DUBIOUS 'STINGS' AT SCHOOLS

After 30 Years, Undercover Drug Cops May Have Outlived Their Usefulness on
Los Angeles Campuses.

Student 0350405 seems precisely the kind of student the Los Angeles Police
Department was trying to protect when it launched its undercover "School
Buy" program 30 years ago to rid Los Angeles Unified School District
campuses of drugs. She has good grades and an unblemished disciplinary
record and is a star on her school's softball team and a role model in her
neighborhood. Or at least she was, until she was arrested last spring for
selling marijuana to an LAPD officer posing as a student. Now she's been
ordered to spend her senior year in an off-campus program for gangbangers,
truants, kids on probation and other troublemakers.

The girl, assigned a number to protect her identity in disciplinary
hearings, was one of 252 students arrested last school year by LAPD
officers and expelled by district officials. In 30 years, School Buy busts
have snared more than 8,000 teenagers and confiscated what police calculate
is more than $7 million worth of narcotics.

But school officials have begun to question whether the disruption to
student lives is too high a price, particularly in the absence of proof
that the program cuts the flow of drugs.

The way School Buy is supposed to work is simple. Young officers are given
a month of training and a cover story, then enrolled in schools to befriend
kids and ferret out drug dealers. At the end of every semester, police
sweep through campuses arresting students. The haul, mostly baggies of
marijuana, is displayed on television.

The way it works in real life is not so tidy. Students say officers badger
classmates who are not drug dealers but who agree to find drugs for them as
a favor. Concerns about entrapment keep many cases from being prosecuted.
And because drug dealers tend to be wary of new customers, those arrested
are increasingly kids with disabilities or emotional problems.

"Instead of the guy slinging dope on campus, you wind up with a random
collection of whichever kids might be naive, stupid, persuadable or
gullible enough to find a joint for a stranger," said Kevin Reed, the
school district's legal counsel. He has launched a review of the program -
the district's first.

Student surveys suggest that the availability of drugs in city schools is
unchanged over the last decade - slightly more than one-third of students
say they are offered, sold or given drugs on campus each year. School Buy
commander Capt. Sharyn Buck says the deterrent value of annual busts kept
those numbers from rising. "Knowing there could be a narc on campus has
stopped the blatant drug dealing we used to see."

Los Angeles is the only big-city district in the nation that allows this
kind of undercover operations. School Buy was the brainchild of then-LAPD
Chief Daryl Gates and, with the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program,
the linchpin of LAPD efforts to keep kids off drugs. But most DARE officers
have since been pulled from schools and dispatched to the streets, their
program having been found to have little long-term effect.

Barring dramatic findings of positive results in the school study, it may
also be time for School Buy officers to pack their backpacks.

When the program began in 1974, the district had no police force of its
own. Today, Los Angeles Unified has 350 police officers. Every middle and
high school has at least one; they're the ones who ought to work with
students and staff members to cut the flow of drugs. Thirty years ago,
school officials could consider individual circumstances when punishing
kids caught in campus stings. The nation's take-no-prisoners war on drugs
ended that discretion. In 1996, state law required that any student selling
drugs on campus be expelled. A 1998 federal law makes those students
ineligible for two years for loans or grants to help them pay for college.
Limiting educational options for teens already flirting with failure won't
help keep them on the straight and narrow.

Keeping drugs off campus is not just a worthwhile goal, it's an obligation.
It is also impossible for the Los Angeles Police Department to accomplish.

If the softball players and advanced placement students and student council
leaders are using drugs - or at least know right off where they can be
found - it will take more than annual roundups to turn things around.
School police and administrators accustomed to letting the LAPD bear all
the weight should take back their responsibility.