Militarizing Public School Security: Classroom Cops Will Have AR-15s

When students in the Compton Unified School
District in California return to class after summer break is over,
they may be surprised to find that the campus police officers are
prepared for all-out war. Over the summer, the district’s school
board authorized the school police to beef up their arsenals by
purchasing semi-automatic weapons.

Compton isn’t even the first public school district to do so; a
dozen others have instructed the cops to buy SWAT-style weaponry,

according to ABC-7:

“I was extremely opposed to the police officers having rifles;
however, the statistics are chilling,” said Satra Zurita, Compton
Unified School District Board member.

The Compton School Board’s approval of the AR-15 for school
police in July was unanimous. They are not alone. LAUSD tells
Eyewitness News they have comparable weapons. So do Fontana School
Police. The numbers are growing.

What were those statistics? School Police Chief William Wu
explained to district officials that some mass shooters
wear body armor (a whopping 5 percent!), and cops have to get
within 25 yards of their target to take anyone down with mere
handguns. Therefore, they need AR-15s. Without better guns, school
cops just aren’t prepared for terrorist attacks, mass shootings,
meteor strikes, etc.

Never mind, of course, that despite random fluctuations from
year to year, mass shootings are
not becoming more frequent or more deadly, and schools are

among the safest places for kids, all things considered. It
would seem to me, then, that Compton is preparing for an
exceedingly unlikely worst case scenario.

Is there any harm in being prepared, anyway? Some members of the
school community certainly seem to think so,
according to 89.3 KPCC (emphasis mine):

But some community members are upset about the policy,
questioning the utility of having such high-powered firearms
in the hands of school police officers.

“The school police has been very notorious in the community and
in reality has never had to shoot anyone before,” said Francisco
Orozco, a recent Dominguez High School graduate and founder of the
Compton Democratic Club. “So this escalation of weapons we
feel is very unnecessary.”

Orozco said the police could better focus on day-to-day security
concerns on campus, rather than arming themselves for a worst-case
scenario. He also pointed to a lawsuit filed last year by
parents in the district, alleging racial profiling by Compton
school police officers — as well as recent allegations by students
of excessive force — as evidence of a rift between the department
and the community.

“The school police has not even earned the right to carry
handguns,” Orozco said.

As the recent events in
Ferguson have made clear, a more militarized police force
damages the relationship between the cops and the community. If the
people already don’t trust the cops, arming them to high heaven
certainly won’t help matters.

Wu defended the new weapons policy as an “effective tool” to
confront threats to students’ lives:

It is a worst-case scenario, and SWAT teams train for it: an
active shooter storming a school, a gunman armed with high-power
weapons and wearing body armor.

“Seeing in the North Hollywood shootings when they were wearing
the soft body armor, bullets were hitting them but having no effect
in slowing them down,” said Wu.

And it can take time for a fully equipped SWAT team to get to a
school.

“Any extra 30 seconds, one minute, two minutes that we can’t
stop the threat exposes our kids to more unreasonable danger,” said
Wu.

District policy will require the cops to store their new weapons
in their vehicles, however, so in the event of a shooting, the
officers would still have to take a few minutes to retrieve the
rifles.

If such new security measures are actually necessary, Wu hasn’t
made a very strong case. Just because something bad
could happen—even though it’s astronomically
unlikely—is not reason enough.

In any case, those who oppose the creeping militarization of the
police certainly have their work cut out for them, if even security
officers in extremely safe school environments are geared for
battle.