Chain Link and Concrete: Discipline, Surveillance, and Policing in Los Angeles Schools, 1945-1985

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is home to one of the largest independent school police forces in the nation. Until recently, the Los Angeles School Police Department commanded a $70 million budget and possessed a weapons arsenal that included grenade launchers, M-16s and a tank. How and why LAUSD got to this point is the subject of this dissertation. In other words, this dissertation analyzes the nature of the relationship between LA city schools, discipline, surveillance, and law enforcement between 1945 and 1985. As Los Angeles’s racial demography changed in the postwar period, the schools relied on disciplinary policy, and eventually, law enforcement to manage the fluctuating racial boundaries of the city. What was initially created to foster a sense of fairness and impartiality in schools experiencing integration later became a vehicle to confine the agency of Black and Chicano students, especially after the 1965 Watts uprising. Students resisted enclosures in waves of protests and boycotts that rocked the district between 1967 and 1970 and put forth their own vision of abolitionist education. In the years that followed the student rebellions, Los Angeles schools increased security personnel, cooperated with law enforcement truancy sweeps and perimeter patrolling, and installed evermore security hardware and surveillance systems, before finally making the police a permanent fixture in select campuses. Moreover, I argue that LA schools serving Black and Chicanx students became a laboratory for the expansion of the carceral state into public education, and by century’s end, they became nearly indistinguishable from other carceral institutions. Indeed, schools, jails, and prisons shared the same practices: constant surveillance, detention and punishment. The proliferation of zero-tolerance policies and school resource officers in the 1990s and 2000s was made possible because Los Angeles city schools experimented, refined, and modeled it for the nation between the years of 1945-1985