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Seize the Time!

Strategy Center, Bus Riders Union  and

Taking Action Social Justice Clubs in L.A. High Schools

Call on LAUSD to Cancel $67 Million Contract with Los Angeles School Police Department and Invest Those Funds to Retain and Attract Black Students Who Have Suffered the Most Under the School/Police System

The Strategy Center, Bus Riders Union,  and Taking Action are Enthusiastic to Work with Students Deserve and other Movement Groups to Win this Victory Now!

Please Read, Join Our Campaign, Contribute to support this work,  write, call, march to every LAUSD board member to support these demands

(See links below)

June 7, 2020

LAUSD Superintendent

Austin Beutner

Sent via email to: austin.beutner@lausd.net

Dear Superintendent Austin Beutner,

The Labor/Community Strategy Center, Bus Riders Union, and Our Taking Action Social Justice Clubs in LAUSD High School are asking you to cancel the $67 million contract with the Los Angeles School Police and invest those funds in retaining and attracting Black students—as we have for the past 5 years.

June 7, 2020

LAUSD Superintendent

Austin Beutner

Sent via email to: austin.beutner@lausd.net

Dear Superintendent Austin Beutner,

The Labor/Community Strategy Center, Bus Riders Union, and Our Taking Action Social Justice Clubs in LAUSD High School are asking you to cancel the $67 million contract with the Los Angeles School Police and invest those funds in retaining and attracting Black students—as we have for the past 5 years.  

 In Minneapolis, the public school board voted unanimously to terminate its contract with the city’s police department on Tuesday in response to George Floyd’s death. “I firmly believe that it is completely unnatural to have police in schools,” school board member Kimberly Caprini. In Portland, Oregon this week, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero announced that he planned to discontinue the presence of Portland Police Bureau officers in the city’s largest district and would increase spending on counselors and social workers.” We urge you to do the same. In our view, too many public officials in Los Angeles perceive themselves as liberal and as such, are slow to respond, and even resistant and at times react with hostility to grassroots movements making structural demands beyond what they think are needed.  The entire nation is now looking in the mirror. We urge you to provide the leadership to end the contract with the LASPD and invest those funds in retaining and attracting Black students now.

The entire concept of “school police” is a reflection of a colonialist and racist worldview. Today, the public schools, even with their best efforts, continue the pattern of “Indian Residential Schools” in which the goal or at least the outcome is the breaking of the spirit, subjugation, and humiliation of Black and Latinx students to bend them to the will of an oppressive white society. We know there are many who do not believe they are perpetuating those pernicious impacts, but we look to the best intentioned administrators, teachers, and board members to fight for the end of “School police” in order to stop inflicting pain and racial abuse on Black and Latinx students and families. While we can of course enumerate specific abuses of the LASPD we are arguing that the daily experience of Black and Latinx students being patrolled by armed police creates a terrible and terrifying sense of normalcy that is in itself a cultural and racial assault on their development as full human beings and has profoundly traumatic impacts. 

For the Strategy Center and our Taking Action Social Justice Clubs in the L.A. High Schools this is not an abstract concern—it is a life and death project to which we have dedicated years of our work. This past summer the Strategy Center worked with 8 LAUSD high school students from Taking Action Racial Justice Clubs who participated in our Transformative Organizers Internship Program. The students worked 2 to 3 days a week doing door to door public education for our Campaign for Urban Reconstruction—Free Public Transportation, No Police on MTA Buses and Trains, No Police in LAUSD Schools, Stop MTA Racial Profiling of Black Passengers, No Cars in Los Angeles. All of these demands were radical, structural, and in our view winnable and urgently needed. The students spoke with more than 2,000 community Black and Latinx residents in the Crenshaw/Leimert Park area, and at many community events including the Compton Pride gathering and the Central Avenue Jazz Festival.  Of course, not everyone agreed with us. But as a whole, our summer involved thousands of thoughtful, heart-to-heart conversations—with students mainly speaking with adults. The main responses were overwhelmingly positive. The vast majority believed that the community, the trains, the buses, the stores, the streets, the highways, and the schools were over-policed, but many had lost hope that anything could be done to change such powerful institutions. But, especially after conversations, many people said, in English and Spanish, “This is the first time in a long time I have heard ideas about getting rid of the police in so many of our institutions and cutting police spending.” Many community residents, Black and Latinx, told them, “We are very proud of you. You have done your homework, you know your facts, keep going!” And yes, 500 people signed cards in support of the entire campaign that we send to Mayor Eric Garcetti. If they were so sympathetic last summer imagine where they would be today! We also had a productive conversation with Board Member Monica Garcia who while not agreeing at the time with our proposal to end the LASPD in the schools, listened with great interest and concern when our student leaders explained that many young girls and women had told them that many LASPD officers were flirting with them, and often they would decide to flirt back in an effort to “disarm” them. Our leaders, the vast majority of whom are young women, discussed with great anger how the existence of police is already causing personality distortions among young Black and Chicana students who feel they have to either suffer disrespectful behavior put forth by officers as a “joke” or even pretend to agree to avoid greater police intimidation and abuse. Again, these are structural issues of the personality development of young Black and Latina women go way beyond disciplining individual officers. It is only by ending the contract with the LASPD that these problems can be solved. 

The Los Angeles School Police Budget of $67 million per year, and $670 million over the next ten years, must be immediately re-programmed to provide long overdue affirmative action through targeted funding for Black children and their families. Today, Black children are only 8% of the LAUSD school system. Still, there are 50,000 Black students in your system whose lives must be given the highest priority. We all have to look squarely at how Los Angeles’ Black population, 750,000 people and 25 percent of L.A. city’s population in 1970, is now only 350,000 and only 9 percent of the city population.  These cruel racist outcomes to drive Black people out of L.A. and every urban center are the product of conscious public policy—a massive white backlash against Black workers, speculation in the housing market to make housing unaffordable, government refusal to build high quality low-income housing. The central feature throughout has been grotesque anti-Black police practices.  From the 1965 Watts rebellion to the 1992 L.A. Urban Rebellion to the explosive present—George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Black Lives Matter, Get Your Knee of Our Necks, Defund the Police— rebellion. We hope you will agree that the time is now for the LAUSD to defund the LASPD by ending the contract with them.

There are many Black organizations challenging discriminatory LAUSD school policies that have led to such low proficiency in academic subjects among beautiful Black children. We hope you all agree that this is not the fault of the students and their families but another indictment of the institutional anti-Black, racially discriminatory failure of U.S. public education—and yes, the LAUSD. It should be obvious that the very existence of any police in the schools is a cultural assault, inherently intimidating and traumatic, and a profound impediment to Black student achievement and yes, the achievement of Latinx students as well. The very existence of “school police” make a clear statement that the LAUSD believes that LAUSD Students, overwhelmingly Black and Latinx, present a threat to the school system and themselves. They are criminalized as a group and are well aware of the trauma of that institutional arrangement. Black parents and grandparents, and virtually all dedicated teachers, psychiatrists, and social service providers know the most painful truth—that Black children face a level of societal aggression and violence, reflected in the overall concepts of “behavior modification and discipline” that create a terrifying individual and collective trauma.  Today, Black children are policed from the cradle to the grave and too often, sent to an early grave because of police violence.  Today, Black and Latinx children from pre-school on become aware that somehow “school” and “police” are virtually inseparable. This separation must be made immediately by cancelling the LAUSD contract with the LASPD.

We have seen you and Board Members Monica Garcia and Jackie Goldberg speak eloquently at the MTA board meeting in support of free public transportation for all LAUSD students. We appreciate your acknowledgment of the work of our Bus Riders Union for 20 years of calling for that policy. We were deeply moved by Superintendent Beutner’s understanding of the destructive impacts of MTA present policies—that families cannot afford $24 a month cost per student for a bus/rail pass  (and we hope you also support our call for free public transportation for their parents who certainly cannot afford $50 to $100 a month for theirs).  All of you addressed the racially discriminatory underpinnings of restricting the travel of LAUSD students and the racial impacts of the MTA’s tickets for the non-existent crime of what the MTA calls “fare evasion.” We know that it is another reflection of the omnipresent anti-Black police state since 50% of all tickets and arrests on MTA buses and trains are imposed on Black passengers. MTA riders cannot afford the fares and have already paid four ½ cent sales taxes to give the MTA a $7 billion a year budget. We urge  your support on our effort to stop MTA attacks on Black passengers as well—many LAUSD student and parents—by supporting our call for the MTA to stop all fare collections and allow those who can pay to do so on the honor system—instead of the MTA’s present dis-honor system.  

Having seen you take leadership at the MTA to get board members—Mayor Eric Garcetti, Supervisor Hilda Solis, City Councilman Mike Bonin,  to support your/our motion for free public transportation for LAUSD Students, we ask you to take the same leadership at the LAUSD—de-funding and ending the contract with the LASPD and investing those funds towards Black achievement. That would be such a critical intervention in history, and we can’t achieve it without your support.   

The Strategy Center and dozens of other civil rights groups have had a long and difficult history with the LAUSD in challenging every form of anti-Black, and anti-Latinx racial profiling, harassment, tickets, and arrests. In every instance the LAUSD has finally, but not until years of our organizing, stepped forward to make significant policy changes for the better. All of those changes would not have taken place without the work of the Strategy Center, Youth Justice Coalition, Public Counsel, ACLU, CADRE, Dignity in Schools LA, Community Coalition and others who invested years to win important changes. We urge you to move with decisiveness now!

In the fall 2011 our coalition secured directives from the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles School Police Department to end the issuing of tardy/truancy tickets and arrests. In February 2012 we won an amendment of LA Municipal Code to stop the LASPD, and LAPD from arresting and ticketing students on their way to school for “truancy. These repressive policies had pushed students and their parents toward a school to jail track rather than a school to college, school to success track.  The Strategy Center students chanted, “Hey, LAUSD. I’m pre-med, pre-job. I’m not pre-prison!” But why in the world did those policies exist in the first place?  Why did it take us years to reverse them? 

In May 2013 – The Strategy Center, Inner City Struggle, Community Coalition, Brothers, Sons, Selves, CADRE, Public Counsel and others got the LAUSD board to pass the School Climate Bill of Rights. This included rescinding the clearly anti-Black and anti-Black male racially constructed violation called “willful defiance.” Many board members came to agree that while Black boys are only 4 percent of the LAUSD students they received more than 50% of discipline, suspensions and expulsions for “willful defiance.” We finally convinced you that the category of “willful defiance” (which for white students was called “boys will be boys”) was anti-Black on its face.  But why did we have to spend more than a decade challenging, thread by thread, a fabric of racism and police abuse that we could never unravel and should not have been constructed in the first place? 

Then, in August, 2014, shortly after the Ferguson rebellions over the murder of Michael Brown, we learned that the LASPD and LAUSD had, under the Department of Defense 1033 Program, obtained 1 tank, 3 grenade launchers, and 61 M-16 to use against their own students and communities—behind the backs of parents, teachers, and students, and civil rights groups such as ours. So why, when we were negotiating with the Board in good faith, were they bringing lethal weapons of destruction to use against protesting Black and Latinx students, parents, and community members? Answer, they were clearly expecting the mass rebellions that we are seeing today.  Remember when the Strategy Center Taking Action Clubs brought 100 students to your board meeting wearing papier Mache vests and chanting Student’s Ain’t Bulletproof?” The LAUSD board walked out and shut down the meeting! The Strategy Center fought for another 2 years on the campaign to End Military Racism in the LAUSD.  In May 2016 we convinced the LAUSD and LASPD to return the weapons—1 tank, 3 grenade launchers, and 61 M-16s, back to the Department of Defense. We are deeply appreciative of Board Member Monica Garcia for working with the Strategy Center to issue a public apology for the LAUSD actions and to work with Chief Steven Zipperman to return the weapons. Chief Zipperman demonstrated courage and sincere repentance by returning the weapons and writing an apology to the Strategy Center and the larger community for his actions. He was the only police chief in the U.S. to return the weapons and our campaign was the only one that succeeded in that objective—of course after 2 years of protests. 

But this still cannot explain why the LAUSD and LASPD chose to bring weapons of community destruction into the school system and why they still have lethal weapons at their disposal. This situation goes way beyond good or bad intentions. The entire institution of School Police Must Go

In rethinking our own history of all this impressive organizing work by all the organizations mentioned, it raises a terrifying truth. The LAUSD, by making the most minimal concessions one at a time, each one taking years and years, whether consciously or not, was objectively so recalcitrant that it could only have had the intention of breaking the will of grassroots groups and keep the existing structures of domination in place. No, our will is not broken. But yes, the racist militarization of the public schools must stop now. 

We know that one of our close allies, Students Deserve, is also calling to defund the LASPD and that many other groups want to join this campaign. We understand this will require a coalitional effort. Having had such a long history of working with the LAUSD board and eventually reaching positive outcomes, we hope to have a conversation with you as part of a process of expanded input. We urge you to end the contract with the LASPD immediately and make a commitment that you will terminate the LASPD contract and execute its implementation rapidly.

We hope to hear from you,

Eric Mann, Barbara Lott-Holland, Channing Martinez, Brigette Amaya, Gionna Magdelano, Kimberly Rochal, Angeles Soriano, Kassandra Soriano, and Sofia Tielemans

Organizers of the No Police in the LAUSD School Campaign

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