January 7, 2013: A lot has changed since December, 1905. Sort of. No 13-year-olds are in San Quentin, but as Susan Ferriss of the Center for Public Integrity reported last week in California Watch, in the first months of 2012, 48% of the 4,000 tickets handed out by school police in the Los Angeles Unified School District were given to children 14 years or younger.
... Disclosure of the 2011 data this past spring led to federal civil rights scrutiny and promises that policies at [LAUSD] would be reviewed, and likely changed.
In 2011...school police handed out [tickets] to students for fighting, daytime curfew violations and other minor infractions – indiscretions that community groups and judges have maintained might better be handled by school officials or referred directly to community-based counseling. But...even as local juvenile judges’ skepticism about ticketing grew, the share of younger students issued citations increased...[2011 figures for the under-14 student population of LAUSD was 43% of 10,200 tickets]
...Data from September and October reveal district school police officers issued fewer daytime curfew tickets than a year before – the result of new rules adopted last February that stopped police “sweeps” ticketing kids as they arrived to school, even a few minutes late. But records also show that during these two months, school police still wrote up more than 1,000 citations to students mostly for other infractions, including disturbing-the-peace allegations and suspected marijuana smoking...
Some school administrators also say they’d like to see clarification as to when an incident merits police officers citing – or arresting – students...
[One principal reported]... that a mom’s complaint last April led to school police issuing tickets to two African-American first-graders who had gotten into a pushing match at his school...Sheriff’s deputies declined to get involved, Cortez said. School police officers responded and issued “disturbing the peace” tickets for “mutual fighting” to the 6- and 7-year-old boys. The citations were referred to the Los Angeles County Probation Department....
The school-based Arrest Reform Partnership is attempting to negotiate a protocol for when it’s appropriate for police to arrest students in situations that don’t necessarily require it. The talks include representatives of L.A. Unified and its school police force; the city of Los Angeles’ police department; and the L.A. County’s sheriff’s department, probation department, district attorney’s office, public defender’s office, and parents and civil rights groups... The first goal is to reach consensus on which offenses might be candidates for an alternative series of responses before resorting to arrest. Such steps could include written warnings and referrals to counseling, said Ruth Cusick, an attorney with Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm in Los Angeles...
...budget cuts [have closed] low-level juvenile courts in LA County, which had adjudicated cases involving ticketed students. Children were obliged, ironically, to miss school to go to court with parents so they could answer to truancy or other offenses that carried fines...all initial citations for daytime curfew violations are now referred back to schools, or to one of a new series of L.A. community centers with after-school counseling options. All other types of tickets [go to] probation officials...Children who are arrested or whose offenses are judged more serious still face higher-level delinquency court....
...During the 2011-2012 academic year, the American Civil Liberties Union recently said, New York police issued 1,666 citations to students (NY has over 1 million students). By comparison, L.A. Unified (700,000 students) school police issued more than 1,000 tickets in September and October of this year alone. New York police made 882 arrests in schools during the 2011-2012 academic year. L.A. school police made 4,333 arrests over the course of three calendar years, from 2009 through 2011, according to data that the Center for Public Integrity reviewed. More than 1,960, or 45 percent, of the Los Angeles arrests were of students 14 or younger....
