LAUSD’s Lockdown Mania Continues

Chatsworth High School, in Los Angeles, was placed on lockdown late Wednesday morning as police searched for a murder suspect in the area. Officers from the Los Angeles School Police Department chased the suspect near the Chatsworth High campus around 11:30 a.m. and said they apprehended a suspect by 1:40 p.m. The suspect was caught by a police dog.

LAUSD has placed dozens of its schools on lockdown in the past few months. Under lockdown, students and teachers must remain in their classrooms, with doors locked, sometimes for hours at a time. LAUSD has provided teachers with “lockdown” kits that include buckets that are to be used as toilets.

In related news, Jeffrey Stenroos, the cop who faked his own shooting, prompting a lock down of thousands of Los Angeles students for hours while police searched for a nonexistent assailant, was charged with four felony counts of perjury. He faces up to five years in jail. Stenroos’ hoax caused 9 schools and 9,000 students to be locked down, while 550 cops searched for his assailant.

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.

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.