A few Los Angeles Parents are battling the city’s most progressive activist groups, with violence in the school district nearly doubling since police were removed from school campuses following riots over the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Maria Luisa Palma, a member of the Los Angeles Parents Advisory Committee, organized an independent petition in February calling for return of the police on school campuses as district data found violent incidents increased from 2,315 in the 2018-2019 school year to 4,569 in 2022-2023.
“We’ve seen a huge increase from our kids,” Palma told Fox News Digital in an interview. “We constantly hear about fights and open drug use in bathrooms. We see proof of it in the data…so we have clearer information. It’s out of control like we hear it from our kids.”
Palma’s petition has received more than 2,500 signatures so far from parents from more than 300 schools and all seven school districts. She said “more is better”. There is no signature limit.
LAPD officers (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
In 2021, Students Deserve, a grassroots progressive student organization that advocates for the abolition of police in schools, lobbied the LAUSD and school board to defund the police from the school district. Los Angeles.
The group argued that the presence of police officers on school campuses often led to the criminalization of students, particularly those from Black and brown communities, and contributed to a hostile and intimidating environment that hindered learning.
“We want schools to divest from criminalization and policing,” the Students Deserve website states. “We want schools to invest in us as Black, Muslim, undocumented, Indigenous, and queer young people from poor and working-class communities of color. We are following the lead of Black Lives Matter in demanding that our schools defund the police and stand up for Black lives. “
Students Deserve, in close collaboration with Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles and California Teacher’s Association, successfully got the school district to re-evaluate its budget priorities and reallocate $25 million from school police to alternative support services, such as counselors, mental health professionals and restorative justice programs .
A BLM protester projects a “defund the police” message on a wall at the Oakland Police Department, January 29, 2023. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Many representatives of deserving students will appear at board meetings, Palma said, and urge members not to invest funds in the school police department.
“They’re the ones who helped create this situation in the first place,” Palma said. “That’s the group that the board listens to, and so they continue to oppose what the parents want.”
The school board voted unanimously in February 2021 to remove police officers stationed in schools and previously rejected a resolution in September 2021 that would have reinstated police.
A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department vehicle (Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department)
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“This is not a question of whether or not the district has the funds to fully fund a functioning police department capable of safely patrolling our schools and stationing officers on our campuses,” Palma said. “It is a political statement aimed at appeasing the refusal of funding for the police movement.”
The LAUSD school board is developing a new safety plan. However, the commission did not indicate whether the plan included a return of police officers. to schools.
