LOS ANGELES — Amid steeply escalating school crime, drug use and fighting, individual Los Angeles public school campuses should be allowed to decide whether to station a police officer on campus, a safety task force said, a recommendation that, if adopted, would reverse wins by anti-police student activists but respond to calls by many parents to restore officers.

Recent practice in the L.A. Unified School District has been to keep police off campus. Instead, school police — a department paid for and operated by the school system — patrol areas around schools and respond to emergency calls off and on campus.

The task force, established by the Board of Education, has operated quietly during the current school year against a backdrop of rising fights on campus and difficulty controlling vaping and the use of serious drugs, such as fentanyl, which killed a student on campus in 2022. District data show a sharp rise in what the school system refers to as reported incidents.

The latest data leave out the two peak-pandemic years of 2019-20 and 2020-21 because students were learning from home for all or much of the time. But with that caveat, incidents under "Fighting/Physical Aggression" have climbed every year since 2017-18, despite declining enrollment. Incidents especially surged once students returned from remote instruction.

Before the pandemic, in 2017-18, there were 2,270 such incidents; the next year, also pre-pandemic, recorded a 2% rise to 2,315. Then came the pandemic and remote learning. After on-campus instruction resumed, these incidents increased 28% in 2021-22 and by 54% year over year in 2022-23.

Put another way, during the two full years since police were removed from campus, incidents of fights and physical aggression rose to 4,569 from 2,315, almost doubling. And as of April 15, with about two months left in the school year, the number was higher still — at 4,786.

It was on April 15 that tension at Washington Preparatory High School in South L.A. boiled over in an after-school confrontation a few blocks from campus. A student fending off at least five other students pulled out a gun and opened fire. A 15-year-old died.

In that incident, a nonpolice school-safety worker, part of the "safe passages" program, allegedly declined to intervene when approached by students just before the fight began.

"One student died because safe passages does not work," said Diane Guillen, a leader on a key district parent advisory council. She said a parents group is going to have at least 2,000 signatures calling for a restoration of school police to present to the Board of Education at Tuesday's meeting, when the task force's recommendations will be presented.

The school board is not expected to take immediate action, but L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho is developing a revised safety plan, part of which may require the board's authorization.

...continued

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.