The Center for Public Integrity

In response to controversy over court citations to students as young as 10, the police chief of Los Angeles’ largest school district said he’s working with school officials to reduce such tickets and establish, by mid-August, more out-of-court counseling options for kids who are cited.

But Chief Steven Zipperman, who leads the nation’s largest school police force, defended his 340 sworn officers’ authority to issue citations when officers believe it’s appropriate. Students have been cited for everything from truancy to vandalism to possessing a marker that could be used for graffiti. They’ve also been summoned to court for jaywalking, cigarette and pot smoking. Large numbers of students have additionally been cited for fisticuffs and for being disruptive inside and outside school.  

“Our number one priority is for these to be handled administratively,” inside schools, Zipperman said in a recent interview. “But sometimes a court visit is something that’s necessary.”

Zipperman has been meeting regularly with community organizers since the Center for Public Integrity and Southern California Public Radio reported this spring that Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) police had issued more than 33,5000 tickets over three years to students between 10 and 18 years of age.  The Los Angeles Unified district is about 74 percent Latino, but Latinos and especially black students have received tickets at disproportionate rates. Los Angeles Unified is not the only school district in the city of Los Angeles, but it is by far the largest.    

The Penn State child sexual-abuse scandal suggests, once again, that institutions intoxicated by power and celebrity will go to great lengths to protect their own — even at the risk of grave harm to children.

You can read the independent task-force report on the university’s assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky yourself.

In contrast, as U.S. Justice Department officials pointed out in May, there are adults who are far less well known than Penn State’s educators who deserve credit for actually doing their jobs and rescuing children from exploitation.  

In North Dakota, Tim Erickson, an agent with the North Dakota Bureau of Special Investigations, is credited with chasing down a tip from Australian law enforcement about a possible international Internet child-porn ring. Erickson’s tenacity, justice officials said, ultimately led to the rescue of young children who were sexually abused on camera in the United States and Canada. 

Acting on the Australian tip, Erickson and other agents in 2010 were led to Christian Robert Webb, the technology administrator of a North Dakota school district. Agents seized more than 40 webcam images of children being sexually abused that had been downloaded into Webb’s archives.  

Jacob Mathis was a classic underachiever and troubled child. 

The 15-year-old’s grade point average was just 0.77 and by his own accord, he had “extreme anger problems” stemming from his relationship with his stepdad. His emotional turmoil often spilled over into school and affected his conduct in the classroom. After an incident in which he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and making criminal threats, he was sentenced to probation.

Mathis’ life changed for the better after his probation officer recommended he enroll in a summer program at East Oakland teen and young adult center Youth Uprising — it utilized restorative justice, a community-focused, therapeutic process that addresses youth violence by helping perpetrators understand the roots of their anger and grasp how they have done others harm.

Restorative justice attempts to break the cycle of violence by addressing the underlying cause — often, a traumatic experience, such as physical or verbal abuse or witnessing a violent crime — and acknowledging the emotional impact of such trauma on young people. Through active communication, young people in restorative justice programs have been able to overcome their violent impulses.

By participating in Youth Uprising’s programs, Mathis said, “I learned how to sit down and talk to people about my issues. Now, it’s all good.”

Mathis said he’s even applied the restorative justice principles he’s learned to his own family dynamics. It’s allowed him to break a cycle of acting out and blaming others that could have easily led to jail. His grade point average is now up to 3.27 and not only has he not re-offended, but he now envisions going to college and studying marine biology at the University of Florida.

“I thought that because I’m from Oakland, nothing good is going to come from out of my life," said Mathis, before being exposed to restorative justice. "And now, I’m motivated to work harder in school.”

At the first-ever congressional hearing on the subject of solitary confinement, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois recently observed that it’s not always “the worst of the worst” who are subjected to the practice. Mentally-ill inmates, immigrants and juvenile offenders are put in solitary as well. And perhaps, said a series of witnesses at the hearing, the time has come to rethink the issue.

Many states are now doing just that. But the debate is not devoid of its own unique politics.

In California, for instance, a bid to require every-four-hour mental-health evaluations of minors who are “segregated” from other wards died a quick death this spring — even though the Golden State’s legislature is one of the nation’s most liberal and the measure was endorsed by the Los Angeles Times. The legislation failed by one vote to move beyond the seven-member state Senate Public Safety Committee. Three of five Democrats voted for the bill, including the Senate’s top leader, Democrat Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento. But two Democrats and the committee’s only two Republicans voted against it.

Depending on who’s talking, the idea faltered because it was flawed, unnecessary and would cost the Golden State money it doesn’t have — or it died because law-enforcement groups with savvy lobbying and financial clout leaned on key legislators to kill it. The dispute is the latest in a series of Sacramento battles over policies pitting liberal juvenile-justice reformers against cops and corrections officers.

Now that young illegal immigrants are an election-year football, Americans have an opportunity to learn a few things from the kids.

A lot of adults profess some degree of sympathy for these young people, who were born in undocumented parents’ native countries, brought here as very young children, either illegally or on visas parents overstayed. They’ve grown up here, gone to school here, speak English and feel American but are undocumented “through no fault of their own,” as both President Obama and GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney say.

But why can’t they go back to where they were born, line up and become legal “the right way?"

Young illegal immigrants have been asking the same sort of question for years, as demonstrated on forums started by so-called DREAMers. That’s the name for this group that derives from the once-bipartisan DREAM Act. The decade-plus-old failed federal proposal would have opened up a path for these youths to earn temporary legal status, and, eventually, a green card by serving in the military (which they can’t do now) or completing at least two years of college.

Here’s some of what DREAMers have learned. And they aren’t the kind of details you will get, lamented a Washington Post editorial, whenever the subject of immigration gets batted around by Romney, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — a GOP point man on the subject — and, to a lesser degree, President Obama.

Lesson one: As DREAMers now know, there is no Ellis Island-like line for them or anyone else to get into, either here on U.S. soil, or back in birth countries, to become legal immigrants. Visas to enter the United States are not open to anyone on a first-come, first-served basis, as long as they are willing to be patient and do it the “right way.”

A group of Florida public defenders is asking a state court to remove and stop sending troubled juveniles to a privately run detention facility they claim is rife with abuses. A court filing disclosed Wednesday also accuses Florida juvenile-justice officials of lax oversight and asks the court to appoint an independent monitor to investigate the Thompson Academy, a 154-bed “moderate risk” residential center in Florida’s Broward County.

Gordon Weekes, Broward County chief assistant public defender, said he has long been concerned about conditions inside the Thompson Academy in Pembroke Pines in Florida. To protect his young clients’ confidentiality, Weekes filed the public defenders’ motion in early June directly with a judge in Florida’s 17^th Judicial Circuit. Weekes disclosed it Wednesday after the motion was filed with the court clerk and copies were given to a Florida juvenile prosecutor, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice and Youth Services International (YSI), the company that runs Thompson Academy.

Broward’s public defenders represent 56 children from that county who’ve been sent to Thompson Academy for housing and treatment, Weekes said.

The motion asks the court for an order to quickly take depositions of “essential witnesses,” including former and current Thompson employees and state oversight officials. It also asks for a court order to prevent Thompson Academy employees from knowing, at this point, the identities of juveniles who have complained about alleged abuses. Weekes said he wants the order to protect the minors from possible intimidation by custodians. 

Public defenders allege, in the motion, that Thompson employees “actively smoke” marijuana at the facility and make it available to wards placed there for rehabilitation, and that food quality is poor and so “minimal” staff use it as “currency” to reward youths for certain behavior. 

In a sweeping policy change with political overtones, President Obama has announced that his administration will allow undocumented youths who grew up here to apply for work permits and spare them from deportation if they meet certain criteria.

The policy will not include a path to legal residency, a first step before applying for citizenship, so it differs from the proposed DREAM Act. That proposal once had bipartisan Congressional support but has repeatedly stalled in the face of Republican opposition. Even though the new policy falls short of the path to legal status that immigration activists would like, the change is likely to expand Obama’s appeal among crucial Latino voters in November.

Obama’s decision will also have tremendous personal impact on a population of young people who were brought here as children and have no way to pursue legal status, either here or back in birth countries, under current immigration rules.

Certain states, such as California, Arizona, Texas, New York and Florida, are home to significant numbers of these youths. And many of them have anguished over their predicament. They say they have been left with no option but to work with fake identification, or under the table, or drive without a license or not drive at all. Some have been admitted to college but barred from pursuing loans and grants. Others have given up such dreams.

In the wake of critical news reports, Los Angeles school police and administrators have agreed to rethink enforcement tactics that have led to thousands of court citations yearly for young students in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods.

The Center for Public Integrity and the Los Angeles-based Labor-Community Strategy Center each performed their own analysis recently of previously unreleased citation records obtained from the Los Angeles Unified School District Police Department, the nation’s largest school police force. The Center found that between 2009 and the end of 2011, Los Angeles school police officers issued more than 33,500 tickets to students 18 and younger, with more than 40 percent handed out to kids 14 and 10 years old. That was an average of about 30 tickets a day. A large portion of the tickets for younger children were for disturbing the peace, which can include a physical fight or using threatening or disruptive language. 

Some parents and concerned juvenile-justice judges have questioned whether it’s appropriate for such minor indiscretions to be handled by police, rather than school authorities. 

Arguing that heavy police ticketing of children is counterproductive, Manuel Criollo of the Labor Community Strategy Center said his group has met twice with L.A. Unified School Police Chief Steven Zipperman and Michelle King, a deputy district superintendent. A third meeting is expected to take place this month.

Previously undisclosed school police records from New York City are raising new concerns about students getting heavily ticketed for vague allegations of disorderly conduct.   

More than 70 percent of court summonses issued to New York City school students between January and the end of March this year were for disruptive behavior, according to a new analysis released by the American Civil Liberties Union of New York this week.

“The high percentage of disorderly conduct charges — a catchall category that could encompass all kinds of typical misbehavior — indicates that NYPD officers are getting involved in non-criminal disciplinary incidents,” said Udi Ofer, the ACLU New York’s advocacy director, in a statement.  The NYPD took control of school safety in 1998. Armed officers are assigned to patrol schools, along with thousands of school safety officers who are unarmed but have the authority to search and arrest students.

The ACLU’s concerns mirror a burgeoning nationwide debate over the proper role of school police, and whether officers are intervening too often in matters that used to be settled in school without handcuffs or court citations.

For example, newly released data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity showed that school police in Los Angeles have been issuing thousands of court citations each year to students, including 11 and 12-year-olds, for disturbing-the-peace offenses, including scuffles at school.