Walking woke back: Los Angeles schools soon to decide if they want cops back on ... trends now
Individual Los Angeles public school campuses should be allowed to decide whether to station a police officer on campus, a safety task force has ruled.
The recommendation comes years after the LA Unified School District did away with cops on campus - a direct result of anti-police student activism brought on by movements like Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police.
Now, amid steeply escalating crime, drug use, and violence, some of these students' parents are reconsidering.
Citing district data that shows a sharp rise in what the school system refers to as 'reported incidents', parents produced 'Bring Back School Police' signs at a regional campus safety meeting May 2.
Meanwhile, a taskforce quietly established by the board of education in the police's place have seen the influx of incidents, and came to the conclusion schools should be left to their own devices.
Individual Los Angeles public school campuses should be allowed to decide whether to station a police officer on campus, a safety task force has ruled. Pictured: A parent holding a 'Bring Back School Police' sign during a regional campus safety meeting May 2
Citing district data that shows a sharp rise in what the school system refers to as 'reported incidents', parents at the meeting echoed the task force's assertion, after it was created in 2020 to replace the mandatory police
Meanwhile, LAUSD staff members listened as parents aired concerns alongside the task force this past Thursday at Patrick Henry Middle School, at a gathering centered around school safety.
'Bring Back School Police,' a sign held by one parent in attendance read, with many now members of the newly minted task force, which any resident can join.
Others also called for more school stationed police but acknowledged the complexity of the problem, four years after anti-police activists successfully advocated to push out officers during the Black Lives Matter protests that peaked after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
That board action passed by narrow margin of 4-3 during a vote in June 2020, which also saw the Los Angeles School Police Department budget slashed by 35 percent.
In the four years since, cops by and large have been kept off campus, leaving the more than 600,000 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade mostly to their own devices.
This has proved to be a recipe for more fights on campus and difficulty controlling vaping and the use of serious drugs like fentanyl, which killed a student at one of the district's more than 1,000 schools back in 2022.
In the newly released data, incidents of fighting more than doubled since the 2017-18 schoolyear, from 2,270 reported incidents to just under 4,800.
Within that span, use of illegal or controlled substances also almost doubled, from 854 incidents to just over 1,500.
The recommendation comes years after the LA Unified School District did away with cops on campus - a direct result of anti-police student activism brought on by movements like Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police
In the four years since, cops by and large have been kept off campus, leaving the more than 600,000 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade mostly to their own devices. Pictured, anti-police protesters parading through the streets of LA on June 23, 2020
The anti-police processions were spurred by movements like Black Lives Matter, and the May 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis
LAUSD students, parents, educators and community members alike participated in the campaign, which has contributed to the alarming increases
