A man wearing a jacket that reads “Anti Genocide Social Club” records a livestream of a line of CHP officers between Royce Hall and Haines Hall on May 2, 2024.
The “Palestine solidarity encampment” was set up a week ago, joining national student protests calling for universities to divest from companies with military ties to Israel and opposing the crackdown on student protesters nationwide.
The heavy police presence included a mix of officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, California Highway Patrol and UC Police Department, according to multiple news sources.
A police officer grabs a protester by the back of their jacket to stop him from moving toward the encampment on May 2, 2024. Credit: Brandon Morquecho / Daily Bruin Photo Editor
As of late Wednesday night, hundreds of students remained gathered both inside and near the encampment. Students inside the encampment reportedly prepared for police to enter by fortifying the encampment with “makeshift walls” as police in riot gear began lining up near the encampment.
Some students were willing to be arrested or defend the encampment, with others expecting the police sweep to occur sometime after 1 a.m. Protesters were seen wearing hard helmets, goggles and respirators, according CalMatters, as they waited for police to take action.
Increasing numbers of police began arriving shortly after issuing the unlawful assembly order at 6 p.m. Wednesday, CBS News rteported. By around 10:30 p.m., police officers in riot gear began approaching one of the encampment’s barricaded entrances as a crowd of students chanted “Viva, viva Palestina,” or “Free, free Palestine” in Spanish.
In recent weeks, hundreds of university students and faculty have been arrested across the nation for setting up similar pro-Palestinian encampments.
Increasingly, faculty have spoken up about the campus leaders’ reliance on police to disperse student protests. Such decisions have been made by campus leaders at the University of Southern California, Columbia University, Cal Poly Humboldt, University of Texas Austin, Emory University and several other schools.
“What I found appalling is, to send armed riot police means you practically take into consideration that students might get harmed. So the university, again, kind of failed to protect its students,” said tenured professor of genocide studies Wolf Gruner in a recent Los Angeles Public Press interview.
Faculty have also joined some student encampments, such as Graeme Blair, UCLA associate professor of political science and a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
In a text to the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student paper, Blair confirmed that “professors inside the encampment ‘plan to be arrested alongside students who have done nothing but talk about a genocide taking place in Palestine.’”
He also stated: “I’m disgusted that after the university failed to protect students simply standing up for causes they believe from an anti-Palestinian mob that tonight they have chosen to endanger students once again by calling in the police. Any harm on students tonight is on them.”
In his comment, Blair referred to the violent events that unfolded at the UCLA campus between Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning when students within the encampment were attacked by around 100 counterdemonstrators supporting Israel.
The counterprotesters arrived on the campus around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday and within the hour began trying to tear down the barricades at the encampment, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The violence escalated within hours, as the pro-Israel protesters threw objects at the encampment and fireworks rained down. Fights also broke out when counterprotesters attempted to break the barricade. Students in the encampment also told the Times that they were hit by a substance they believed was pepper spray. Some people in the encampment were seen being treated for eye irritation, the Times reported.
During the altercation, journalists reporting for the Daily Bruin were also attacked. A group of four student reporters were verbally harassed, beaten, kicked and pepper sprayed. At least one of them went to the hospital and has since been released.
Police were slow to respond to the violence, according to multiple reporters at the site, which local, state, and federal leaders condemned.
One such person was Gov. Gavin Newsom, who commented on the events Wednesday morning on X, formerly Twitter: “I condemn the violence at UCLA last night. The law is clear: The right to free speech does not extend to inciting violence, vandalism, or lawlessness on campus. Those who engage in illegal behavior must be held accountable for their actions — including through criminal prosecution, suspension, or expulsion.”
The violence waned by around 3:45 a.m.
Hours later, University of California President Michael Drake ordered an investigation into how UCLA handled the violent demonstrations.
Following Wednesday’s violence, the president of the union representing UC’s non-senate faculty and librarians called for the resignation of UCLA Chancellor Gene Block.
“We call for the immediate resignation of Chancellor Gene Block for his failure of leadership. Chancellor Block has refused to meet with protestors to discuss their interests; instead he has created an environment that has escalated tensions and failed to take meaningful action to prevent the violence that occurred last night,” said Katie Rodger, president of the University Council-AFT in a joint statement with Jeff Freitas, president of the statewide California Federation of Teachers.
I hav several friends who were attacked while working at public schools in CA. Our law enforcement officers are not allowed on campus of schools unless an emergency.
The principal and vice principal are not allowed to make kids responsible. The kids can do anything, throw things at teachers, talk when teachers are trying to teach, calling teachers names, sexual harassment, and that’s why teachers are leaving CA. Another issue is CRT … Read More
I hav several friends who were attacked while working at public schools in CA. Our law enforcement officers are not allowed on campus of schools unless an emergency.
The principal and vice principal are not allowed to make kids responsible. The kids can do anything, throw things at teachers, talk when teachers are trying to teach, calling teachers names, sexual harassment, and that’s why teachers are leaving CA. Another issue is CRT and sex offenders using girls bathroom and sports changing rooms and showers. One big mess. Sex offenders not made responsible. DAs paid off by Soros.
Middle schooler allegedly attacks classmate twice, choking him severely. Police recommend attempted murder charges to district attorney.
School staff calls police to report squirrel with injured leg in school courtyard.
Unknown man in swimsuit briefs adorned with Australian flag trespassing at high school pool. Lifeguard sees a man follow boys 9 and 12, into the locker room. Man strips, pulls back the shower curtain to see the boy and asks: “Does this make you uncomfortable?” Man flees. Police list indecent exposure and lewd acts as possible offenses.
Officer dispatched to investigate ringing school alarm. Burnt English muffin found in teachers’ lounge.
From Crescent City, Weed and Alturas in the far north to Calexico and El Cajon nearly 800 miles south, all along the Pacific Coast, across the sprawling Central Valley and up into the High Sierra and down into the Mojave Desert, police are dispatched to California schools thousands of times on any given day classes are in session.
Reasons are myriad: Students bringing guns and knives — and even a spear and a bow and arrow — to school, sexual assaults and “perversion reports” and fights. Then there are lost keys, malfunctioning alarms, and dogs — even cattle — loose on school grounds. Once, police were called for help with a swarm of bees.
Calling the Cops Investigation
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a continuing investigation into school policing in California.
Monday: San Bernardino County: growing hotspot for school-run police
Local reporting: Emma Gallegos (Kern County), Lasherica Thornton (Fresno), Mallika Seshadri (Los Angeles and San Bernardino County) and Monica Velez (Oakland)
Project manager and editor: Rose Ciotta, Investigations and Projects Editor
Database design, data gathering, scraping, cleaning: Daniel J. Willis, Thomas Peele and Justin Allen
Website design: Justin Allen
Graphics and website design: Yuxuan (Sunny) Xie
Social media, photo editor: Andrew Reed
Copy Editor: Chuck Carroll
Cops rush to reports of students attempting suicide and overdosing on drugs, bullying, sexual assault and unwanted touching. They surveil high schoolers leaving campuses for lunch. They break up fights between parents over spots in elementary school pickup queues. They haul drunken adults from the stands at school sporting events. They once investigated a teacher’s claim that someone stole $10,000 from her classroom desk.
Mostly the call logs capture the anguish of youngsters with mental health challenges, victims whose nude photos are showing up on social media for all to see and parents turning to school administrators to deal with it all.
The data offered a raw, first-blush look at why school staff summon cops, reasons that sometimes lead to juvenile and adult arrests.
All incidents included in the police logs largely remain out of public view due to state laws that shield juveniles and allow police to withhold information on investigations. As a result, the data collected as a representative sample of the state is also clearly an undercount of what routinely occurs in California schools.
An EdSource analysis found that nearly a third of all calls for police were for incidents deemed serious. After consulting police experts, EdSource tagged the data with a definition for serious incidents as those that reasonably required a police presence. Included among serious incidents are those tagged as violent, which include anything involving a violent act, including self-harm.
The share of serious incidents increases to 4 out of 10 when police patrols are set aside. They make up about a third of all records, but most have little detail on what police were doing at or near the school.
The analysis also showed that high school students in districts with their own police departments are policed at a higher rate than in districts that rely on municipal police and sheriffs.
School police calls across California
Four years after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, igniting a national revolt and the defund-the-police movement, only about 20 of California’s 977 public-school districts made significant changes to school policing.
Most that acted ended contracts with municipal police departments to post cops — commonly called school resource officers — in schools. And three districts that made changes reversed course and brought police back after short hiatuses.
EdSource’s investigation sampled records showing calls from and about schools to city and school district police departments and county sheriffs. In some cases, officers stationed in schools dispatch themselves to a problem by radioing their dispatcher. Schools without campus police often call 911. Typically, police record their activity as “patrol” or “school check,” vague descriptions that raise questions about the use of public resources.
Whenever a school resource officer ran along a corridor, one hand on a radio microphone, or a sheriff’s deputy raced along a country road with lights and sirens on to reach a distant rural school, they contributed to what data showed is a vast, continuing police presence in California’s pre-K to 12 public education, EdSource found.
The records resurfaced a debate lingering years after Floyd’s killing about how much policing schools need and if deploying armed officers does more harm than good.
Similarly to police debates at the municipal level, school policing can be polarizing. Across California, the issue emerges as a political divide, with some seeing the police as necessary to ensure safety and others seeing them as agents of racial injustice.
In 2021, the ACLU of Southern California issued ascathing report that recommended an end to school policing in the Golden State, calling it “discriminatory, costly, and counterproductive.” In schools with regularly assigned cops, students across “all groups” were more likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement, researchers found.
A 2020 University of Maryland study published in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, found school districts that increased policing through federal grants “did not increase school safety.” Researchers recommended improving safety through “the many alternatives” to police in schools.
In California, school policing is “a structure. It’s part of the budgets, it’s part of the vocabulary of the schools. It’s part of what the expectation is from the parents and the students,” said Southwestern Law School professor Jyoti Nanda, who has researched school policing for 25 years and calls it “completely unnecessary,” adding, America is the lone civilized country where it is practiced.
In rural California, school policing is seen as routine, allowing students to become “comfortable interacting with someone in a uniform, wearing a badge, and carrying a gun, so that as they grew older, they see those people as a friendly face, a resource that they could go to as opposed to someone that they should be afraid of,” Tulare County School Superintendent Tim Hire told EdSource. The practice is spreading in Tulare, where three small districts recently agreed to share a resource officer to travel among them.
Such decisions are often couched as safety matters, a vigilant effort to prevent the next school shooting and avoid the failure of Uvalde, Texas police to stop the gunman who slaughtered 19 students and two teachers in 2022.
When state Assemblymember Bill Essayli, R-Riverside, introduced legislation in February to require an armed police officer in each public school with more than 50 students, he described the need in base terms: “We need good guys and girls with guns, ready to act.”
Essayli’s idea is “a step backward,” Assembly Education Committee member Mia Bonta D-Alameda, said at a hearing where the bill died in April. “We know it to be true that there’s a disproportionate impact on Black and brown students when police officers are in schools.”
A matter of local control
The state Department of Education offers no guidance or best practices, calling policing a local matter, a spokesperson said. There’s little consistency statewide in whether police are deployed in schools. Nineteen school districts have their own police departments, including Los Angeles Unified, which refused to release its police call data, some with only a handful of officers.
Los Angeles Unified cut its police department’s budget by 35% in 2020 and banned officers from being posted in schools. Following reports of escalating violence, the district recently reinstated police to two schools through mid-June. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho had informed the school board that he was planning to return police to 20 schools, but he got community and trustee backlash.
Oakland Unified disbanded its police department in favor of non-police staffers to keep peace in schools and respond to emergencies. Principals were trained on when to call city police only as a last resort. Still, data shows eight of the district’s 18 traditional middle and high schools combined to call city police 225 times, with nearly half of them serious, between Jan. 15 and June 30, 2023. Reasons include assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.
Retired Long Beach and San Diego school Superintendent Carl Cohn, who served on the California State Board of Education from 2011 to 2018, said Oakland’s model of deploying people to talk students through peaceful resolutions of disputes can work. In the early 1990s, he ran the Long Beach schools anti-gang task force, hiring people with “street cred,” including former gang members.
They “could stop instantly what was going on on a campus by their mere presence,” Cohn said. “Their credibility with youngsters that might be on the verge of gang affiliation was really powerful.”
Yet Cohn’s “not on board with this notion of ‘let’s abandon the school police altogether.’ It’s the type of thing where ultimately there’s enough bad things from time to time happening that the safety of children has to be front and center.” Police must be well-trained, and school officials must cooperate with them, he added.
Shutting down the Oakland Unified police department of 11 officers and changing its policing culture is tough and ongoing, said a leader of a racial-justice group that pushed for the change.
“There’s still the ideology of policing that exists on campus and is embedded in the infrastructure of schools that we’re also up against,” said Jessica Black, a Black Organizing Project activist. “The criminalization of young people, implicit bias, and anti-Black racist practices” still need to be confronted.
It was only after Floyd’s murder that Dr. Tony Moos, a physician, learned that her four children who had each attended high school in the affluent Santa Clara County city of Los Altos had “negative interactions” with school resources officers “that they’d kept to themselves,” she said.
Moos was motivated to act and got the city to examine school police practices and make changes.
After hearings that included a Black high school teacher saying a resource officer had once pushed her to the ground, the city pulled police from the high school. The city also replaced its police chief in 2022. The new hire, a Black woman, came with much-needed experience.
Out of public view
California law grants police wide powers to withhold documents, including investigatory records, requested under the Public Records Act without revealing how many such records are being withheld. Many departments withheld from EdSource some — or even all — of the school calls they received.
The same is true about what information police can reveal in news releases or public statements about individual school incidents, especially involving juveniles. The public is often then not informed about police activity in schools.
That means that the serious incidents — weapons, death threats, rapes, assaults, fights, drugs — that police are responding to in 3 out of 10 calls often remain confidential.
Police in Crescent City, Del Norte County, for example, didn’t release information about the attempted murder of a student at Crescent Elk Middle School by a classmate who allegedly repeatedly choked him on Jan. 23, 2023, until EdSource asked about the incident more than a year later.
When EdSource asked police in Avenal, Kings County to elaborate on a call record of a late-night report of “shots fired” at the city’s high school, a lawyer responded claiming the information was exempt from disclosure.
“The problem is that (the exemptions) apply to virtually everything law enforcement does. They never expire. So, every police report is potentially covered by the investigatory records exemption,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, an open government group. The lack of disclosure of police activity in schools makes it all the harder to determine what the correct level of policing should be, he added.
Given the importance of the issue, the lack of information is troubling, Loy said. The debate over school policing “should be held on the basis of full and complete data and not driven by anecdote.”
A day of policing
The one-day record of police responding to a school for serious incidents was 10, the data sample shows.
That was May 17, 2023, at Burroughs High School in the Sierra Sands Unified School District in Ridgecrest, a desert city of 28,000 in eastern Kern County near Death Valley.
The first occurred at 8:38 a.m. when a school resource officer arrested a student for battery and released him to his parents. District Assistant Superintendent Brian Auld, who’s in charge of security, told EdSource the student “didn’t even go to the police station.”
That was followed at 9:09 a.m. by reports of two students who appeared to be under the influence of drugs. They were evaluated and returned to class. Another report of two students apparently under the influence came in at 10:26 a.m. One student was impaired and released to their parents, Auld said.
Less than 10 minutes later, the resource officer responded to a student in “mental distress” who was taken for a psychological evaluation.
At 1:23 p.m., police were alerted to a terrorist threat that ended up involving a student threatening to beat up someone, Auld said.
About 20 minutes later, two girls began fighting in art class.
One grabbed what Auld called “an art project” — apparently a ceramic object — and allegedly swung it at the other girl’s head. Police called it assault with a deadly weapon, arresting the aggressor. “Deadly weapon sounds like a knife or a gun. The officer made the decision that (the object) could have done serious bodily harm,” Auld said. “I’m not downplaying it.”
At 3:14 p.m. a report of disturbing the peace came in. No details were provided.
At 10:26 p.m, a vandalism report to the police turned out to be benign — police found that soon-to-graduate seniors had decorated the school with toilet paper.
Ridgecrest is “a unique, isolated community” near a military base. The school district considers its relationship with the police as a successful partnership, Auld said.
District officials “have some, or even total, discretion regarding whether or not an arrest is made,” he added. The district has 15 counselors, mental health therapists and a registered behavioral therapist, Auld said. It’s also implementing restorative practices and social-emotional learning to “change behaviors before they result in suspensions, expulsions and arrests.”
The Kings of calls
The most total call and dispatch records in the data for one school that relies on calling 911 was Lemoore High School, in Lemoore, a city of 26,600 in Kings County with 471 calls over a nearly six-month period.
Lemoore police, which refers to school police as youth development officers, provided scant detail on the reasons for the calls, listing hundreds in records as premises checks.
In an interview, Lt. Alvaro Santos, who supervises Lemoore’s school policing, attributed the numbers to the department’s practice of having all available officers “drop what they’re doing” during the times students arrive at school and leave for lunch and later go home, basically surrounding the buildings, some on side streets out of view of students.
“They’re around the school. They could be either parked on a side street or they could be driving by looking for vehicle code violations or anything that would pose a danger to the students,” Santos said. He said the schools are near a main road through the city and that there are concerns about drunk drivers in the area.
More serious calls
Sampled data shows that middle schools have a higher rate of serious incidents reported to police than high schools. At Cesar Chavez Middle School, in East Palo Alto, 41% of calls to police reported violent incidents, threats and sexual misconduct, data shows.
In one of two calls that East Palo Alto police labeled “perversion report,” a student allegedly used a phone to make “a TikTok” of another girl using the restroom, according to a recording of a heavily redacted 911 call to police from a school official. Police refused to release any details.
Fresno’s Gaston Middle School is in a neighborhood plagued by violence, gangs and drugs, all of which follow students through the school doors, both police and Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson said.
A patrol car for a Fresno Unified student resource officer sits outside of Gaston Middle School and its health clinic. Credit: Lasherica Thornton / EdSource
“I would love for there to be no acts of any physical harm on another person, but that’s impossible,” Sgt. Anthony Alvarado said.
Fresno Unified has been debating what level of policing to have in its schools for several years. In 2020 police were pulled from the district’s middle schools but remained in high schools. After several violent incidents, police were returned to some middle schools in 2022 and the rest in 2023.
School “feels like a prison”
The daily presence of Kern High School District police at Mira Monte High in Bakersfield “feels ghetto,” sophomore Jose Delgado said.
The school “feels like a prison. It’s like they don’t trust us at all.”
Still, Delgado said, he understands the need for police, noting a lot of fights at the school. “It’s for the best, but it makes us feel ghetto.”
Data shows 163 police call records at Delgado’s school for the five-and-a-half month period. They describe incidents including assault with a deadly weapon, an irate parent, out-of-control juveniles and resisting a police officer.
Delgado’s sense of school as a prison and not being trusted are among the reasons why the negatives of school policing “completely outweigh the positives,” Nanda, the Southwestern Law School professor said.
The students who police typically interact with “are not the children that are doing well in school,” Nanda said. “Part of why there isn’t an outrage, a global outrage, is because it’s not impacting the people that are in power, the people who have agency.”
Children seeing police in schools can be akin to going to an airport and encountering armed officers at a security checkpoint, said University of Florida education professor Chris Curran, who has studied school policing extensively. “It’s natural to wonder what’s wrong, why are there people with guns?” he said. “You find yourself saying, ‘What do I not know about? What’s this danger that has necessitated assault rifles?’”
No state guidance
When he was a state Assembly member in 2020, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Assemblymember Mia Bonta’s spouse, clearly came down on the side of removing police from schools when he spoke at a forum after Floyd’s murder.
“It’s just really important to call out this incredible moment,” he said, lauding districts, including Oakland, that ended policing. “There’s a general dehumanization of children of color, a belief that they need to be surveilled and monitored and watched and policed.”
“The outcomes don’t make our students safer,” he said. School policing is “not achieving what we’re seeking,” a video of the forum shows. It was hosted by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.Credit: Andrew Reed/EdSource
Asked recently if Bonta’s position on school policing as the state’s top law enforcement officer mirrors what he said in 2020, his press secretary replied “no” via email.
Bonta, who’s expected to enter the 2026 governor’s race, “has always believed that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for school safety, and that schools need to work towards data-driven policies that fit their community,” Alexandra Duquet wrote.
“School resource officers can be an important component of ensuring students and school personnel safety,” Duquet wrote. “Their primary focus should be ensuring the safety of all on campus — not discipline — and they be given tools such as implicit bias training that ensure the equitable treatment of all students.”
Thurmond, a declared 2026 gubernatorial candidate, took no position on school policing during the forum. He recently told EdSource he favors “well-trained school resource officers to handle serious situations.” He also called for “more training of school staff so they’re not calling police for something that’s a student discipline matter.”
Thurmond also said that during his time as a member of the West Contra Costa Unified School District board from 2008-2012 he saw police officers help students, calling them “some of the best social workers I’ve worked with.”
State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who during Thurmond’s forum praised Oakland’s shuttering of its school police department, said in an interview that school districts should consider alternatives to police the way some cities have started using trained civilians to respond to 911 mental-health-crisis calls.
State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley.Credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
“Kids are emotional. Kids don’t have impulse control the way adults should, and to bring an officer in, especially since all of our officers are armed, can, rather than defuse the situation, make it worse,” Skinner said. Kids can act out what they experience at home or on the street, she added.
Skinner, the author of several major police accountability bills, also said she saw value in the data EdSource obtained and published.
Police logs can help officials decide if civilian staff should deal with more school incidents at a time when California’s suffering a police shortage, she said. That could leave sworn officers available for “real public safety needs. We never want to prevent a school from calling 911 if that’s needed. However, there might be some appropriate guidelines or boundaries that cities and schools could work out.”
Stopping a police chase
The executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers, Mo Canady, a retired cop, said districts would be mistaken to remove resource officers from campuses. Police will always be needed to respond to schools, and “we need for students and faculty to be able to feel like this officer is more than just a law enforcement officer, that they really are another trusted adult in that school environment.” A trained and well-known officer, “may be the person who comes into a situation with the coolest head,” he said.
Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California School Counselors Association, has seen what can happen when police approach a student situation lacking the cool-headedness Canady described.
As a school counselor in the Monrovia Unified School District in Los Angeles County, she once worked with a child who ran away from school multiple times. Finally, an exasperated principal called the police, who chased after the student.
“The principal didn’t stop them. I felt as (officers) went on in their rant this kid is getting more damaged. So, I said, ‘Stop, stop,”’ Whitson said. “We already had a very damaged kid, and this wasn’t helping.” The student was later found to need special education services, she said.
Tom Nolan, a retired Boston police lieutenant turned sociologist who’s taught at several universities and studied school policing, said when law enforcement officers are called into a school situation, “they become the shot callers,” deciding what to do whether it is in the child’s best interest or not. Too often, principals are calling them for minor problems like lost keys and disciplinary matters, he said.
“The research is unequivocal in demonstrating that the police coming into schools, or police being assigned to schools, is almost always a bad idea. It has bad outcomes for children. It has bad outcomes for school safety.”
Nolan said police are not school counselors and shouldn’t play that role. “That’s something that’s a very specific skill set that is attained through years of graduate level study by mental health practitioners and clinicians.”
The California Police Chiefs Association declined to make anyone from its leadership available for an interview. In an email, its executive director described school policing as a matter best discussed at local levels.
Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, a powerful federation of police unions, wasn’t available for an interview, a spokesperson said. In a statement, Marvel, a San Diego police officer, said cops assigned to schools “play an important role in” schools. They act as “educators, emergency/crisis managers, first responders, informal counselors, mentors, and model the kind of behavior that builds trust and respect between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”
Data shows that sometimes, regardless of who might be available to counsel or advise a student, one may just do something dumb, like putting a death threat in writing.
On June 15, 2023, James Morris, the county administrator who also acts as Inglewood Unified superintendent, received a death threat via email, police call records show. Morris, a veteran administrator, was brought on to lift Inglewood out of years of state receivership because of fiscal woes.
“I can just say, generally, it was a student,” Morris said when asked about the threat. Police took a report, but Morris said he didn’t want charges filed.
“I’ve been doing this for 44 years. It takes a lot to rattle me,” he said. “It was a young person who just needed help.”
Four years after removing district police from individual campuses, the Los Angeles Unified School District has temporarily restored officers to two schools — reviving longstanding debates and dissatisfaction over school policing.
Superintendent Alberto Carvalho attempted to restore officers to 20 school sites to make campuses safer, according to a May 13 memo to school board members. Those campuses were chosen based on “relevant safety data.”
“As we near the end of the school year, we continue to refine our protocols to ensure our schools are safe and welcoming environments for students and staff,” he said in the memo. “It is critical that we are aware of the specific needs of our schools, and respond accordingly.”
A day later, amid a backlash, Carvalho’s plan collapsed, with the district limiting police to only two of the 20 schools until the end of the school year because of “heightened activity” in the region: Washington Preparatory High School and Northridge Middle School. At each of the campuses, police could be stationed either all day or during specific times, including dismissal, according to an LAUSD spokesperson.
The district will decide weekly whether to keep police in place. It is unclear what the district will do next.
The district’s own data shows a 45% spike from 2017-18 to 2022-23 in incidents involving suicide risk, fighting/physical aggression, threats, illegal/controlled substances and weapons. And 25% in the year ending 2022-23.
Weapons incidents rose from 994 to 1,197 in the year ending 2022-23.
Police were restored to the two campuses after gun incidents. In one, a student died in a shooting a few blocks from Washington Prep. During that incident, a member of the Safe Passage program — which involves community members monitoring routes to and from school to keep students safe — allegedly failed to intervene.
Meanwhile, at Northridge Middle School, police came to arrest two students who had brought loaded semi-automatic handguns. Afterward, members of United Teachers Los Angeles rallied in support of student safety, alleging the district failed to issue a lockdown and did not communicate adequately. LAUSD did not respond to the union’s allegations.
Members of United Teachers Los Angeles rallied in support of student safety at Northridge Middle School in May.Credit: Courtesy of UTLA
“The recent uptick in interest in bringing police back to schools happened because of a few incidents on campuses,” said Amir Whitaker, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California. “And, as always, the immediate response is to bring in police — when oftentimes we know the police wouldn’t have prevented the situations in the first place.” Whitaker is also the primary author of a 2021 report titled “No Police in Schools,” which concluded police in schools have “devastating and discriminatory impacts on tens of thousands of California students.”
How LAUSD is dispatching its police is part of a continuing EdSource investigation that revealed the vast presence of police in K-12 schools in California. EdSource obtained nearly 46,000 call logs from 164 law enforcement agencies for the period January to June 2023. LAUSD’s police department refused to release its data.
The current debate over school police is part of a longstanding tug-of-war over student safety. Some community members have advocated during board meetings for more law enforcement, while others maintain that school police should be abolished altogether.
“There isn’t security on campus, and that obviously affects our children,” said Efigenia Flores, a district parent and member of Our Voice/Nuestra Voz, a group of Latino parents that has consistently advocated in meetings with district officials for an increased police presence, alongside mental health and counseling supports.
“This is unacceptable,” she added in Spanish. “That is why we want a clear and transparent plan that incorporates our voice.”
According to a recentdistrict safety and school climate presentation, a range of safety concerns have increased across the district in recent years, leaving many parents worried about their children’s well-being and eager for the district to restore a presence on individual campuses.
“In alignment with our commitment to comprehensive safety measures and as an ongoing practice, we continuously review relevant statistical data and implement enhanced on-campus support from a number of departments within our District as deemed necessary,” a district spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource.
Uneven access to community-based safety
Several community organizations, however, have maintained that law enforcement heightens fears around racial profiling and violence against students of color —and say the district has “really failed to commit to implementing” community-based safety efforts that could help tackle “root causes” of violence, according to Joseph Williams, director of Students Deserve, a community organization focused on “making Black lives matter in schools.”
Those community efforts include Safe Passage and restorative justice practices, which are designed to help students understand the impact of negative behavior and address underlying challenges that may have caused them to occur in the first place.
LAUSD spokesperson Shannon Haber maintained, however, that the district has “really leaned into our safety initiatives and restorative justice practices,” citing efforts to hire more mental health professionals and partnerships to promote safe passage, among other initiatives.
School board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin has long supported restorative practices in the district — and said the fears Black students experience around police “is not something I want to perpetuate, personally.”
“Everybody’s job in the school district is to make sure kids are safe; and, some people think only officers focus on safety,” Ortiz Franklin said in an interview with EdSource.
“Your teachers are focused on safety, your principals focus on safety, your campus aides are focused on safety — everyone understands that is our primary concern. And so, where we need to improve and grow as a system is not just with one department. It’s with everyone.”
LAUSD’s current law enforcement landscape
In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murderat the hands of police in Minneapolis, LAUSD’s school board voted to cut the district’s Los Angeles School Police Department by 35% and remove police officers from all campuses.
The district’s police department saw a $25 million reduction in the 2020-21 budget, including more than $14 million in salaries and over $10 million in overtime pay, according to a Dec. 15, 2020, report by the Board of Education.
Since then, the district has adopted a “patrol model,” where an officer is assigned to patrol a neighborhood in a car, both before and after the school day.
Some officers also patrol during the evenings when there could be potential trespassing or vandalism — and they are often present during evening events, including football games, Ortiz Franklin said.
If an incident takes place on campus, she said, a school principal or designee can call the police, and the district department has a response time that ranges from three to seven minutes.
The district did not disclose how many calls were made to district police over the past several years.
“We have public education dollars to spend on teaching kids to get ready for college, career and life; and, if we choose to spend education dollars on law enforcement, that to me feels like a disservice and a missed opportunity,” Ortiz Franklin said, while emphasizing that the district anticipates “dire budget cuts” in the coming years.
With incidents on the rise since 2017-18, some parents are asking for more police in schools to keep their children safe.
“Because there is no security, this will continue: the distribution of drugs, fights, bullying and sexual harassment,” said Maria Hernandez, a mother of four LAUSD students and a member of Our Voice/Nuestra Voz.
“There are many mothers who are saddened by the deaths of their children, and I don’t think they are hoping for more,” she added, speaking in Spanish.
Evelyn Aleman, who runs Our Voice/Nuestra Voz, added that “we, as the adults, really have to step in and take charge of the safety of the students.”
She also questioned whom principals would call in an emergency if there aren’t district police at schools.
“They’re going to call LAPD. Do we want the principals doing that?”
‘A visceral response’
Venice High School senior Lindsey Weatherspoon saw a man in a blue uniform enter her classroom a couple of weeks ago. Aware of allegations that district police had targeted students of color, she panicked.
“I could just feel my heart literally beating out my chest — thinking it was wrong, and they’re conducting random searches or something,” Weatherspoon said.
Fearing police violence, she wondered: “‘Is this going to happen to me? Is this going to happen to one of my friends?”
The uniformed person entering the school turned out to be a maintenance worker, but Weatherspoon found it “mind boggling” to have “such a visceral response.”
Weatherspoon is part of the ACLU of Southern California’s Youth Liberty Squad, one of many community organizations that has called for an end to school policing altogether — whether by district or municipal law enforcement agencies.
Several students from these organizations also attend district board meetings and speak out against policing during public comment sections — claiming the district police force has disproportionately profiled and policed students of color and consistently posed a threat to their emotional safety at school.
Despite being roughly 8% of LAUSD’s population, Black students account for roughly a quarter of arrests, citations and diversions, according to a 2022 report released by the Police Free LAUSD Coalition, a group of community organizations that oppose school policing.
“Rather than arresting (students) and pushing them out of our schools, we truly need to find out the root cause of what is really going on with our youth. What is it that’s going on at home? What’s going on mentally, as well?” said Steven Ortega, the director of youth organizing at the East Los Angeles-based non-profit InnerCity Struggle.
“We’re not saying, ‘Let’s let young people get away with anything.’ We’re saying that there still needs to be accountability, but more holistically.”
In eastern San Bernardino County, a cluster of five school districts take a different approach than nearly all the rest of California when it comes to school policing: they not only buy books for kids, they also buy bullets for cops. They run their own police departments.
There are just 19 school-run police forces in California spread over 10 counties. They include Los Angeles and San Diego unified, the state’s two largest districts. In all, 15% of California K-12 students — more than 863,000 kids —attend districts with their own police departments.
Those students are more likely to be exposed to police than students whose schools rely on officers from municipal police departments or sheriffs offices to respond, a far more common model, an EdSource analysis shows.
Studies show that student exposure to police raises fear and anxiety, especially for students of color who come from over-policed communities where friction with, and distrust of, police are common. A 2021 study by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California found that students of color and disabled students were far more likely to be arrested in schools with assigned officers than those without. Black students’ arrests were 7.4 times higher in schools with assigned law enforcement.
Outside of San Bernardino, school-run police departments are waning. Oakland Unified disbanded its force in 2020 after the videotaped murder of George Floyd, who died at the hands of city police in Minneapolis. Baldwin Park Unified in Los Angeles County closed its in 2021. Inglewood Unified’s will shutter at the end of this month. San Jose’s has but one officer — its chief.
Combined, the 19 school police departments in the state have fewer than 500 officers, state records show. Some have as few as four. Others have had troubles: police chiefs sued, arrested and a department sharply criticized for abusing students. The unified districts with their own police departments are: Apply Valley, Hesperia, San Bernardino City, Fontana Unified and Snowline Joint.
But San Bernardino’s cluster will soon expand. Trustees of the Victor Valley Union High School District, based in Victorville, voted in March to form a police department and begin searching for a chief to head it.
“We need to take our safety to another level,” district Superintendent Carl Coles said prior to the board’s unanimous votes. He cited no crime data or examples of student violence. He told EdSource by email that student suspension rates declined in the last year.
Among the reasons he gave in March: Victor Valley needs to keep up with its neighbors, five districts that have their own police departments, rather than rely on school resource officers provided by contract with the county sheriff.
Board members were quick toagree.
“The way things are right now, our resource officers, they get called away and sometimes you never see them,” trustee Rosalio Hinojos said before the vote. School-employed officers are more stable, always on campuses and “have a good rapport” with students, he said, referring to districts that employ their own officers. “I don’t think that’s happening right now.”
Just before the vote, Hinojos struck an ominous tone, saying it was “not a question of if, but a question of when” police would be needed in the nine-school district. He declined an EdSource request to clarify the remark.
Why San Bernardino?
San Bernardino, the largest U.S. county outside of Alaska and nearly the size of West Virginia, isn’t a place where much discussion about defunding police departments occurred after Floyd’s murder. It’s so deeply conservative that voters approved a 2022 ballot measure instructing officials to explore seceding from California.
“When you look across our county, we do have pockets of areas that may statistically have more crime that takes place,” San Bernardino County Schools Superintendent Ted Alejandre told EdSource.
“That may be one influence on why a school may want to have more protection.” He said his office gives no guidance on the matter, but added that local superintendents and school board members in the Inland Empire have deep interests in “keeping their campuses safe.”
In Fontana, a city of 212,000 known for its steel mill and NASCAR track, school police are deployed “full force at the high schools and middle schools and elementary schools,” board President Marcelino Serna said in an interview.
He cited fear of “school shootings” and potential threats “of people coming on campus,” as primary reasons for the department’s existence. “It’s sad that anyone would want to commit harm to any children. We’re always having to be vigilant.”
The department had 15 sworn officers as of April, state records show. The cops, Serna said, like to show off their police cars and dogs to students, as well as “their weaponry, if kids are wanting to see that.”
In nearby Apple Valley, a townof 75,000, police presence on campuses became spotty because deputies from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department were often called away from schools to perform other duties, Rick Roelle, an Apple Valley Unified School District board member and retired sheriff’s lieutenant, said in an interview.
That “would leave the schools kind of high and dry,” he said. The district formed its own police force in 2002. It had nine officers as of April, records show.
Apple Valley Unified has experienced rises in “drug use, violence and disruptive behavior,” Roelle said. “What we’re seeing today is violence where kids are getting kicked in the head, and they’re getting smashed up against walls, and they’re getting severely injured on campus. So, if there’s no police there to take someone into custody for doing that, who’s going to do it?”
An EdSource investigation into school policing gathered nearly 46,000 logs of calls for police from and about a sample of California schools from Jan. 15, 2023 to June 30, 2023. In Apple Valley, 4.9% of its nearly 1,500 calls were for fights, assaults, battery, and disturbing the peace — the second-lowest rate amongthe 10 districts with their own police departments included in EdSource’s sample. Inglewood Unified led the category with nearly half of its 196 calls reporting such events.
Apple Valley Superintendent Trenae Nelson declined interview requests, as did school Police Chief Cesar Molina. Nelson also didn’t respond to emailed questions about the police department.
Comparing districts with their own police and those that rely on outside departments:
Students in high schools with district-run police were more likely to encounter officers than other high schools. The average number of calls for police was 88 in districts with their own departments compared with 57 in districts with outside police.
School districts that employ police officers break up fights more than other districts: 4.6% of incidents in high schools without in-house departments were calls about fighting or disturbing the peace, compared with 6.6% in high schools with outside police.
School district police officers are dispatched to counsel students over 10 times more than other officers. In the 76 high schools with their own departments, police officers were dispatched to counsel students 63 times, and in the 209 high schools without their own district officers, they were called 16 times.
Police “really are just ill-suited to address mental health concerns, not because of training, but really it’s not their role or their expertise to be handling these types of things,” said Cal State Long Beach education associate professor Caroline Lopez-Perry, who studies school counseling.
Carl Cohn, a former State Board of Education member and superintendent at Long Beach Unified in the 1990s, said he was pressured to create a district police department by the school board after the 1992 riots triggered by the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles.
A board member who was a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff “was adamant we needed it,” Cohn said.
But Cohn said he was skeptical, thinking, “Do we need to take scarce resources and actually set up our own school-district police force?” He had long meetings with city officials trying to create a coverage plan using Long Beach police officers that would meet district needs. When the department’s chief told him, “‘Look, if we can’t protect kids we shouldn’t be in business,’’ he went with the city. It was a decision he doesn’t regret. Other superintendents have expressed regrets to him over having school departments, calling them a financial drain, he said.
Who’s watching the watchers?
When school officials sign contracts with cities or sheriffs for school policing or just rely on responses to 911 calls, they tap into a system where a city manager oversees police, and in some cities where police commissions add a level of oversight. Elected sheriffs are answerable to voters about their departments.
When school districts create their own police departments, they take on that oversight themselves, which in California comes with laws limiting public accountability and granting officers deep job protection and privacy rights.
“Police just do a better job when they have accountability,” said Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog. At small agencies like school-police departments, more power is vested in fewer individuals, like a chief or small cadre of officers. They may not have trained internal affairs investigators, leaving chiefs to conduct their own misconduct probes. “There’s just not the infrastructure.” At small public agencies, “There’s little oversight that’s happening outside of the department as well.”
A leading California policing expert agreed.
“Any department or any entity that polices itself is ripe for corruption,” said retired state Superior Court Judge LaDoris H. Cordell, the first Black woman appointed to the bench in Northern California. She also worked for five years as the City of San Jose’s independent police auditor.
In response to EdSource questions to districts regarding outside oversight, officials at seven districts reported having none. Stockton Unified reported it has a community advisory group “which meets quarterly and reviews quarterly reports on employee statistics, complaints, and calls for service,” Superintendent Michelle Rodriguez told EdSource. In Riverside County, Val Verde Unified has a group of students, parents and others that meet with police but don’t have oversight authority.
While independent oversight of all law enforcement is critical, Cordell said, it should be especially so for school-run departments, considering they primarily police children. As San Jose’s police auditor, she published a multilanguage student handbook titled “A Student’s Guide to Police Practices” that advised juveniles on their rights during police encounters.
Her main concern about school policing, she said, is inequitable treatment of students of color. Some police “focus primarily on kids of color, Black and brown kids,” she said. “Just the melanin in the skin raises suspicion.”
Scandals
In April, the state Department of Justice (DOJ) ended five years of oversight of the Stockton Unified police after an investigation found officers “routinely violated the civil and constitutional rights of Black and Latino students and students with disabilities.”
DOJ investigators found police routinely arrested the students for “defiance, disorderly context, fights without injuries, using profanity and loitering” that civilian personnel should have handled.
“School police were out of control, arresting and traumatizing kids for acting like kids,” Linnea Nelson, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California said in a statement. “Those disparities still exist, and we will continue to monitor the District’s progress to prevent resurgent discrimination.”
Stockton school police took “important steps to address concerns regarding
interactions between police officers and students and to promote an equitable and positive learning environment,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.
There have also been problems at school police departments involving leadership.
A former chief and lieutenant of the Inglewood school police department are scheduled for sentencing Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court after being charged in a 2022 corruption investigation.
According to court records, the former department lieutenant, Timothy Marks, hired then-Chief William T. Carter as a security guard at a marijuana facility in San Bernardino County. Carter worked there when he was supposed be on duty at the police department. He “boasted to his security coworkers of his ability to do whatever he wanted because he was a police chief,” prosecutors wrote in court papers, adding, Carter drove his school-police car to the job “using his lights and sirens to get there faster.”
After being charged with embezzlement, conspiracy and perjury, Carter and Marks both cut deals and pleaded no contest in April to petty theft. Carter agreed to repay the district $15,722 and Marks, $3,006. The agreement calls for each man to be sentenced to 50 hours of community service and a year of probation.
James Morris, a former school superintendent who is working to help the district out of years of state receivership because of fiscal woes, said he is “pleased that the outcome will return funding to the students of Inglewood Unified.”
In San Diego, Chief Alfonso Contreras of the school district police department abruptly retired last month after less than two years in the post after 11 officers — nearly a third of the department’s ranks — sued him in December. Those officers alleged that Conteras and several supervisors who are his friends, and one with whom he is romantically involved, discriminated against others based on sexual orientation, gender and race. Conteras had been on paid suspension since January. The lawsuit remains in early stages, court records show. San Diego Unified spokesperson Maureen Magee said she couldn’t discuss ongoing litigation.
A chief’s perspective
The president of the California Association of School Police Chiefs disagrees that these agencies, typically smaller than most municipalities’, need more oversight.
At smaller agencies, “you have to be even more critical of your department and policies to ensure you are always in compliance,” Mark Clark, chief of the Val Verde Unified School District Police in Perris, Riverside County, wrote in an email in response to questions.
Clark, who’s spent his career at school departments, said that the in-school department offers school districts more control over how officers on their campuses are hired and trained.
Clark wrote that he formed Val Verde’s committee in 2017. It’s made up of parents, staff, students and other organizations within the district that have made recommendations to the board on procedures, staffing, and equipment. Although it is not an oversight panel, its input has been helpful, he said.
The committee, he said, has offered “nothing but support for hiring more officers.”
EdSource reporter Michael Burke contributed to this story.
Policing experts say that discipline is the responsibility of school administrators, not law enforcement.
Many California school districts’ contracts for policing services do not prohibit officers from involvement in routine student disciplinary matters, despite the federal government’s guidance that administrators are responsible for handling those issues, an EdSource investigation found.
EdSource obtained 118 contracts between 89 districts across the state and the cities and counties that provide them with school resources officers from local police, sheriff’s and probation departments. More than half either allow police to enforce school rules and code of conduct violations, such as using profanity or wearing inappropriate clothing, or don’t address disciplinary issues.
The U.S. Department of Justice advises that agreements for what are generally called school resource officers “clearly indicate” that officers will not be responsible for requests to resolve routine discipline problems involving students. That guidance aims to “prevent unnecessary law enforcement involvement in noncriminal student misbehavior.” (A spokesperson for the department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services did not respond to multiple requests to elaborate on the department’s recommendations.)
Jyoti Nanda, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said that officers lack the training necessary to respond to behavioral issues that can result in student discipline.
“Well-trained educators can handle all of the disciplinary issues,” Nanda said. “When police enforce school rules as opposed to criminal law, they are overreaching their footprint” in ways that are “deeply damaging to children.”
Many policing contracts also put resource officers in vaguely defined roles.
They are to act as “informal counselors,” “mentors,” “role models” and exemplars of “good citizenship.” Some contracts are meant to “promote a positive image of law enforcement.” One agreement refers to them as “youth development officers.” Another says their duties include serving as “a visual deterrent to aberrant behavior.”
Some give police authority to enforce school rules and code-of-conduct violations, such as using profanity or public displays of affection, that could result in a student being disciplined.
Some contracts say that officers will teach classes, without specifying the courses or training requirements.
The Anderson Union High School District’s contract with the Shasta County Probation Department requires resource officers to “provide class instruction as identified by the district and approved by the county.” Superintendent Brian Parker did not respond to questions about that requirement.
The varying roles officers play can result in legal risks to students, according to University of North Carolina law professorBarbara Fedders, who has argued for removing school resource officers.
“Relationship forming and being nice and all of that is misleading. Because if you then need to question the kids, you’re going to be able to take advantage of that relationship and use it for law enforcement purposes,” Fedders said in an interview.
‘Situations that arise from student conduct’
Some contracts don’t differentiate between officers’ roles in investigating school rule violations and potential crimes.
The Fullerton Joint Union High School District, which straddles Los Angeles and Orange counties, has policing contracts totaling more than $800,000 with the cities of Fullerton, La Habra and Buena Park. Each requires resource officers to “investigate situations that arise from student conduct at school.” The agreements also authorize officers to search students if they believe, or have reasonable suspicion, that something illegal occurred, or are “directed to do so by a school administrator.”
Fullerton Union High School in Orange County.Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Legal experts were critical of those terms.
The language in the contract “sends the wrong message not only to officers but to students and parents and teachers because it’s so vague,” said retired Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell, who also served as San Jose’s independent police auditor from 2015 to 2020.
“It’s pretty much at the discretion of an administrator, or even the officer, to just decide if there’s something suspicious, or they think may be illegal,” Cordell said. “We’re not talking here about probable cause. Who’s the reasonable person? The officer? The administrator? Who knows?”
District Superintendent Steven McLaughlin, Assistant Superintendent Ruben Hernandez, school board President Vickie Calhoun, and Dr. Chester Jeng, who was board president when the contracts were ratified on a consent agenda vote, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The city managers of Fullerton, La Habra, and Buena Park also did not reply to messages seeking comment.
Khadijah Silver, a supervising civil rights attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Lawyers For Good Government, also criticized Fullerton’s contract language.
“It’s basically saying, anytime a kid acts up, you’re free to go violate their civil rights and interrogate them off of the school’s premises and all of that,” Silver said. “It’s unconstitutionally overbroad language that fails to define or delineate any bounds of appropriate police behavior whatsoever.”
‘What any reasonable adult would do’
Some legal experts say that by allowing officers to enforce school rules, districts create situations that are confusing and intimidating to students. Nanda said that officers’ involvement in discipline is often “ambiguous.” Students, she added, may not understand why an officer stops them in the hallway: Is it for an alleged crime or a violation of school rules?
“Are they just walking the child over to the principal’s office, or are they interviewing the child and taking police notes? How does that play out?” she said. The presence of resource officers can result in harsher discipline for students, “particularly for Black students, male students and students with disabilities,” according to a 2023 study by researchers at State University of New York, Albany, “even though officers are typically not trained to, and often do not intend to, become involved in minor disciplinary matters in the school.”
Although the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers recommends that districts prohibit officers from “becoming involved in formal school discipline situations,” its executive director, Mo Canady, said in an interview that he thinks officers should get involved in situations that could result in discipline.
When officers see a young person misbehaving and get involved, they’re doing “what any reasonable adult would do,” Canady said. “Adults should never walk by and ignore a situation like that. I don’t care if we’re at a shopping mall, whatever it is.”
Asked whether there is a difference between an adult and an armed police officer intervening when a juvenile misbehaves, Canady said: “That’s why one of the issues that we harp on constantly is the importance of good relationships that (officers) build with students.”
California’s Department of Education does not provide guidance on the use of school resource officers, Elizabeth Sanders, an agency spokesperson, said.
The California School Boards Association provides districts with what it calls a “sample policy” on policing contracts, which recommends that the duties of resource officers should “not include the handling of student code of conduct violations or routine disciplinary matters that should be addressed by school administrators or conduct that would be better addressed by mental health professionals.”
Troy Flint, spokesperson for the association, said district leaders are free to “interpret the sample policy in a way that captures their community’s desired approach to law enforcement on campus. We recognize there’s a diversity of opinion throughout the state about the role security personnel should play on campus or whether they should be there at all.”
‘Why are we policing our students?’
The Oxnard Union High School District has contracts with two law enforcement agencies that clearly prohibit resource officers’ involvement in disciplinary matters.
The district’s $2.33 million contract with the city of Oxnard states that police are to distinguish “between disciplinary misconduct to be handled by school officials from criminal offenses.” The contract also says that officers “are responsible for criminal public order offenses” and “should not get involved in school discipline issues.” A separate contract with the city of Camarillo contains similar language. Both contracts require officers to establish “clear probable cause” before searching a student.
Oxnard Union High District Superintendent Tom McCoy chats with school resource officers Alexus Santos,left, and Sgt. Hannah Estrada on the campus of Pacifica High School in Oxnard.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
But the district’s contract with Ventura County for one resource officer does not address discipline. Superintendent Tom McCoy said in an interview that it is “well understood and discussed in meetings” that resource officers provided by the county do not enforce discipline. It’s never been an issue. They are very aware of our policies.”
The district has a policy that is not in its policing contracts and that allows students to request “a person of the same gender or gender identity or a staff member familiar to them to be present” if they are questioned by law enforcement.
McCoy added that the district requires students who “are questioned or interviewed by police on campus also must be referred for counseling and wellness services on the same day to address any specific needs identified through the interview process.”
Karen Sher, the school board member whom McCoy credited with helping create the district’s policy, said her experience teaching at a school with resource officers led her to ask herself, “‘Why are we policing our children?’”
Oxnard Union High School District board member Karen Sher.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
Sher said she believes that officers have a role to play in school safety, but she also worries about how their presence might affect disadvantaged students. About 16% of district students lack stable housing, she said.
“How on earth does anyone believe those students have not had an interaction, both positive or negative, with police?” Sher asked. “We expect them to come to school, see police cars in front of their school, and expect them to feel good about that? That’s a very entitled perspective.”
Eric Wiatt, a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy who has worked at Adolfo Camarillo High School for the past three years, said adjusting to being a resource officer took time.
“The first year was a learning experience of communicating with (students) and developing a rapport. It wasn’t natural in me. You know, all the different social media platforms that are used and the different slang they use,” Wiatt said in an interview.
He says he spends a lot of time investigating bullying and threats made on social media.
School resource officer Eric Wiatt from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department patrols the campus of Adolfo Camarillo High School in Camarillo.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
“We actually dig into them. We take every threat very seriously. We do a full investigation,” Wiatt said.
When he’s not investigating threats, Wiatt walks the campus wearing a bulletproof vest over his uniform and a pistol holstered to his hip. He often eats lunch with students.
Riley Young, a 16-year-old junior whom school officials selected to be interviewed by EdSource, described Wiatt as calm and helpful.
“I’d been getting in trouble,” she said. “He helped me realize that being good in school and in life was important.”
‘Providing clarity’
District leaders provided a range of reasons why their policing contracts don’t address whether resource officers can be involved in disciplinary matters.
The Madera Unified School District’s contract with the city of Madera for resource officers doesn’t address disciplinary issues. Superintendent Todd Lile said the idea that officers would enforce discipline “has never been present and, as a result, has never been explicitly called out in contractual language.” Police are “not thought of or expected to keep control of a campus,” he said.
The Lucia Mar Unified School District has two contracts for resource officers. Its agreement with the city of Arroyo Grande prohibits officers from enforcing discipline. But its contract with San Luis Obispo County does not address disciplinary matters.
Amy Jacobs, a district spokesperson, said Lucia Mar has a policy prohibiting law enforcement’s involvement in discipline, but Jacobs didn’t provide an answer when asked why that policy wasn’t written into the contract with the sheriff’s office.
The Galt Union High School District board in Sacramento County agreed to a three-year contract with the city of Galt for three resource officers in 2023. The agreement did not address police involvement in discipline. But shortly after Anna Trunnell became district superintendent in 2024, the contract was revised.
It now states that resource officers “will not be responsible for requests to resolve routine discipline problems involving students. They will not respond to incidents that do not pose any threat of safety or would not be considered crimes if they occurred outside of the school.”
Trunnell said the new language “assists in providing clarity when responding to student needs.”
The lack of clarity in many school policing contracts is “profoundly alarming,” said Nanda, the Southwestern law professor.
“It’s crucial,” she said, “for parents, educators and administrators to pay attention to the who, what and why of officers in our schools.”
