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Police to encourage attendance before issuing truancy tickets to LAUSD students
A student on his way to school walks past a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) school bus.
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Police to encourage attendance before issuing truancy tickets to LAUSD students
Police to encourage attendance before issuing truancy tickets to LAUSD students
Activists welcomed a new Los Angeles School Police policy Thursday that ends what they called overly aggressive truancy sweeps.
Laura Faer of the Public Counsel Law Center says in a recent five-year period the LAPD and school police issued nearly 50,000 tickets within LAUSD boundaries.
"We were seeing children who were on their way to school, their bus maybe had broken down, they were a few minutes late, or they had dropped off a sibling at another school site," she said. "They’re on their way to school and there are police flanking the outside of the school — so they’re trying to get to school and they’re being handed out tickets."
Faer says prior to the new policy, police frisked and handcuffed many students. Critics of the earlier truancy policy says the dropout rate increases with truancy sweeps, $250 tickets and mandatory court appearances for parents. They also say it results in ethnic and racial profiling.
Now, much of that will change: Officers will no longer give truancy tickets near campus and will encourage students to get to school instead of automatically issuing a ticket. There will be no school police ticket task forces or truancy sweeps within the first 90 minutes of school.
Those tickets, Laura Faer says, actually ended up having the opposite effect because students had to miss class to go to court.
School police Chief Steven Zipperman says his officers support goals to improve attendance and graduation rates.
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