LOS ANGELES (AP) - Police in the Los Angeles Unified School District should be prohibited from using pepper spray and blood-stopping neck holds, Superintendent Austin Beutner said Monday.
Beutner said he will recommend that the board of the nation’s second-largest school district adopt the policy changes before the school year resumes in August.
The superintendent wants to bar carotid holds, an arm hold that cuts off blood flow in the carotid arteries of the neck. It can quickly cause unconsciousness and can kill if held too long.
Many law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, have suspended or ended use of the holds in the wake of the death of George Floyd after a Minneapolis police used his knee to pin Floyd to the ground for nearly nine minutes as Floyd said he couldn’t breathe.
Beutner also said that a committee of community members will make recommendations about school police operations to the board “as soon as possible.”
The district has about 400 police officers. Beutner said they are “trained differently” from metropolitan police. School police investigated 150 threats of mass shootings on campus last year and handled more than 100,000 reports of incidents and have never fired a weapon on campus, the superintendent said.
“But we cannot ignore legitimate concerns and criticism that students and other members in the school community have about all forms of law enforcement,” Beutner said. “The culture and climate of schools must be founded on inclusion and respect. No person should feel the presence of a safety officer on a campus as an indictment of them or their character.”
He noted that the district previously changed other policing policies. Beginning next month, the district will end random checks of students for weapons using metal-detecting wands.
Beutner’s remarks at his weekly briefing came days after the board of United Teachers Los Angeles, the powerful teachers union, voted to call for defunding the school police department and using the $63 million budget for counseling and other student services, the Daily News of Los Angeles reported.
Gil Gamez, president of the L.A. School Police Association, which is the police officers’ union, said officers are needed on campus to reduce conflicts and keep the peace.
“I’m not trained in homicide, I’m trained in school and school cultures,” he told the Daily News. “UTLA is putting their students at risk, their own members at risk - everyone, from the principal to the custodian. They say police officers (are) detrimental to mental and emotional well being, but it’s to the contrary.”
A police spokesperson said that in the last three years, school police used pepper spray 34 times out of 188 use-of-force incidents, the Daily News said.
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