Anti-police sentiment was rampant after George Floyd’s death in 2020. That is when the Unified Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) called for the removal of police officers from LA school campuses. Their letter claimed that they had the support of several local groups including Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, and celebrated their “overwhelming support” for the group’s Black Los Angeles Demands in Light of Covid-19 and Rates of Black Death, which included a demand that “a significant share of stimulus and public funding must be earmarked as grants for the Black community and ongoing program funding should be redirected from police and law enforcement budgets.”
This was one of the reasons they wanted to eliminate police from LA’s schools. Subsequent budget cuts and community activism also caused them to do away with weekend patrols that helped prevent vandalism in schools. Instead of the police patrolling the areas surrounding schools, they would only come to schools only when summoned by someone in the community.
This decision is a reckless one, especially considering that L.A's school police had nothing to do with George Floyd. Some members of the school board were against defunding the police and removing them from campus unless there was another concrete plan in place to guarantee the safety of students and the larger school community. Richard Vladovic, who was a member of LA's Unified Board of Education at the time, told the board: “I would regret for the rest of my life if I left any student vulnerable, any student in danger” as a result of the decision to remove police from schools.
George McKenna III, who is still a member of the Los Angeles Unified School Board, believes that the school police have been disproportionately maligned. He said, "the school police were never a danger to the students. Are you under the assumption that there are no Crips, no Bloods, [that] there are no gangs out there and we’re going to do this with social workers?”
Most of America's schools and universities have full-fledged police units to patrol the campus, and almost 100 schools in Texas have created their own police departments. The officers share the same authority as any other member of the police. They can make arrests and carry arms. The Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) includes School Safety Officers, who are civilian non-armed employees that “provide support for school safety,” with some serving as part of their Parking Enforcement Unit. While they are no doubt doing their best, this does not instill much confidence in their abilities.
Police officers are by and large dedicated to protecting people, not harming them. Keeping this in mind, along with the increase in school violence, the decision to completely do away with school police officers is definitely the wrong decision for our community.
