The Death of in Loco Parentis

Ibid. The minority commissions were created in the aftermath of the school protests in the 1960s and early 1970s as advisory to the Board of Education. The commissions that took a position on corporal punishment were the Mexican American Educational Commission, created in 1969; the Black Educational Commission, created in 1970; and the Asian-American Education Commission, created in 1971. George LaNoue and Bruce Smith. The Politics of School Decentralization (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1973), 69–70.Google Scholar

U.S. Congress, Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Our Nation’s Schools—A Report Card: ‘A’ in School Violence and Vandalism (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 3.Google Scholar

California Ad Hoc Committee on the Prevention and Management of Conflict and Crime in the Schools. Final Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Prevention and Management of Conflict and Crime in the Schools to Evelle J. Younger, Attorney General, Wilson Riles, State Superintendent of Public Instruction (California Department of Justice: Sacramento, 1973), 2.Google Scholar

Julilly Kohler-Hausmann. “‘The Attila the Hun Law’: New York State’s Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State.” Journal of Social History 44 (2010): 71–93, 73;CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Michael Flamm. Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press: 2005);Google Scholar

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Josh Sides. L.A. City Limits : African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 194–196.Google Scholar

As with the delinquency scare in the 1950s, the reality behind the juvenile crime scare in the 1970s was somewhat less alarming than the rhetoric. As Robert Rubel noted in his extensive review of research and reports on school crime and violence published in the 1960s and 1970s, “the purposes of these reports were not primarily research.” Rather, the primary purpose of the reports was to raise “public awareness to the nature and extent of changes in pupils in public schools,” and they did this in part by publishing data in the most sensationalistic way possible. Moreover, the data upon which they relied were uneven and inconsistent — collected through different methods in different states, districts and schools, or, presented to committees anecdotally by district and school representatives. Inconsistent collection methods meant that student behavior that may have been labeled at one school as assault, for instance, might have been termed a “skirmish” at another school, and not even recorded at all at still another school. Robert Rubel. The Unruly School: Disorders, Disruptions, and Crimes (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977), 33. The exception to this was the Safe Schools Study, which was published after Rubel’s book. It reported on survey data gathered from a nationally representative sample of students, teachers, and principals from thousands of schools, and it was able to offer a base-line report of school crime and violence—although even this baseline was created by self-reports. It found that approximately 11 percent of the nation’s secondary school students were victims of theft, although 80 percent of those thefts involved money or property worth $10 or less. Teachers reported thefts at roughly the same rate. About 1.3 percent of secondary school students, 2.1 percent of junior high school students, and one half of one percent of teachers reported being physically attacked in a one-month period.Google Scholar

National Institute of Education. Violent Schools-Safe Schools (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978). The study has since been criticized for its methodology and others have re-analyzed its data.Google Scholar

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Richard Lawrence. School Crime and Juvenile Justice. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 18–19.Google Scholar

“Terror in Schools,” 52; see also, “In Public Schools,” 9; “High Schools, Too, Have a Crime Problem,” U.S. News & World Report 71.21 (1971): 26; National Institute of Education. Violent Schools-Safe Schools, 6. For opinions and reports asserting that the rise in school crime was not limited to urban or desegregating districts, see, Myron Brenton. “School Vandalism,” Today’s Education 62.4 (1975): 82–85; “In Public Schools,” 9; “Violence in Schools,” 37–40.Google Scholar

Cited in, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. A Generation Deprived: Los Angeles School Desegregation (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1977), 5, 8.Google Scholar

Crawford was in the courts for years, and had multiple appearances in the California Court of Appeal, and both the California and U.S. Supreme Courts. Almost five years passed between the superior court’s first order in 1970 and the court of appeal’s subsequent ruling, during which time the desegregation order was suspended. No desegregation plan was implemented until 1978, and the case was remained in the courts through 1982, but by that time the litigation had ended and the district had only a voluntary program in place. David Ettinger. “The Quest to Desegregate Los Angeles Schools.” Los Angeles Lawyer 26 (March 2003): 55–67.Google Scholar

Jack Schneider. “Escape from Los Angeles: White Flight from Los Angeles and its Schools, 1960–1980.” Journal of Urban History 34 (2008): 995–1012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

See also, Becky Nicolaides. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002).Google Scholar

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 42–82; Sides. L.A. City Limits, 176–189.Google Scholar

“Violent Crimes in LA Increase while Overall Rates Goes Down.” Los Angeles Times (March 29, 1973), A1. The rise in gang violence in Los Angeles and in other urban areas has been an understudied phenomenon. Some have blamed the destruction of the Black Panther Party and the dissolution of the Brown Berets. Researchers have also argued that the black gangs in Los Angeles grew out of a need for self-protection against police violence and discrimination. See, Gerald Horne. Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), esp. 180–200;Google Scholar

Mike Davis. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 267–322. In the early 1970s, gangs were portrayed as a growing problem produced by either a culture of poverty or (black) youth’s “lust for notoriety.” See, “Gang Violence Linked to Desire for Notoriety,” Los Angeles Times (December 24, 1972), Section A, B, 7.Google Scholar

See also, Rodolfo Acuna. A Community under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River 1945–1975 (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center, Publications, 1984).Google Scholar

The precise number of security personnel employed by the district in the 1960s is difficult to pin down. It is clear, however, that the office of security, which had been in existence since the 1940s when night watchmen were hired to prevent school burglaries and night vandalism, had become an institutionalized part of the district’s bureaucracy by the 1970s. According to testimony before the California Legislature, California state law enacted in 1961 allowed for the implementation of school security in districts; in 1969 the law was changed to allow school security personnel to function as peace officers of the state, if the district desired. This gave the officers expanded policing powers beyond those granted to private security forces. While the Los Angeles City School District employed around two dozen security officers in the mid-1960s, by 1971 the force had grown to over 100 agents. That number was increased when President Nixon signed the federal Emergency Employment Act (EEA) that same year, which provided enough funds for the district to hire around 90 additional personnel. Rubel. The Unruly School, 149; California Legislature, California Legislature—Joint Committee on Revision of the Penal Code—Hearings on School Violence and Vandalism, December 8, 1977 and December 15, 1977, Volume 1 (Sacramento, CA: State of California, 1977), 47–48; “Board Takes Steps for School Security,” Herald-Dispatch (November 1, 1973), 1, 3.Google Scholar

Police-community relations in both South Central and East Los Angeles had become particularly strained post-Watts. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission reported in 1969 that issues of law enforcement misconduct remained unresolved in South Central Los Angeles, and police violence at a Chicano antiwar protest in 1970, which killed a well-known and well-respected Mexican American journalist for the Los Angeles Times, further alienated Chicano youth. Martin Schiesl. “Behind the Badge: The Police and Social Discontent in Los Angeles since 1950.” In In 20th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict edited by Norman Klein and Martin Schiesl (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1990), 153–194. See, also, Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, Quest for a Homeland (video recording), (Los Angeles: NLCC Educational Media, 1996), tape 1.Google Scholar

“Police School ‘Sweeps’ Praised and Criticized,” Los Angeles Times (January 17, 1972), Part II, 1, 8. Truancy was beginning to take on new urgency in the 1970s, as experts identified it as a sign of “pre-delinquency,” and so the police program also fit into a larger movement that labeled all students not in school as criminals. See, for example, Gordon Morris. “The Truant,” Today’s Education 61, 1, (January 1972), 41–42; Walter Schafer and Kenneth Polk. “School Career and Delinquency.” In, Schools and Delinquency edited by Kenneth Polk and Walter Schafer (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), 164–180.Google Scholar