Kids or crooks?

• Author: Shackford, Scott
• Position: Police in schools - Brief article

Los Angeles Unified School District has decided it's time to start treating students more like students and less like parolees.

Los Angeles has regularly used school police to discipline students. In 2012 the Center for Public Integrity and a local civil rights group, the Labor-Community Strategy Center, studied three years of police activity in schools and determined that officers were handing out an average of 30 citations a day. Forty percent of the citations were going to kids 14 and younger, often for low-level problems such as tardiness and "disturbing the peace."

School leaders, community members, and even local juvenile court judges had begun objecting to the number of students receiving citations, which

require court appearances and often lead to...