Security Tightened Following 600 Student Melee | News | KTLA The CW

Security Tightened Following 600 Student Melee

May 12, 2008, 11:27 AM PDT

South L.A. -- Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent David Brewer met today with the principal of Locke High School, where a melee Friday involved hundreds of students.

"The campus is calm; the students are in class," Monica Carazo of the LAUSD said this morning.

Brewer met this morning on campus with Locke Principal Travis Kiel, and extra personnel from the school district were assigned to the school, along with a beefed-up security and police presence on- and off campus, Carazo said.

About 1 p.m. Friday, a fight broke out that quickly mushroomed into a brawl -- and it took dozens of Los Angeles and LAUSD police officers, some in riot gear and using their batons, about a half hour to restore order.

The school was placed on lockdown, with students confined to classrooms and allowed to leave one classroom at a time to avoid further violence.

Three students were arrested for fighting, and one non-student was arrested for the illegal possession of a knife, Susan Cox of the LAUSD said.

Four students suffered minor injuries, Cox said, although witnesses said they saw students knocked out and bloodied.

Today, in addition to extra police, members of the school district's human relations staff, who are trained in dispute resolution, were assigned to be at the campus at San Pedro and 111th streets.

Meantime, community activists planned to be at the school to address the problems of school violence.

One of them, anti-immigration activist Ted Hayes, has pinned responsibility for the brawl on Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and on "anchor children" of illegal immigrants.

However, a Locke senior, Victor Wong, 18, told the Los Angeles Times the fight was not about race but began as a confrontation between members of rival tagging, or graffiti, crews.

"It was a crew-on-crew thing," Wong said. "They asked for my help, but I'm graduating. I'm done with all that."

Wong said a planned fight Friday with 10 students on each side -- the outgrowth of a one-on-one fight Wednesday involving one black and one Hispanic student -- escalated into a brawl involving hundreds of students.

The two groups met on the handball courts, and "all of them started going at it," Wong told the newspaper.

The fighting quickly spread across the campus. Locke has about 2,600 students, about 65 percent of them Latino and 35 percent black.

LAUSD police said only two officers are normally assigned to Locke, but that about 60 officers were sent to the campus to put down the brawl.

The LAPD dispatched more than a dozen patrol cars and about 50 officers.

Locke is about to be reorganized as a cluster of charter schools run by Green Dot Public Schools, which will take over in July, and some faculty and staff have accused the district of letting the campus drift in its final year as a traditional public school.

The school has been especially plagued by tagging crews. The school employs two full-time workers to paint over graffiti, Green Dot's Kelly Hurley, who is managing the transition, told The Times.

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