Posted on 04/23/2024 2:28:42 PM PDT by grundle
After school on April 15, a fight broke out a couple of blocks from Washington Preparatory High School in South L.A. In a cellphone video of the incident, an adult can be heard saying off camera, just before the fight began: "Let them ... fight. If they want to fight, let the ... police [inaudible]. ... I’m not breaking up s—. I don’t give a f—."
The adult who apparently declined to intervene was a member of the "safe passages" program designed to make sure students get to and from school unharmed, according to students and a senior union official.
Less than 10 seconds after the fight began, three shots rang out and a student was struck. He collapsed and was pronounced dead at a hospital.
School district officials referred questions about the incident to the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, which is investigating the shooting, and L.A. Unified provided mixed messages about whether the alleged conduct of the safe-passages staff member was something the district would look into.
The incident in an unincorporated neighborhood near South L.A. is adding fuel to a debate over campus safety in the nation's second-largest school system and the reduced role of school police. Students and community activists — many of them Black — joined by the leadership of the teachers union, have called for the complete dismantling of the school police department. The presence of any officer on a campus, they say, "criminalizes" students, making them targets for potential harassment and undermining the role of school as a nurturing, academically focused environment.
Schools have responded by increasing their reliance on safe passages, in which district staff, volunteers and hired organizations visibly monitor students' routes between home and school. These workers are meant to be easily recognized by the yellow jackets or vests they wear.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
I guess “Safety Officer” looks good on the resume. Or to your parole officer.
And they give you a cool yellow vest!
Maybe it’s the criminals who are “criminalizing” themselves.
This is SO typical…blame everything and everybody except the criminals.
He would have been shot too.
Safe space defect.
Sounds like this student was nurtured to death...
We should Celebrate Black Culture, if they want to kill themselves and each other, so be it. The least they could do is get their own YouTube channel to broadcast the killings, maybe get some online betting too.
Homicide Preparatory High School in South L.A.
Unless the yellow vested safe passage guy was armed and authorized to fire on criminal thugs, he would be smart not to intervene if these are HS or junior HS age kids. At first I was thinking he was walking elementary school age kids and thinking he should have got involved to break up a kiddie fight (although that could still be risky). Unarmed against HS or post HS thugs in LA, yeah, no thanks.
I noticed something about teams at my several employers. They’d appoint people and you end up with “teams” where the members make the right noises but try to be as far as possible from the action. It’s one of those sounds-good ideas from above that you really need the right people for. For dealing with school violence where the perps can be 275 pounds, you need someone who’s basically a mixed martial artist otherwise they’re just going to get hurt. “Appointing” your average Joe is just stupid. Even if he’s a volunteer, if he isn’t trained, he isn’t qualified.
Students. Bang bang.
A lot has been narrowed down with those few words.
The ‘other’ Yellow Vests, beside those who used to protest in France.
They got what they demanded, right? Drastic reduction of police in the area.
Am I wrong in thinking these safety officers are slightly glorified crossing guards for street intersections and not really expected to take a bullet from gangbanger hoods who shoot at students over some alleged disrespectings?
Police have the tools to handle most situations. And that includes lethal weapons as a last resort. Also, police usually have qualified immunity if things go south.
A “safety team member” has none of that. Therefore, a safety team member would be crazy to physically intervene in a serious fight. Call 911. Try to talk the combatants down if you can. But that’s about it.
Side note: I was an urban high school teacher for many years. I broke up my share of fights. Got sent to the hospital for my efforts once. That was years ago. Things are much worse now.
A person on another site posted a section of the rule book for Safety Officers in this particular program (Safety Officers are volunteers and not law enforcement). The rules say that Safety Officers are not to get involved in violent incidents, and that police are supposed to handle fights and other violence.
I believe it was in NJ (?) where a principal was arrested for assault when grabbed a student in order to prevent a fight.
Regardless of the circumstances, it would be stupid to ever touch a student.
The tort lawyers will be swarming. LAUSD has deep pockets.
Sounds like the school district is ready to wash their hands of the killing and to move forward.
All that remains to be said is they “condemn the killing in the strongest possible terms” and that they are “reaching out” to community safety volunteers to “make sure nothing like this every happens again.”
Paraphrasing...”school has been trying to minimize police presence.” Well I think we may have found the problem Sherlock. How stupid can you get. Limiting police presence might work in Iceland but this is the United States of America, which is possibly the most dangerous country on earth right now.
Having worked in a school like this, most likely, the safety officer who said, “Let them fight...” had probably intervened between the two multiple times to no avail.
It’s a no-win situation.
This is a culture determined to double down on stupid and kill themselves, as well as myriad innocent bystanders, in their tribal warfare.
As long as they keep it to themselves, who cares at this point.
In a post Christian, hedonistic, neo pagan decadent culture, there is an indifference to human life. Sorry but many Americans no longer share the commonly held decent values that once formed the country’s unifying consensus. Neither the shooter nor the safety team adult will be held accountable and the dead student will be quickly forgotten.
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