LAUSD's Finest: Los Angeles School Police

How an oblivious school board lets a tiny, scandal-ridden force endanger L.A. kids

Comments (0) By Max Taves Wednesday, Sep 2 2009

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Pushed by Kerstein, the school board agreed to a dramatic policy shift, giving school police the power to arrest anyone in the greater Los Angeles area — technically, within “one-half mile” of the school district’s 1,100 ubiquitous schools, centers and offices. Kerstein called his power grab “Village Policing,” and his scheme got around a longtime rule that kept the campus cops’ jurisdiction to a one-block radius of school property.

Kerstein also brought in two former high-ranking LAPD veterans, Steve La Roche and Manion. To transform his department in the image of LAPD, Ream says, “the first thing Alan Kerstein did — he’s a very superficial guy — he changed our patches [and uniforms]. He changed our call signs to be like LAPD.” He placed officers on a four-day/10-hour schedule — odd for a school district that operates five days a week but again copying LAPD. Kerstein also took “Unified” out of “L.A. Unified School Police Department” — another trace of the school district. He ordered a new fleet of cars. No longer purple and white, most were black and white. Just like LAPD.

Obsessed with mimicking LAPD, LAUSD’s police headquarters ordered black-and-white patrol cars and a K-9 unit, and even launched a SWAT unit bristling with weaponry.

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Kerstein created a “motorcycle division” — no other large, urban U.S. school district has one, according to the secret report by Evergreen. That audit found that motorcycle cops rarely work, don’t attend roll call, don’t keep activity logs and “are not required to respond to calls for assistance.” No other school police in the U.S. except Miami-Dade had a SWAT team; Kerstein insisted on one. (In the only clear example of an effort to roll back Kerstein’s influence, Cortines last year quietly disbanded it.) Kerstein had to have a K-9 unit — unheard of at any school district except Miami-Dade.

One of Kerstein’s obsessions with LAPD-like accessories was his repeated alteration of the School Police Department’s “official seal” — some say he redrew it four times — before he settled on a Roman-themed design depicting rods of wood, or what he’d later describe as “a symbol of magisterial authority.”

Paul Quezada, president of the department’s sergeants’ union, says officers on the force still hope for real reform. He initially backed Kerstein but now tells the Weekly that the former chief “was the most detrimental thing the school district ever did to the Police Department. ... This became a self-serving vehicle with special units and pretty uniforms and better days off — less accountable structure.”

Perhaps most disturbing, under Kerstein and his understudy and successor, Manion, the Internal Affairs unit allowed 16 probes of school cops to blow past the legal deadline for punishing the officers, all of whom were found guilty of wrongdoing. In a stark example of the code of silence that grips the School Police Department and now has spread to the district, school officials refused even to acknowledge, when pressed by the Weekly, that LAUSD let lapse 16 complaints against officers, allowing the school cops to escape punishment even though all were later deemed by district police investigators to be guilty.

In addition, because a 2006 court ruling now protects officer privacy, LAUSD denied many of the Weekly’s requests, filed under the California Public Records Act, for documents detailing the 16 cases. In instances where the district did provide documents, they were so heavily blacked-out by LAUSD as to be useless. Parents are in the dark about who the officers are, which schools they police and what acts they committed. In fact, parents and the public are forced to trust the same broken system that protected Ian King.

An August 9, 2006, letter written by Manion and obtained by the Weekly describes two egregiously overdue I.A. investigations assigned to Deputy Chief Nancy Ramirez. Manion’s letter to Ramirez is troubling for its lack of outrage: “The investigation involving [name redacted] was assigned to you on May 5, 2005, and was due on June 6, 2005,” Manion writes more than a year later. “The completed investigation has not been submitted. The investigation involving [name redacted] commenced on July 6, 2004, and was due on April 4, 2005. The completed investigation has not been submitted. . “Regrettably,” Manion informs Ramirez, “these investigations are now out of statute.”

Ream, of the officers’ union, says he fired off a letter to Manion warning him that allowing potentially bad cops to escape punishment by sitting on investigations was “either intentional wrongdoing or there’s incompetence. It’s one of two things, and both are unacceptable.” In the past 18 months, Ream says, he knows of no additional probes that missed the legal deadline. But, he adds, “We had a complaint a couple months ago — someone said ‘shit’ in front of the chief. This is something that they’ve started a full-on nine-month investigation — and assigned two detectives to it.”

Certainly, Manion inherited a mess only a savvy manager supported by a competent Board of Education could have fixed. The chaos is seen in a note Manion fired off in November 2005 after learning that school cops had piled 600 boxes of bullets on an unguarded pallet in a public hall at School Police headquarters.