In a California Desert, Sheriff's Deputies Settle Schoolyard Disputes. Black Teens Bear the Brunt.
But Gardner felt obligated to speak up during the meeting, which had been called by school district administrators. Some of his Black students had complained that they were treated differently than white kids caught doing the same things, like fighting, disrupting class or smoking cigarettes. He’d been concerned for a long time about the culture on campus, fearing it encouraged staff to turn Black students over to law enforcement. But Gardner knew he needed more than just a hunch and secondhand accounts, he said.
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He came prepared for the online meeting with the findings from the federal reports. “I went in, boom, and blew the whole thing up,” he said. But as he stared at the deputies through his screen, he felt intimidated, he said, and his voice shook. When Gardner finished, he said he was met with blank stares. “These people look[ed] at me like I was an alien from outer space,” he said.
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We analyzed and mapped thousands of contacts between deputies and civilians that took place during the 2019 calendar year, the most recent year not disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis focused on Lancaster, one of two major cities in the region, finding clusters of stops on public school campuses. In the vast majority of those contacts, deputies cited “reasonable suspicion of criminal activity” as the reason for the stops.
Our analysis found that during that time, six public high schools accounted for about 300 of the city’s 4,000 stops — or roughly 7 percent. When we compared the race of teens stopped with the demographics of those schools, the disparity was clear. Black teenagers accounted for 60 percent of the deputy contacts on campuses but made up only about 20 percent of the enrollment in those schools.
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