KPCC: LA School Police ticket more than 33,000 students

The police working for the L.A. Unified School District, the largest force in the country, came under scrutiny in recent months over charges that they were ticketing a disproportionate number of black and Latino kids for truancy. Now the school police are under fire over another issue: how many tickets they give out for a variety of infractions, and to whom.

What they found is that, in that time, school police issued more than 33,500 tickets to youths up to 19 years old. "When youth transition into middle school, there's a major increase in the frequency of which the citations are given out," said Zoe Rawson, a legal advocate with the Strategy Center. "And they are primarily for the types of behavior that schools have disciplinary methods and interventions that should be in place to keep them in school and keep them out of the criminal justice system."