Karina Gonzalez
Amid controversy surrounding incidents involving Sheriff’s personnel on several Los Angeles Community College campuses, the board of trustees meeting today is expected to include further discussion about the role of active Sheriff’s operations in an educational setting.Two incidents on the Pierce campus in recent weeks prompted President Robert Garber to meet with Sheriff’s leadership. The first was a complaint filed by a professor about a Sheriff’s vehicle traveling too fast down the middle of the main mall on Halloween night. The other incident involved Professor Ed Jones and a confrontation with Sheriff’s personnel for impeding the instructor’s driving path.Jones related his version of the incident in a guest column in the Nov. 28 issue of The Roundup.”I’ve been very insistent that we will find a way to mesh these two cultures,” said Garber, who has met with Sgt. Rick Martinez and Team Leader Jeanine Swanson in response to the two incidents.He continued, “They’ve been very accommodating.”According to Deputy Al Guerrero with the Pierce station, the incident on Halloween involved a felony assault that took place in Parking Lot 1. According to the incident report, two students were involved in a fight when one of the students resorted to using brass knuckles, which are illegal in the state of California, and escalated the occurrence to a felony.”An emergency call went out to our radio frequency of a crime in progress,” said Guerrero. The vehicle proceeding down the mall was responding to that call for help.”This was an extreme situation for Pierce,” noted Guerrero. “That was a very traumatic situation for the student involved.”The situation with Jones is still under review by the administration. Following a highly publicized altercation between Sheriff’s personnel and a professor and student at Mission College in Spring 2006, several meetings took place at the district level to investigate the role of Sheriffs on college campuses. Their contract was again renewed last year.On Oct. 17, a Sheriff’s operation at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, which was aimed at reducing drug sales on campus, attracted attention after several of the 32 men detained alleged that the incident was racially motivated. Only two of the men were arrested after being detained, both on outstanding warrants of more that $50,000 each, not for on-campus drug-related charges.According to Team Leader Diane Dodd at Trade-Tech, the campus has the highest number of drug arrests for all nine campuses, and the program involved bringing in members of the Narco and Rover response teams. After repeated cancellation by the teams due to more pressing drug stings, the campus office decided to go ahead with what they call a “saturation control” procedure to break up a group of students often found loitering and engaging in suspicious activity. “It was not a drug bust,” said Dodd. She added that seven of the men were not enrolled at Trade-Tech.”We basically let them know that if you want to come back, register for classes, do it the right way, and we’ll see you at graduation,” said Dodd.Dodd noted that this was the first time an operation like this had been conducted, and that the procedure, while it might be used again, will be tweaked for use at a college campus, rather than in the community.At a board meeting on Nov. 8, Captain Ralph Webb, who oversees the Community College Bureau, defended the actions at Trade-Tech, calling them legal and within guidelines, but “admitted that the district sheriffs had a ‘terrible supervision model,'” according to the District Academic Senate’s board of trustees report.The Board currently has a Sheriff’s Task Force in place, and members include Senior Vice-Chancellor Adriana Barrera, District Academic Senate President David Beaulieu and Garber.According to Beaulieu, the task force meets every other month, with their next meeting scheduled for today.”What happened at Trade-Tech cannot happen again,” said Beaulieu, who also noted that smaller incidents had also been reported at Harbor and Valley colleges.”The question is how to merge, mesh, one culture, the Sheriff’s culture of life on the street, with the college culture,” said Beaulieu. “We are running into some problems with these two colliding.”At Pierce, Professor Jones said that the problems did not exist with the Campus Police, a private force employed by the district before the Sheriff’s began their contract in 2002.”It felt like [the police and college community] were on the same team,” said Jones.Debate continues on that point. Speaking at Pierce on Nov. 27, Chancellor Mark Drummond said that the now-defunct Campus Police were sometimes referred to as “Keystone Kops,” and that the district had been paying roughly $2 million annually as a result of lawsuits that they sparked.Wanda Lewis, 54, a senior office assistant at Trade-Tech’s Sheriff’s Station, was an employee of the Campus Police before the change and said, “No one on campus could stand the College Police… A lot of people just don’t like policing.”The Sheriffs personal operate as independent contractors under the current policy, but Garber noted that they do try to work with the school’s administration, conversing regularly with Vice President Ken Takeda. “I want officers who are friendly, helpful and supportive,” he said. He has asked that they look into buying more of the three-wheeled Segways that they piloted last summer, in an effort to get them out of vehicles and closer to the campus community.Pierce’s Academic Senate also has a Work Action Committee, chaired by Professor Larry Andre, which can make recommendations to the administration regarding the Sheriffs personal if it affects instructor’s work environment, according to Senate President Tom Rosdahl.