On April 15, an altercation outside Washington Preparatory High School in South Los Angeles turned deadly when a student was shot and killed. A video of the incident has drawn attention to the ongoing debate over campus safety and the reduced presence of school police in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and calls for police reform.
The video, which has not been released publicly, shows an adult who is alleged to be a member of the school’s “safe passages” program refusing to intervene as a fight breaks out. The adult can be heard saying, “Let them … fight. If they want to fight, let the … police [inaudible]. … I’m not breaking up s—. I don’t give a f—.”
Less than 10 seconds later, three shots are fired, striking the student. The student was pronounced dead at a hospital.
The school district has referred questions about the incident to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating the shooting. L.A. Unified has provided mixed messages about whether the alleged conduct of the safe passages staff member will be investigated by the district.
The incident has reignited the debate over campus safety and the role of school police. Students and community activists, many of whom are Black, have called for the complete dismantling of the school police department. They argue that the presence of any officer on a campus “criminalizes” students, making them targets for potential harassment and undermining the role of school as a nurturing, academically focused environment.
Schools have responded by increasing their reliance on safe passages, in which district staff, volunteers, and hired organizations or companies visibly monitor students’ routes between home and school. These workers are meant to be easily recognized by the yellow jackets or vests they wear.
However, increasing numbers of parents, especially Latino parents who make up the vast majority in the school system, want to keep the police. During the wave of Black Lives Matter protests, the Board of Education removed officers from campus — limiting them to patrols, investigations, and crisis response — but these parents are demanding their return to on-campus duties. They say that school police make campuses safer and are preferable to relying wholly on city police in emergencies.
Washington Prep, like other district high schools, has tried to minimize the presence of police. These officers enter campus only to deal with an emergency. Schools instead rely increasingly on a counseling-oriented approach that is universally approved of, although not necessarily as a substitute for police. The counseling approach has been hindered by a shortage of social workers and limited “de-escalation” training for staff.
Outside campus, there’s been increasing reliance on safe passages — whose participants can include volunteers or district staff or outside organizations. Anti-police activists insist that safe passages programs are the wave of the future: They can provide more block-by-block coverage than one or two patrolling officers — and without the threatening presence, in their view, of armed officers.
School board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin has been the board member most adamant about ending all spending on school police. She said that, in the big picture, reforms are working to make schools safer and improve learning environments.
“Just last week, the board’s School Safety and Climate Committee, which I chair, heard from two of our more than 60 community-based safety partners about their approaches, successes, and opportunities for improvement,” she said. “A theme we heard … is that with daily safe passages outside school and peace-building and mentoring inside school, we can prevent a majority of unsafe incidents from occurring in the first place.”
In schools where such practices are well managed, Franklin said, “we are seeing improved relationships and student attendance, and reduced physical altercations.”
Sgt. Jason Muck, the head of the union representing Police Department managers, said the Washington Prep shooting points to a need for consistent de-escalation training. He also called for coordination between the school police and the safe passages teams.
His view is that some of the safe passages providers see police as the enemy and are unwilling or unprepared to bring police into a potentially dangerous situation in which the officer could be an ally. The safe passages workers, he said, “don’t have walkie-talkies. They don’t have to report things to us. They’re just standing out there. I’m not saying that this still couldn’t have happened with officers there, but trained officers can deal with situations like this.”
“From what I’m hearing, this weapon could have been in this student’s possession on campus all week,” he added. “This is stuff that was brewing all week long. And if we had an officer on campus, the officer well could have gotten wind of this and maybe this could have been prevented.”
Board member George McKenna, who represents Washingon Prep — and who once gained fame as its hard-charging principal — strongly supports a police presence.
“The only people who are required to break up fights and run to the problem are the school police,” he said.
The campaign against the L.A. school police caught fire in the wake of the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by city police officers — one of a string of high-profile police abuse cases across the country. When the Board of Education majority, in June 2020, ordered officers off campus, they also slashed the school police budget by $25 million — a 35% cut — resulting in reduced services.
Before that action, each high school typically had one officer, while two middle schools would share an officer. The police budget has crept upward since — due to districtwide salary increases and other higher costs — which angered activists who accuse the board of backtracking from commitments to phase out police.
Washington Prep junior Pierre Clark has mixed feelings about safety issues. Those supposed to provide safety were not doing so “if you look in the video,” he said. “They were just standing there watching. I feel like your job is to break up that stuff.” And at school, “nobody checks you when you walk in. Anybody can walk in there with anything and nobody would know.” All the same, he has misgivings about a ramped-up police presence: “I want to feel normal. I don’t want to see all these police officers. It’s just a heavy presence, having a lot of cops around you.”
