LA School COP: Oops, My Bad, I Shot Myself

Look Officer, Use A Toy Gun Next Time (by coralinetheblue)

Jeffrey Stenroos, the LAUSD Police Officer who shot himself recently, prompting the lockdown of nine Los Angeles area schools, has told investigators that he accidentally shot himself. LAPD spent days searching for a parolee they thought had shot the officer.

The incident provoked a lock down of nine schools for as much as five hours, with students unable to leave their classrooms for food, water or the restroom.

The hoax and its consequences for LA students highlight the problems with LAUSD’s lockdown policy. Over the past month, more than a dozen schools have been locked down in separate incidents, with students confined to a classroom for as much as five hours. LAUSD is using the lockdown more for social control than for students’ safety. Neither LAPD nor LAUSD have dealt with the recent incidents rationally or reasonably, holding kids like prisoners far longer than necessary, so they could “secure” the area casually without disruption by students and their families. For example, rather than questioning Stenroos sufficiently to assess the credibility of his claims, it was assumed he was too traumatized to talk. Yet he was wearing a bullet proof vest and he was a police officer, someone who should be able to give evidence under duress.

The incident also highlights a terrible flaw in the policy.  Anyone can call the police claiming to have witnessed an armed suspect near a school and provoke a lockdown that not only undermines students’ liberty, safety and dignity, but that also steals valuable class time from them.

Cop Threatens to Kill Teen Molested by His Wife (the Boy’s Teacher)

Yep, you heard me correctly. A Burbank Unified middle school teacher, Amy Beck, seduced and molested one of her sixth-grade students for six months. Her husband, an officer with LAPD, caught them and threatened to kill the teen and his family. The officer, Nathanial Beck, is now under investigation for failing to report the sexual abuse (but apparently not for the death threats). The family of the boy has filed a lawsuit accusing the LAPD and the city of Los Angeles of failing to investigate or take any disciplinary action, despite complaints about the threats.

More LAUSD Lockdown Madness

Image by DaR

Either LA is the most dangerous city in the U.S. or they’re just plain lockdown crazy. I’ll put my money on the latter. 

South Gate High was the latest school to be placed on “precautionary” lockdown, and it wasn’t even during school hours. Reports of a male with a gun led LAUSD to lock down around 200 students, along with teachers and administrators, from 3:30 until 6:30 on Friday.

Three suspects were eventually arrested, but no weapons were found. The “precautionary” nature of the lockdown confirms my suspicions that the lockdowns are being used as social control to simplify the jobs of cops, at the expense of children’s liberty and dignity. Anyone can call in a phony police report of armed men which, under the current system, would result in children being held prisoners in their classrooms without food, water or toilets (other than the district provided shit buckets) for hours.

This brings the total to over ten LA schools locked down for three or more hours each in just the past two weeks. Police still have not apprehended a suspect in the shooting of a school cop outside El Camino Real High School last week. The LA City Council and others have put up a $100,000 reward.

Schools Are Jails (Piss Buckets For Your Kids’ Safety)

School or Jail (image by lavocado)

In the wake of two recent school lockdowns, LAUSD is now requiring all LAUSD classrooms to have a “lockdown kit” that includes a 5-gallon bucket to be used as a toilet. Kits also include toilet paper and a portable toilet seat, as well as first aid equipment, duct tape, gloves and flashlights. The shit buckets were apparently used by some students last week, who were locked in their classrooms for hours while cops and school officials ran around like chickens without heads.

As appalling as it is to think that school districts now consider violent school rampages so routine that classrooms must be equipped with bucket johns, it is even worse when they start to treat any disturbance as cause for a full scale lockdown and use lockdown procedures as a form of social control.

In the case of the Gardena shooting last week, a student brought a gun to school. It accidentally discharged when he dropped his backpack and two students were seriously injured. While this was a terrible tragedy and there was certainly need for emergency procedures, there is no reason why the entire school needed to be locked down for hours. There were no hostages, intruders or armed suspect rampaging through the school. The incident was self-contained. The room in which it occurred should have been quickly secured so that emergency workers could attend to the injured students and police could question witnesses. Once this had been accomplished, the rest of the school should have been allowed to return to their routines, or dismissed.

In the Woodland Hills case, police were searching for an armed assailant who had shot and wounded a school cop, near El Camino Real High School. Students from nine different schools were locked down for up to five hours as officers searched for the suspect. While it may be justified in cases like this to keep classrooms locked down for student safety, LAUSD’s own police chief, Steve Zipperman, admitted that students were locked down longer than necessary. LAPD and LAUSD blamed each other for the miscommunication and lack of coherent plan.

In both cases, students’ hygiene, dignity and wellbeing were sacrificed by police and school officials, not to protect children, but to make the grownups’ jobs easier.