On Tuesday, LAUSD students from our Community Rights Campaign weathered the rain to launch a new initiative for greater accountability from the Los Angeles School Police Department.
In actions at Manual Arts, Westchester, and Cleveland High Schools, they reached out to students, teachers and community members to support CRC's 5 new policy recommendations [1]for creating new policies and procedures that restrict the use of force and role of police in our schools to protect the civil/human rights of all.
Five policy recommendations:
The students raised 5 demands from the CRC's new policy report, Police in LAUSD Schools [2], written in collaboration with Los Angeles Chapter of Dignity in School [3]
- Establish an independent and enforceable Police Review Board made up of parents, students, and community members with the power to provide accountability
- Conduct a comprehensive review and assessment with student, parent and community input of the current standards, procedures, and practices of school police including use of force, arrest, role and conduct.
- Provide detailed and publicly available records of LASPD including but not limited to arrests, tickets, complaints on police misconduct and resolutions to such complaints.
- Establish an Office of Equal Protection, as approved but not yet acted upon in the 2007 Equal Protection motion.
- Ensure no collaboration of LAUSD/LASPD with gang databaseStudents speak out in the Valley
Students speak out in the valley
At a rally of 30 students at Cleveland High School in the San Fernando Valley, graduate and Community Rights Organizer Lissett Lazo said, "Our greatest concern is that there is no clear mechanism of oversight in place to hold the Los Angeles School Police Department accountable for their actions. If a student feels her rights have been violated, there is no independent body to investigate the claim and determine the outcome of this situation. This heightens the anxiety and hostility students experience at school-thus leading to more student push-outs."
Sophomore John Flores spoke of how he was taken into the bathroom by two school police officers at Sylmar High and beaten until he ultimately lost consciousness. He talked of the fear he felt for his life and afterwards the painful outcome of achieving no real resolution or accountability for what happened to him. Read more student stories of police abuse in LAUSD Police in Schools. [4]
Students organize in Westchester and South L.A.
At Westchester High School, students spent their lunch hour passing out "No to Pre-Prisons" fliers, buttons, and stickers that ask whether $50 million of LAUSD's education funds is better spent for school policing (current LASPD budget) or for restoring cuts of faculty and staff and cuts to arts and cultural programs. The students talked to their peers, teachers and administrators about solutions and resources-like mental health counseling and peer mediation groups-that could better address fighting, truancy, and other discipline and student conduct issues.
Andrew Terranova, Westchester teacher, said, "School conduct needs to be put back in the hands of the school and out of the hands of law enforcement. As a teacher I lose control of my classroom when students are removed from my class. If my students don't feel respected on campus by other adults, we need to find long-term solutions to keep our student in school through a holistic approach that involves students, parents, teachers and administrators and appropriate resources."
At Manual Arts High School in South Los Angeles, students and community activists organized fellow students, teachers and other community members to call Board Member Marguerite LaMotte urging her to support the adoption of the recommendations in Police in LAUSD Schools.
Read article from the San Fernando Valley Sun on the Student Day of Action [5]