LBUSD’s Step Away from Policing Students Is a Step Forward

As a former LAPD Deputy Chief, and before that a captain in South Central Los Angeles, I have lived through the history of police officers being assigned to schools. What I witnessed then – and what the research and recitations of harm now confirm – should serve as a warning to us all: policing students does more to criminalize children than to protect them.

When officers first arrived on campuses, principals and teachers gradually surrendered their traditional disciplinary role. The assistant principal – the school disciplinarian – began to vanish. In their place stood uniformed officers whose training prepared them for the streets, not the classroom. Instead of guiding young people through mistakes and misbehavior, these officers introduced the possibility of citations, arrest reports and criminal records. What should have been teachable moments too often became permanent labels.

Later, as a special operations commander and still later as deputy chief in charge of training, I saw another well-intentioned but deeply misguided program take hold: DARE. At the time, it was marketed as innovative, even lifesaving. But it placed officers in classrooms as educators in subjects they were not qualified to teach. The result was not prevention, but mistrust. To this day, I consider DARE a program that harmed more than it helped, embedding fear and confusion where trust and guidance were needed most.

That is why I see the current direction of the Long Beach Unified School District as both welcome and necessary. LBUSD is stepping up to correct harmful practices of the past. According to the Sept. 17 School Board agenda, LBUSD’s new plan would remove the ability of school safety officers (SSOs) to arrest students for most low-level offenses and instead create diversion pathways designed to keep children out of the criminal justice system. “We should be using restorative justice and school-based discipline first,” one district administrator was quoted as saying, underscoring a shift away from treating schools like precincts.

And this isn’t just rhetoric. The board’s own agenda materials make clear that the district is formalizing this new direction. The proposed update to LBUSD Board Resolution 071805-B seeks to reduce reliance on outside police agencies like LBPD and the Sheriff’s Department and give trained school safety staff the authority to resolve incidents internally. The plan builds on successful pilots in restorative justice and diversion, where every single case referred last year – including trespassing, petty theft, and simple battery – was dismissed after the student completed interventions.

LBUSD has already been recognized as an official diversion provider by the Los Angeles County Department of Youth Development and the Long Beach City Prosecutor’s Office, and the district has secured $2 million in grant funding to expand the program over the next three years.

Not surprisingly, some SSOs have voiced concern. One officer told the LB Post that the new policy “ties our hands” and could make campuses less safe. But we have to ask: safe for whom? Safe for the adult comfort of defaulting to enforcement – or safe for the children who deserve to learn without the shadow of criminal labeling hanging over every mistake?

This is not a call to ignore serious crimes. As LBUSD officials explained, incidents involving weapons, major assaults, or other serious felonies will still be referred to the police. But the routine disciplinary matters that make up the vast majority of school incidents – scuffles, defiance, truancy, vaping – will return to the people best positioned to handle them: teachers, administrators, and counselors.

Now, as a Long Beach resident, I see children in my neighborhood growing up in our schools. It gives me hope to know that our school board is acting to protect their future. By restoring discipline to the educational setting, LBUSD is putting trust back in the hands of educators – the people best equipped to guide our children through challenges toward better choices.

The choice before us is clear. Do we continue to perpetuate the harms of programs like DARE and the criminalization of student misbehavior? Or do we finally learn from experience, and place education – not enforcement – at the center of school discipline?

LBUSD has chosen the latter. And I commend them for it.

Stephen Downing is a resident of Long Beach and a retired LAPD deputy chief. He writes on policing, civil liberties and the rule of law in Exposing the Con, Defending Democracy. You can follow his work at stephendowning.substack.com.