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EDITORIAL
Create parent patrols
(Published February 9, 2004)

Many D.C. residents and parents, while calling for tightened security at D.C. public schools, are expressing legitimate concerns about the prospect of turning learning institutions into armed camps with uniformed, gun-toting Metropolitan Police officers roaming the halls.

Prompted by the horrific shooting death of a 17-year-old student in a first-floor hallway at Ballou Senior High as classes were changing on Feb. 2, city officials’ promises to improve school security should be implemented in a reasoned manner – not as a knee-jerk response to what is surely among the worst examples of street violence spilling into the District’s schools.

However, the mayor’s recent directive that Police Chief Charles Ramsey devise a plan for taking over school security duties, which are now handled by unarmed private security guards, needn’t be greeted with alarm.

If the school system’s $45.6 million security contract were working, guns would not be getting into schools. The current, expensive security measures are obviously ineffective.

The Metropolitan Police Department rightly should be ultimately responsible for security in all D.C. government buildings – including public schools. That shouldn’t mean that sworn and armed D.C. police officers need to be pulled off neighborhood street patrols to monitor hallways and doorways.

Some parents, like D.C. Congress of PTAs President Darlene Allen, are urging the creation of neighborhood patrol squads within the schools. Allen, whose own children attended Anacostia Senior High – where a 16-year-old student was fatally shot just outside the school’s doors last Oct. 30, believes the patrols would help bring order to school corridors by making school officials partner with people who have a vested interest in maintaining neighborhood safety. "Whatever happened to community policing?" she asks. The patrols, similar to the anti-crime "orange hat" groups, could be supervised by D.C. police.

Northeast Washington restaurateur Jim Stiegman, who has high praise for police work that recently led to the fingering of four men who allegedly murdered three of his workers last year at Colonel Brooks’ Tavern, also is among residents who express serious reservations about making armed police officers the staple of school security efforts. Stiegman says he would rather see those officers patrolling the community and suggests that city officials hire unemployed parents of D.C. schoolchildren to provide security within their own children’s schools. Such an arrangement, he notes, would make a small dent in the District’s high unemployment, while at the same time improve concerned parents’ economic situation and directly involve them in their children’s schooling.

The deaths of D.C. high school juniors Devin Fowlkes and James Richardson in the last few months have graphically illustrated what everybody already knows: Guns kill. And the presence of two armed D.C. police officers, stationed outside Anacostia Senior High, did not protect Devin Fowlkes. They merely witnessed his murder.

Introducing guns, even if carried by police officers, into the mix of routine school security measures would only put schoolchildren steps closer to the potential of becoming firearms statistics.

There is a better way to keep children safer.