School Police

I feel it is necessary to respond to the letter on "School Police" (March 19) which questions my statement (quoted in a March 8 article about the student who stabbed a teacher) and asks why only half of our school police force is assigned to schools. In answer, 252 officers, nearly 83% of our 305-person police force, are assigned the primary responsibility to protect students and property at our schools. Of these, 143 are assigned to campuses to watch over our students before, during, and after school hours.

As Gov. Jerry Brown announced more funding for public schools Tuesday, the Los Angeles Board of Education agreed to pay for more school police, maintain a classroom breakfast program and keep supplemental staff at schools. The board also heard projections of next school year's budget, which - for the first time in six years - wasn't expected to require any new cuts. L.A. Unified schools Supt. John Deasy had asked the seven-member board to approve the so-called discretionary programs, although it was unclear whether they would all be funded directly from the district's general fund.

School police are charged with protecting the students, staff and property of the vast Los Angeles Unified School District, a job that has become increasingly dangerous with the rise of gangs and guns. The union that represents this force has asked the Board of Education to equip its patrol cars with shotguns, a more powerful and intimidating weapon than the nine-millimeter pistols that school officers now carry. The officers' desire for more firepower is understandable.

A group of parents and students have filed a federal lawsuit against the Compton school district alleging a pattern of abuse and racial profiling of Latinos by school police. One family alleged that school police targeted a student's father for arrest and deliberately got him deported to Mexico after he filed a complaint against an officer. In another incident, school officers allegedly beat, pepper sprayed and used a chokehold on a bystander who was taking video of an arrest on his iPod, and erased cellphone videos taken by students.

Acknowledging that school police often face violence in neighborhoods around campuses, the Los Angeles Board of Education approved a plan Monday to equip school police cars with 12-gauge shotguns. The school board voted 5 to 2 in favor of the proposal after a contentious hearing in which several board members called the weapons a valuable deterrent but others said they feared that students might be shot accidentally.

An emotionally charged proposal to equip Los Angeles school police cars with 12-gauge shotguns cleared its first hurdle Thursday when a Board of Education committee agreed to send the plan to the full board as early as Monday. But debate continued to rage over a weapon that police call a necessary tool but parents and some school board members label a danger to students.

A Rowland Heights Unified School District police officer patrolling near Nogales High School was shot and wounded in the hip Sunday morning by a teen-age assailant who escaped on foot and remained at large, a sheriff's spokesman said. Officer Mark Russell, 29, a five-year veteran of the department, was treated for a minor wound at Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina and released, sheriff's spokesman Mark Bailey said.

The Los Angeles County coroner's office said Friday that school police officer Joel Shanbrom died from multiple shotgun wounds. Shanbrom, 32, was killed Wednesday night while his wife and 3-year-old son were upstairs in their Northridge home, according to official reports. Police initially described the crime as a home-invasion robbery but broadened their investigation after learning that nothing was taken from the rented house and that two hours had passed before the shooting was reported.

Los Angeles schools Supt. Sid Thompson called on the Board of Education to spend $3.5 million to hire 22 school police officers and retain 300 campus security aides as part of a program to prevent violence unveiled Monday. Thompson also recommended that all school principals work with teachers and parents to devise a safety plan that includes anti-violence curriculum as well as safety precautions around campus.

Frustrated by auto accidents and congestion around school campuses, members of the Los Angeles Unified School District Police Department are seeking authorization to begin issuing traffic tickets. "The bottom line is that our patrol officers see these violations and can't do anything about it right now," said Richard G. Keith, president of the school district's Police Officers Assn.

Police officers in the Fontana Unified School District were armed recently with semiautomatic rifles, drawing sharp criticism and sparking an effort to ban such weapons on school campuses. The Colt military-style rifles, which cost about $1,000 each, are kept in safes when officers are on campus and will be used only in "extreme emergency cases" like the massacre in Newtown, Conn., Supt. Cali Olsen-Binks said. The district purchased the rifles in October and received them in December, before the tragedy in Newtown, where a gunman killed 26 people - 20 of them children - at an elementary school.

A young mother carried her baby, along with a loaded gun in a diaper bag, into a Philadelphia school where she had gone to sign up for classes, police said, one of two gun-in-school incidents reported in the city as the national debate on gun control raged in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., massacre. In the second incident Thursday, a high school student hid a gun in his shoe, but it was found when he walked through a metal detector. His gun was not loaded. But the weapon carried by 21-year-old Kelly Jones in the bottom of her pink-and-white diaper bag was fully loaded, police say, and Jones -- who was accompanied by her aunt and her baby when she was caught with it -- now faces criminal charges.

Police in Indiana said they found a stockpile of 47 guns hidden throughout the home of a man who had threatened to set fire to his wife and then walk to a nearby elementary school and "kill as many people as he could. " Von I. Meyer, 60, was arrested at his Cedar Lake home Saturday on suspicion of felony intimidation, resisting arrest and domestic battery. Police in Cedar Lake, about 60 miles southeast of Chicago near the Illinois-Indiana state line, said they were called to the man's home after he threatened on Friday to kill his wife and open fire at Jane Ball Elementary School, located less than 1,000 feet from his home and connected by a series of trails through a wooded area.

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- The gunman in one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history forced his way into a Connecticut elementary school, where he killed 26 children and adults before turning a weapon on himself, state police said Saturday, adding that they were continuing to search for evidence to explain how and why the rampage took place. “We're doing everything we need to do to literally peel back the onion, layer by layer,” State Police spokesman, Lt. J. Paul Vance told reporters at a news conference.

A fistfight between two Narbonne High School girls that drew a crowd of onlookers Thursday ended abruptly when a school police officer shot a burst of pepper spray into the air, forcing 47 students to seek help with respiratory and eye irritation, officials said. Students described a frenetic scene at the Harbor City school as the last of the fire engines and ambulances left the campus. Those stung by the pepper spray rinsed their eyes, some briefly accepted oxygen from paramedics and others said they were feeling nauseated as they made their way to a nurse's office that quickly became overcrowded.

AURORA, Colo. - A little more than a week before the shootings at a crowded movie theater, it appears suspect James Holmes was already looking to beat a retreat from the small apartment where he lived, one that would soon be turned into an explosives-laced deathtrap. Half a block from his building - now surrounded by yellow police tape, with broken shards of glass dangling where windows used to be - Holmes had stopped to chat with neighbors, telling them he was looking for a new apartment.

Alarmed by the school district's decision to station armed police officers in high schools, a woman on Thursday pulled her daughter out of Buena High. School officials said the mother's concern is unwarranted and that the officers are meant to help students, not serve as "enforcers." Cheryl Mattley, a single mother of five, said she may also remove her son from Pacific High, one of the district's two continuation schools. She said she doesn't know which schools her children will attend.

An investigation has exonerated Pasadena schools Police Chief Jarado L. Blue of allegations that he concealed a video camera in a storage room to spy on female employees undressing. Blue, 47, will return to work next week. An investigation conducted by attorney John Potter, hired by the school board, found no wrongdoing, district officials said. The chief was suspended March 23 after an anonymous letter sent to Supt.

KANO, Nigeria - In an attack that didn't happen - well, not officially - a police inspector and four of his officers were ambushed by Islamist militants last month in this northern Nigerian city. Two of them died, two crawled away and hid in a ditch, and the inspector, shot in the leg, called on his cellphone for help. It arrived eventually, but only after he had bled to death. Northern Nigeria is a region under siege. Boko Haram militants mount attacks almost daily and security forces retaliate in a scattershot way, often mowing down civilians.

Jeffrey Stenroos, the former Los Angeles school police officer who staged his own shooting last year in a bizarre hoax that caused three schools to be locked down and forced the closure of streets across the western San Fernando Valley, will pay the city a lump sum of $309,000 in restitution, authorities said Monday. In exchange for the restitution, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Richard Kirschner agreed to let Stenroos post bail from Los Angeles County jail pending the outcome of an appeal.