Last December, a police officer pulled aside Christopher Padilla as he walked to classes at Roosevelt High School.
The 17-year-old senior had just reached the border of the school zone, and said he was just “20 steps from the school entrance.”
“He said, ‘Why are you late to school today?’” Padilla recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and got into the [police] car.”
Listen to Christopher Padilla's "In His Own Words" account of his arrest:
And Padilla was late to school—15 minutes, that is.
But more importantly, he was a minor.
In 1995, the Los Angeles City Council enacted Section 45.04 of the city municipal code, otherwise known as the “Daytime Curfew Law.”
Under the Daytime Curfew Law, students under the age of 18, who are subject to compulsory education, are prohibited from frequenting public places during school hours.
The original language of the code stipulated that the curfew lasted from 8:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m., but in 2008, Councilwoman Jan Perry amended it to extend from “bell to bell.”
Offenders are summoned to the informal Los Angeles Juvenile and Traffic Court, where court referees award warnings, community service or fines as punishments. Fines start at $250.
In theory, the law penalizes habitual truant students. In reality, it punishes tardy students.
“I’ve had students whose tickets are from 7:40 a.m. The bell rings at 7:30,” said Zoe Rawson, a Labor and Community Strategy Center attorney who has represented several students in truancy ticket cases.
“The majority of tickets I’ve had have been from 8:30. The latest may be 9:00 or 9:30. One of the reasons is that’s when the police are outside of the school. So, it’s both the time and the location.”
L.A. Unified is one of the few districts nationwide to employ its own police force. But in the majority of cases, LAPD is enforcing the curfew.
In fact, the school police recently placed a moratorium on truancy tickets.
But LAPD is continuing to ticket students en masse, especially during “tardy sweeps.”
Jorge Lopez, a social studies teacher at Roosevelt High School, said that once a month, LAPD officers do a “round-up” of tardy students in the neighborhood, ticketing 20 to 30 students in one day.
Roosevelt High School has the highest number of students being ticketed for truancy.
“I felt a great sense of urgency to address this issue now that our school is being targeted and a disproportionate number of students are being ticketed,” Lopez said.
Santee Educational Complex in South Los Angeles also has high ticket rates. Both schools are members of Mayor Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.
“If a student goes to a heavily policed school, he or she is more likely to get a ticket,” Rawson said, adding that the fine increases with each ticket.
For this reason, ticketing rates are higher in South and East Los Angeles.
LAPD Divisions with the Highest Truancy Ticketing Rates:
“[The truancy ticket system] creates a sense that students are disposable,” said Manuel Criollo, an organizer for the Community Rights Campaign.
It also criminalizes them.
“The intent of the law is well-documented that it’s around an association of unsupervised youth with delinquency or criminal activity keeping both the youth and the public safe,” said Rawson.
During the "tardy sweeps," Lopez noticed gang preventionists from both the City of Los Angeles and Soledad Enrichment Action, a gang intervention non-profit.
But Rawson said the rationale behind the idea that "all gang members at one time or another were truant" is flawed.
"That justification is overly broad," said Rawson. "You can't presuppose that any young person who is truant is dangerous. That assumption does not warrant police involvement."
Criollo cited that a student is twice as likely to dropout of school if he or she is arrested and four times as likely if he or she undergoes a court hearing.
L.A. Unified has a dropout rate of 32.8 percent. Lopez said Roosevelt High School’s rate is nearing 65 percent.
Lopez said it is the district’s responsibility to remedy this problem. Police interaction only complicates the issue.
“I feel that as educators we need to take care of tardies and discipline within the district, rather than handing over our work to the courts and to the police,” Lopez said.
Lopez is working with the Community Rights Campaign to inform students of their legal rights regarding truancy.
The campaign, an offshoot of the Bus Riders Union, began when organizers saw a link between the inaccessibility of public transportation and the increased likelihood of truancy tickets in the early 2000s.
Under the slogan, “Why is it so easy to get a mug shot instead of a bus pass?,” the Community Rights Campaign worked to eliminate the application process for students.
Their efforts led to the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s simplification of the application in March 2005.
But those efforts also led Community Rights Campaign activists on another path. Their interactions with students opened their eyes to the several negative implications of the presence of police officers in educational places.
Listen to Community Rights Campaign organizer Manuel Criollo talk about these implications:
They began four years of surveying students, dissecting the intricacies of the Daytime Curfew law, and lobbying with L.A. Unified School Board members.
In September 28, 2009, the campaign led a demonstration against a proposal by City Councilman Tom LaBonge and School Board member Tamar Galatzan to cite students for truancy on school grounds.
“[Galatzan] withdrew the motion,” said Ashley Franklin, an organizer for the Community Rights Campaign. “It was a major victory.”
A Timeline of the Community Rights Campaign's Action against Truancy Tickets:
And the Community Rights Campaign is continuing to battle the ticketing of students for truancy on school grounds.
Employing the efforts of attorneys like Rawson, the campaign is currently lobbying against the enforcement of the Daytime Curfew Law inside school grounds on legal grounds.
“Under state education law, once a student arrives at school, school has supervisory capacity. And that takes them out of purview of the daytime curfew restriction,” Rawson said.
With this argument, the common LAPD practice of “tardy sweeps” is illegal…and so is Padilla’s ticket.
Rawson took on Padilla’s case, appealing his $343 fine on the grounds that Padilla was on school grounds when he was arrested.
The appeal was denied. The Los Angeles Juvenile and Traffic Court's supervising referee gave no reasoning for the decision.
But denied appeals will not discourage the Community Rights Campaign.
It was instrumental in establishing the school police's moratorium on tickets. The campaign is still working to make that moratorium permanent.
The school police are also not currently collaborating with the tardy sweeps at Roosevelt High School.
Lopez hopes that, with the efforts of the Community Rights Campaign, LAPD will stop the sweeps as well.
“They could provide different efforts at creating programs that promote arts, that promote education, that provide tutoring, that could address time management. Something more productive than ticketing families. Because that's what they are doing, they are ticketing the families in these communities,” Lopez said.
