Concerned parents calling for heightened police presence on LAUSD campuses
Parents gathered at a Los Angeles Unified School District board meeting Tuesday morning to call for an increased police presence on school campuses.
The 2020 decision to slash the school police budget by a third has led to a rise in shootings and incidents regarding students with firearms at all LAUSD schools, parent Maria Luisa Palma said, adding that the number of stabbings and reports of students using drugs at school have also risen.
Palma also feels that she and other Latino parents are underrepresented and not given a platform to officially express their worries, but they have filed a petition and presented signatures at Tuesday’s meeting.
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“Our message to the district is that the Latino community deserves a seat at the table to have these conversations about the lack of safety on our campuses,” she told KTLA 5’s Ellina Abovian. “The parent voices are not being heard, and we are sick and tired of not being included in this conversation.”
Citing several specific incidents of violence on LAUSD campuses – including the fatal April shooting of a teenager near Washington Preparatory High School in South Los Angeles – Palma says that there is no choice but to bring the school police back.
“We want for the most part to begin with the school police [being] back on campuses like they used to be,” she said.
The parents aren’t alone in their concerns; school law enforcement officials share the same sentiments when it comes to keeping students safe and say that the district’s plan to cut school police funding has not worked.
“Their experiment didn’t work [and] for the past couple of years, they have been using impromptu security companies to replace police officers on campus,” Los Angeles School Police Association President Gil Gamez said. “Some of [them] were formerly incarcerated individuals [and] I have nothing against them but that is not how you replace police officers on campus.”
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According to Gamez, three security guards did nothing to stop the fight that led up to the fatal April shooting outside Washington Prep, which only adds to parents’ worries about their children’s safety.
“There was video all over the Internet of [one of the guards] saying ‘I’m not going to do anything; call the police to handle it’ and finally, once the individual was shot, we had a school police officer who was the only one on the floor rendering aid,” Gamez said. “These individuals are not trained…they don’t have the authority to do things and they don’t know how to do them.”
“They are probably good people, but they are in way over their heads,” Gamez added. “Nobody would try to do this with teachers – pull people off the street and tell them to teach – so you sure as heck don’t do that with police officers.”
As for the next steps, Palma says that all she and other worried parents can do is wait and see how the district responds.
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“We don’t have any formal process…we are just requesting this, and we will wait to hear from them,” she said. “We want to talk, that’s what we want.”
KTLA has reached out to LAUSD for comment but have not yet heard back.
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