Is it time to give students and teachers what they want? That would be the total freedom on school campuses they demand, irrespective of safety.

Would it reduce taxpayers’ expenses?

For some history, the Los Angeles School Police Department was established in 1948. In 2016, laschoolreport.com reported this department oversees 664,000 students and 60,000 employees.

As of 2016, the department consisted of 410 sworn officers, 101 school safety officers and 34 civilian support personnel, with any given portion on duty 24/7 in 26 cities.

This is no half-baked operation.

There are canine and investigative units along with a critical response team, an anger management team and police academy magnet schools.

Seven divisions have their own police cars and motorcycles, and there is a Multi-Assault Counter-Terrorism Attack Capabilities (MACTAC) for the obvious: terror threats.

In the summertime, they visit early education and elementary schools, and they participate in Beyond the Bell programs.

There’s more to applaud about this police force, but overall, they work hard to build positive relationships with the students.

Are schools safer for students, teachers and other employees? According to Chief Steven K. Zipperman, the answer is a mixed bag, as it “depends on what prism we’re looking through” to gauge safety.

The prisms would be lack of crime overall, number of weapons seized, a feeling of safety coming to school; or is it “the amount of or lack of suspensions or expulsions?”

The LAUSD reported 3,103 incidents for the 2014-2015 year – an increase from 2,425 in 2013-2014, or about 28 percent.

Incidents reports included 1,163 sex crimes or inappropriate behavior, and 746 cases of finding illegal or controlled substances, with 839 weapons confiscated.

With that background, here’s what is happening on February 24: a rally to organize students “against the district’s police force” (Daily Wire, January 29, 2018).

The most prominent co-sponsors are the United Teachers Los Angeles, Black Lives Matter and the American Civil Liberties Union.

I repeat: “against the district’s police force.” Its title is “Making Black Lives Matter in Schools.”

The featured speaker is to be police abolitionist Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter.

The LAUSD flyer implores: (1) “Join the next round of our fight to end random searches and criminalization;”

(2) calls for “community schools funding;”

(3) “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Item 1: review the aforementioned statistics from the LAUSD.

Item 2 is bewildering, considering the California Department of Education cited that for 2014-15, K-12 education and child development cost taxpayers $45 billion, accounting for 40 percent of the state’s budget. More staggering is that overall, California’s public school spending was $76.6 billion, which includes federal funds and other sources.

Item 3 comes from the honoring of Assata Olugbala Shakur, once part of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army (a famed revolutionary extremist group), and one of the FBI’s “Most Wanted.”

With a lengthy criminal history, she was imprisoned for the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper. She escaped in 1979 after serving two years and now lives under political asylum in Cuba.

The collective activists’ aim is to end random police searches, with some voicing “abolishing policing” altogether.

They claim that existing policies are “racist” and “disproportionately” target and “criminalize” non-white students.

One district-employed English teacher at the microphone of an earlier protest said, “We’re going to get these cops out of our schools, and we’re going to end these random searches, and we’re going to be proud to be black and brown.”

The claims of police activity being racist and disproportionate are unsupported by surveys from the Census Bureau and American Community Survey (2013).

Los Angeles’ ethnic composition was stated at nearly 70 percent non-white. Non-Hispanic whites were 29.4 percent.

In 2016, Cecily Myart-Cruz, a vice president of both UTLA and the National Education Association, told a local news station, “It’s about having a movement, not a moment.”

Considering crime data, it’s hard to fathom the concept of “over-policing” on our campuses.

Betty Arenson is a Valencia resident who believes in the Constitution in its entirety and that laws should be upheld and apply to everyone equally.