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Campaign targets tardy tickets
By Cynthia Griffin | OW Staff Writer | 20.AUG.09
“We noticed during our campaign (fighting for better access) that students would say, ‘when I come late to school, I’m getting a ticket as I’m walking into school.’ That was almost 10 years ago,” explained Manuel Criollo, a community organizer with the Strategy Center, who added that these tickets required students and their parents to take off a day from work and school, go to court to appear before a judge and potentially face a fine of up to $250 for a first offense; $350 for a second ticket, and up to $900 for a third infraction as well as automatic loss of a driver’s license.
After kicking around the idea for a while, an effort called the Community Rights Campaign (CRC), was formerly launched Tuesday, and the goal is to address the practice of giving students tickets for being late or truant and making schools, what Criollo calls pre-prisons.
Both the BRU and the CRC are efforts of the Labor Community Strategy Center, “a think tank/act tank.”
According to the campaign, at high schools around the city school officials are increasingly using suspensions, citations and the penal code to regulate student behavior.
One of the key platforms of the campaign is to “decriminalize truancy and tardiness, by not enforcing the revised daytime curfew in Los Angeles, which allows tickets to be issued from “bell to bell.”
Criollo said this curfew used to be from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., but was revised to cover whenever a student’s first bell rings (7:50 a.m. in some cases) until whenever the final school bell tolls.
As a result of this curfew, the campaign said Los Angeles County has handed out more than 12,000 of these citations, and the Los Angeles School Police (LASP is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District) handed out more than 4,000 of that overall total.
In an informal survey of 1,400 young people at various campuses across the city, Criollo, said that about 15% of these students had received a tardy citation, and the vast majority were actually on their way to school.
“The two places we saw these tickets issued the most were around Westchester and Manual Arts high schools,” noted Criollo.
If a student does not go to court to resolve the ticket, it stays on his or her record as money owed to the court, and at age 18, they will automatically lose driving privileges.
“In some extreme cases, tickets have been sent to collection agencies,” Criollo said.
In addition to wanting school officials to find another way (beside citations) to handle truancy and tardiness, the Community Rights Campaign is also seeking better accountability from the LAUSD school police about use of force to regulate student behavior.
Criollo said there have been instances of slamming students against walls; macing everybody in and around an on-campus fight; and even using handcuffs on students being cited for tardiness or truancy. “We have one case of a ninth grader at Westchester, who was a minute late, and not only did he get a ticket but was put in handcuffs. When the young man told the officer the cuffs were too tight, the individual allegedly said ‘I run this show right now,’” said Criollo, who noted that LASP policy says that handcuffs are only to be used in very rare circumstances.
Among the other problems the campaign identified are “check points” outside school entrances and nearby bus stops where students are given truancy tickets; Black and Latino pupils being profiled, stopped and searched in and around school campuses; and a belief among many students that school police do not enhance school safety but often escalate conflicts and/or use excessive force in handling situations.
And the process for parents to complain about problems is extremely difficult to navigate. Consequently, another solution the campaign is seeking is the creation of an Office of Equal Protection, that will serve as a single point of contact for filing complaints of discrimination and/or harassment.
The campaign is also seeking increased ethnically relevant student support programs, peer mediation and conflict resolution efforts.
For more information on the Community Rights Campaign, call (213) 387-2800.