be as strong, and I’m certain a lot of community pressure would be brought to bear to continue them.”

In effect, metal detectors exist for their value as a public relations tool, a demonstration that schools care about keeping guns out. It is far easier to bring in the detectors, principals have concluded, than to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that a child who is determined to bring a gun onto school grounds will do so, detectors or no.

The good news is that very few children ever bring guns to school, and statistics suggest that their numbers are shrinking.

Quietly, school districts in urban areas have shied away from metal detectors. Los Angeles Unified and Inglewood are the only two districts in the state to use the detectors on a routine basis, according to county education officials. (Inglewood’s school police chief, Mel Miller, says the district has found one knife and one gun in five years of searching.)

“It would be pointless,” says Compton school spokesman Fausto Capobianco, whose district does not conduct metal searches. “Metal detectors aren’t really going to stop kids from bringing weapons into schools.”

Bill Ybarra, director of the safe schools center for the Los Angeles County Board of Education, says that other strategies are more effective--maintaining phone hotlines or anonymous tip boxes to report threats, or beefing up security and patrols, for example.

“People love to talk about metal detectors,” says Ybarra, “but that’s a time-consuming type of search that doesn’t yield much.”

Visits to Los Angeles high schools make that clear. At Belmont, for example, Summe, 52, a former English teacher who is now an assistant principal, must stop what he is doing every day, take the two metal detecting wands out from under his desk, and find a female school staff member to help with the search of female students.

On this recent day during second period, he is joined by the school’s assistant head counselor, Rhea Turek. Glancing at a campus map, Summe selects Room 318, which he doesn’t recall searching before.

Inside, a class of about 20 ninth- and 10th-graders are in the middle of a math lesson. He asks for the roll book, and writes down every fifth name--a tactic he uses to make the search random. “Nobody is in trouble,” he says by way of introduction. “I’m going to ask a few people to come with me. I’ll explain what this is later.”

Summe calls out four names, and the students grab their book bags and follow him out of the room. Turek keeps an eye out for students who might drop a weapon. Summe and Turek spend five minutes looking for that rarest of commodities at overcrowded Belmont: an empty room to conduct the search.

Finally, Summe finds a workroom and announces: “This is a metal search. We’re looking for weapons.” He adds: “I have no reason to suspect you of anything. If you’d cooperate, I’d appreciate it.”

Legally, students are not required to consent to the search, but nearly everyone does. On this day, the four Belmont students empty their pockets of keys and coins. They are scanned with the metal wands for about 15 seconds each. Summe and Turk inspect backpacks. One girl is patted down because of a bulge around her ankle (It’s a function of baggy pants, it turns out). All four, to the surprise of no one, turn up clean.

Summe believes the searches can be useful as a deterrent. “If people know you’re watching, they know you’re watching,” he reasons. The four students aren’t so sure about that. Belmont, they say, feels safe--safer at least than the surrounding streets. The searches are a minor inconvenience.

“The bad kids just avoid the searches, or hide their weapons or don’t show up for class so they don’t get picked,” says Valerie Pascual, 14. “I’m not sure what good the metal detectors do.”