Why California schools call the police

Transcript:

Zaidee:

On any given school day, thousands of calls go out from California schools to the police. Those calls range from the mundane to the extremely serious. At one school last year, staff called police to report a squirrel with an injured leg in the school courtyard.At another, an officer was dispatched to investigate a ringing school alarm. And found a burnt English muffin in the teachers’ lounge.

But also, there’s this one: a middle schooler allegedly attacked a classmate twice, choking him severely. Police recommended attempted murder charges to the district attorney. And at one high school pool, a man in swimsuit briefs followed boys into the locker room and exposed himself.

These are just a few of the nearly 46,000 police call logs and dispatch records from January to June 2023, that EdSource obtained from 164 law enforcement agencies in almost every California county, as part of a sweeping statewide investigation into school policing. This data offers a first, raw look at why school staff summon cops.

This is Education Beat: Getting to the heart of California schools. I’m Zaidee Stavely. This week: Why schools call the police.

You can find the data and our reporting and analysis at callingthecops.edsource.org.

My colleagues, investigative reporter Thomas Peele and data reporter Daniel J. Willis, led this EdSource investigation, under the watchful eye of investigations and projects editor Rose Ciotta. I invited all three of them to chat.

Hi, everybody. 

 

Everyone: Hi. Hello. Hi. 

Zaidee: So Danny and Thomas, how did you all come up with this idea to look at all of these police calls, and why did you wanna pursue it?

Danny: Well, originally, I, I have been trying to do this story for quite a while. Um, a lot of false starts, uh, a lot of questions of scale. Um, then, um, Thomas Peel was hired and a lot of those problems cleared away with his skillset, and, um, we started going from there.

Zaidee: Thomas, what interested you about the story?

Thomas: Well, I’m always interested in police. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of my career, um, for 40 years reporting on either crime or, um, police function, police misconduct, police discipline, um, police shenanigans. And what’s interesting about this to me is that there was no easy way to do it, because we sort of face a nearly triple whole level of blockage on this. Police in California have very wide discretion to provide nothing under the Public Records Act because of exemptions that are extremely broad and never expire. Schools are considered juvenile facilities, so what happens in them can also be to have a very restricted level of public access. And the arrests of, and prosecutions of juveniles, other than in some large aggregate form, are completely sealed from public view, as they should be, by the juvenile courts. So there was really only one way to get at what we’re doing, and it was very much sort of a backdoor approach of going to police departments and asking for records of the calls that they received from schools, be it either by 9 1 1 or the assignment of school resource officers, and what the police responses to those matters were. And that was a very significant undertaking with the Public Records Act that is really 13 months now in the making, because it was a very uphill battle to gather the records.

Zaidee: So this is what I consider to be kind of an epic undertaking. Rose, why did you, as the investigations editor, choose to greenlight this project?

Rose: Yeah, this was a, a very important and, um, let’s say, labor intensive effort for EdSource. And it’s also a topic that is different, but very relevant to what we care about. In a most unusual way, it gives, uh, us, it gives the public a bird’s eye view of what goes on in schools. And regardless of what your position is on whether there should be police or should be no police, or should be something in between, this body of information, we really feel is a public service, which is why we made the decision that it was gonna be worth all of the time and effort to nail down this information.

Zaidee: Okay. What did you find in these 46,000 police calls from 164 police agencies and 852 schools? What, you know, what were these calls about?

Thomas: Everything.

Danny: There was a little of everything there. What you would expect from police calls, a lot of them are rather mundane. You know, cops’ life is not a TV show. Not everything is exciting. So, uh, about three outta 10 of the calls are patrols, just logs of them looking around and not noting that they found anything. A lot of the other ones are, um, not what I would call the police for. There are a lot of, um, animal calls that are often pretty funny. There’s a lot of abundance of caution calls, but there’s also some really horrible stuff in there. Going over the data was actually very jarring to go back and forth between multiple calls from students about a dog in a hot car, and then, you know, some horrible detailed account of sexual assault on the very next page.

Thomas: Yeah, I mean, there was a teacher who, for reasons unknown, had $10,000 in her desk at school that was stolen. There were rapes, there were sexual misconduct things, that are horrible to have to read, involving students. There are myriad fights, guns, knives. There was a bow and arrow in a school. There was a spear in a school. There were students who did and said horrible, horrible things to each other. There were students who went to the front office of the school crying because their foster parents or caretakers or assigned guardians were throwing them out of houses, and they didn’t know what to do. And the school had no other recourse, but to call in a police officer, there’s just a, you know, myriad look at society really, and society’s problems.

Rose: Some of the most poignant incidents I think were the ones that dealt with suicide threats by students. Of course, all the information was redacted. There’s nothing in there that identifies any student, uh, and in fact, we went even one step further to remove anything that might possibly identify a student. I mean, I, I went through and took out descriptions of what a kid who ran away from the building was wearing. Um, but I think it’s really important to note that the human interaction between students and their families all plays out in school.

Danny: One thing to keep in mind is that while certainly the really bad stuff is what sticks with you,   serious calls only make up about a third of all the calls that we have, uh, which means the other two thirds are either not serious, you know, smoking under the bleachers and noise complaints, and all sorts of other things that aren’t really all that bad, or just unknown. It is worth keeping in mind that as bad as things seem when you look at each individual case, that is by far not the majority of what happens. 

Zaidee: You know, we have six months of data from January to June, 2023. Um, we don’t have the data from prior years. And so I’m wondering, you know, how much can we actually conclude from the data?

Thomas: You know, that’s a great question, Zaidee, and we have to consider this data to be the baseline because there’s been no other real attempt at gathering it. We know that if the data is extrapolated, and we’re very confident in that extrapolation, that it shows that police are called to schools on any given school day in California thousands of times. But, you know, we don’t know what it was five years ago. We don’t know what it was pre-pandemic. And, um, you know, there’s gonna come a point where we’re gonna have to decide to do this again in order to gauge and answer that question going forward.

Zaidee: What about the police response to these calls?

Danny: It’s all over the map. Their responses vary wildly from one department to another. Um, even something that, like Rose was saying in terms of a mental health call, a student is having a mental health crisis, two different departments, even if they’re geographically close, will handle it very, very differently. And if there is a pattern, it wasn’t clear from the data.

Rose: And I do think some of that really has to do with how the district is set up to handle those kinds of situations, um, because the police would pretty much hook into that. What also shows up in the calls is that in some schools, they have a protocol for calling some other staffing, some other support, mental health staffing. I mean, sometimes the mental health call is like, uh, a suicide attempt, and, and the student has a weapon, you know, has a knife and has been cutting themselves. And so, you know, it, it can be to a heightened level where the police needs to be there, but it seems that in many of the instances, the schools have a certain protocol of connecting the parties so that the student is either taken away in a ambulance or a parent comes, or, you know, they, they connect with a counselor. It all kind of depends on where they are in the incident. 

Zaidee: You write that school policing can be polarizing with some, seeing the police as necessary to ensure safety in schools and others seeing them as agents of racial injustice. Do you think the calls tell us anything or not about whether police need to be in the schools or if they’re abusing their power in schools?

Thomas: Oh, I think first off, Zaidee, there’s clearly some geography at play here that in parts of the state where that are known for conservative politics, there is a much more supportive idea of the police in schools to be enforcing safety. And in more liberal areas, the social justice aspect and the racial injustice aspect of policing in America long term clearly plays out. If you go to say, San Bernardino County, where there is a cluster of, uh, districts that run their own school police departments, and they are gung-ho, they want to have cops in school, cops are there to enforce the rules and to provide safety. And then there’s Oakland, which had a school police department, and after George Floyd’s murder disbanded it in the name of racial justice, and now has people whose job titles are climate and culture ambassadors, who are essentially civilian peacemakers who work with different ways to dissolve student disputes without involving law enforcement.

Zaidee: And Oakland wasn’t actually the only district to disband their police department, right? Baldwin Park Unified in Los Angeles County also closed its department in 2021. Inglewood Unified is closing down theirs at the end of this month. But there are 19 districts in California that still have their own police departments. And Thomas, you took a closer look at those. Where are these districts located?

Thomas: They range from L-A-U-S-D, the biggest school district in the state on student population. And San Diego, which is the second biggest, to some very small places, there’s one department that has, uh, three cops. There are two departments, one of which is going, uh, out of business at the end of the month that simply has a police chief. There’s a cluster in the Inland Empire in San Bernardino County of districts that employ their own police. And there’s, um, another district that voted in March to begin developing a police department, 

Zaidee: And you found that school districts that had their own police departments, had more, a higher rate of calling police in high schools?

Thomas: Yeah. Clearly, um, the highest level of policing or of contact with police occurs at high schools where the school is running its own police department. And, you know, one of the things that goes into the reform movement thinking on school policing is that the overwhelming presence of police officers can create a sort of a fear factor within the student population that why are we constantly having to be guarded by people with guns? What is wrong here?

Zaidee: And you also found that districts with their own police departments call the police more often to counsel students, right?

Thomas: Yeah. One of the things that the police chiefs in those kinds of districts talk about and like to use as a sort of a justifying of existence is, well, we’re there for the relationship with the students. We’re there to be informal counselors, we’re there to be the familiar face and a familiar adult kind of thing. And it comes into this sort of question about when there are these assigned school police officers working for a school department, where’s the line in what they, what they deal with? I mean, a police officer is charged essentially with one thing, which is enforcing the criminal code. But yet they’re describing themselves as counselors and friendly faces, and it gets blurry. And the school counselors point out that most police officers don’t have any training in being a counselor. It becomes at some point a question of resources. We know that police officers are generally paid more than teachers and paid more than school counselors. It’s the allocation question, is this really the wisest use of limited public dollars to serve students?

Zaidee: Danny, you wanted to add something?

Danny: Yes. The other two things that really jumped out at me when I was analyzing the data was that one, they are brought into breakup fights a lot more often. I, I can’t say the scale of the fights they’re brought into breakup, it doesn’t go to that level of detail, but presumably, whereas a district that doesn’t have their own police would hesitate to call 9 1 1 over a couple kids fighting at lunch. If there is a police officer there, they do call them to break it up rather than do it themselves. The other thing that really jumped out is that they’re asked to do a lot of things that at other schools would be done by, you know, probably a custodian or something like that. We have a lot of records of police officers asked to reset alarm panels, um, unlock gates for afterschool activities, a, a lot of stuff that just does not seem like it’s a good use of police time, but they are there and they do have the keys and, you know, if an alarm goes off, then they stay to re-arm everything and make sure it all works.

Zaidee: I think a reader might look at this and say, well, the districts with their own school police departments have more calls because maybe there’s more stuff going on and that’s why they have their own school police department. Does the data show differently? 

Danny: Well, we went through and categorized, uh, every call we could. There is a percentage that we were unable to categorize because we couldn’t tell what they were talking about. But we did categorize the majority of calls. And just based on that, there was not an increase in serious calls at districts with their own department. It didn’t seem to be a worse school, it was just a larger volume overall. And there was more of things labeled, like we’ve said, counseling, um, you know, lock assistance, things like that come up a lot more than they would if they had to call 9 1 1 to do it.

Zaidee: You also found that there isn’t much oversight of those departments. Why is that an issue? 

Thomas:Well, I think one of the things that I could address is that when a school district contracts with, say, their local city police department to put a school resource officer in schools for X amount of hours a week, the city, with trained people like a city manager who is used to running, being the civilian head of a police department, remain in place. The disciplinary process for that police officer remains with his, his or her employer, which is the municipality. The same thing with the sheriff’s department. What happens in the 19 districts that have their own police departments is all of that administrative oversight of the department falls on the school district. And that raises a question of exactly how well trained, say a, a given school superintendent is to be the civilian head of a law enforcement agency. 

Thomas: And, you know, we queried a bunch of superintendents and got a few answers, and none of them really indicated that there was any specific training to run a law enforcement agency or that school board members get any specific training. Police officers, they are the only public employees who have a legal right to employ deadly or serious force against a person, so there’s a lot of questions about oversight. 

Thomas: You know, there have been some allegations of misconduct within the school police departments. There is a former chief of the Inglewood department, um, in Los Angeles County, who was originally charged with embezzlement of public funds and perjury and conspiracy, and he plea bargained that down to a misdemeanor that he’s scheduled to plead guilty for. In San Diego, this school police chief was very recently sued by about half the officers in the department, accusing him of, uh, various kinds of discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation. And he, very soon after being sued, put in for retirement. So, you know, the oversight question on these guys is, you know, a real thing.

Zaidee: Rose, I know, um, we had several, several reporters working on local coverage of police in schools. Can you describe some of what they found?

Rose: Yes. Um, Monica Velez was, uh, doing the Oakland story and she had to do a lot of reporting to really try to hone in on, what was the level of calls that Oakland was making to police, versus what their policy is right now, which is that staff and principals are trained to call police as a last resort. But what we’re finding is that even though staff are trained not to call, there are cases where they are calling. The district acknowledged that, you know, there, this is a work in progress. They’re trying to get it right. 

We also had Lasherica Thornton doing a reporting in Fresno. There was a particular middle school there, uh, that had, uh, some pretty high numbers. Emma Gallegos, she was reporting out of Kern County. Mallika Seshadri, she’s based in Los Angeles, and she did reporting for us on L-A-U-S-D, which refused to give us any of their, their police call data. And, and yet there are things bubbling up in LA right now. Los Angeles, following the George Floyd murder, decided to cut back funding for their police department, pull back police out of the schools, but they didn’t disband the department. And what’s going on right now is that there’s been an uptick in some violent incidents, and they’ve now placed police back into, into and around two schools.

Zaidee: What do you hope that readers and, you know, listeners do with the, the information from the database and, and, and these stories?

Danny: There is a lot of back and forth about policing in schools and policing in America, and part of the inspiration for the story is that there’s not a lot of hard data about what the police do once they’re actually inside. And that leaves a pretty major hole when you’re deciding whether or not it’s good. So hopefully people can read through, line by line, call by call, and see exactly what the police are doing in there. Granted, it’s not everything. It’s not how it ends up. We don’t have demographics, data for who they’re policing. There are holes, but at least you can get a sense of what the police are doing if you take them out. These are the things that they will not be there for serious, not serious, large, small. And hopefully people will use that to think about their position and incorporate that into their views.

Rose: I think too, another, um, use for it is that when you start going into some of these select areas like the mental health or, you know, we had a whole lot of calls of, uh, students being bullied and students being abused by other kids who are taking cell phone photos of them in very compromised, uh, positions, and then sharing it on social media, that they can use those incidents to engage in a conversation with the school districts about how, is there a better way to handle this? Or how should it be handled? Or how can the community come together to try to deal with it. In some cases, districts had some backup support, like for mental health. I think any of our listeners, you know, could easily just compare their district to other districts and see if there’s any good ideas there for them.

Thomas: As far as what people take away from it, I think that there’s, the allocation of public resource question is pretty immense. Um, Senator Nancy Skinner, who’s, uh, represented Berkeley, um, for years, you know, raised the fact that EdSource is committed a public service by acquiring and making this data public and suggests that it shows that cities and school districts should talk about when police are needed, especially when it’s city police responding to schools and are they the right person? Is a suicidal student best served by a police officer coming into the school, or a mental health counselor? You know, there’s finite public dollars, and we all know that California is having a crisis in police staffing. And is this the best use of that resource? This is one of the questions that needs to be asked out of this data.

Rose: I just wanna mention it’s also, um, pretty important timing. It’s four years, uh, after George Floyd’s murder, and as we’ve seen in California, some districts moved to limit police. The Oakland experience, the Urban Institute has just released information describing it as being on the leading edge of violence prevention practices that they are studying right now along with Baltimore and Washington DC and they’re expecting to, uh, release that study in August. A lot of people are trying to figure out what is the best model for taking care of what comes up in schools and are armed police officers with arrest power, the best person to be the first go-to staff? And I think with this information, people can arm themselves with facts so that they can ask questions from a fact-based position, instead of just dealing with anecdotes and stories and, you know, whatever fearful things are kind of floating around.

Zaidee: Do you have any plans for continued reporting on this?

Thomas: Sure. There’s a lot to do. We feel like we’ve kind of just broken the, the surface on this. There’s more reporting. And at some point we’re gonna have to also use this baseline to make another examination over time to see if anything has changed.

Zaidee:Well thank you all very much. I really appreciate this. 

Everyone:

You’re welcome. Thank you. 

CREDITS:

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Education Beat: Getting to the heart of California schools. A production of EdSource.

You can sift through our database of police call records and read our stories on police in schools at calling the cops dot edsource dot org. You can also find the link in our podcast notes.

Our producer is Coby McDonald.

Special thanks to our guests Rose Ciotta, Thomas Peele, and Daniel J. Willis.

Thanks also to our managing editor, Adam Eisenberg.

Our theme music is from Blue Dot Sessions.

This episode was brought to you by the Dirk and Charlene Kabcenell Foundation.

I’m Zaidee Stavely. Join us next week. And subscribe so you won’t miss an episode.