Police Admit Fault in Responding to Protest at Gompers

San Diego police responded inappropriately to a student demonstration at Gompers Secondary School last Friday, both by sending too many officers and by not first positioning them at a staging area near the school, an internal police investigation has concluded.

Deputy Chief Manuel Guaderrama said Thursday that messages from the police communications center, which received a call for assistance at Gompers, were imprecise. As a result, officers responding to the call thought the problems were more serious than they turned out to be, Guaderrama said.

“We’ve already learned a lot from this,” Guaderrama said Thursday, after a Wednesday critique of the operation with the officers and supervisors who were involved.

About 200 students at the 1,400-student school walked out of class Friday morning to protest the involuntary transfer of business education teacher Rhoenna Armster to another school. Some students drifted onto a nearby street--in large measure to talk to the media--and were then forced back onto school grounds by almost 30 officers.

There were no injuries, but both schools Supt. Tom Payzant and school board President Kay Davis have said the lack of serious confrontation “was a matter of luck” given the large number of police, two of whom were equipped with riot gear.

Guaderrama said Thursday that the police received a call from the San Diego city schools police asking for backup because the students were demonstrating.

“They handled their part of it very well . . . but we sent far more (officers) than were needed,” Guaderrama said. “Too many units were sent (a total of 40 officers) and they responded directly to the scene instead of to a staging area, some location away from the school, which would be normal procedure.”

Guaderrama said that normally a supervisor would go directly to the school, size up the situation, then brief officers at the staging area on what to do.

Compounding the problem last Friday was the fact that units from two different police divisions responded to Gompers, Guaderrama said. There were officers both from the Southeast San Diego division, which covers the Gompers neighborhood, and from a special schools task force unit trained to work on campuses along with the school police.

“Normally, we would have the schools task force respond (about 14 officers) and they would brief the others on what would be needed,” he said.

Payzant said the report Thursday confirmed what he and Police Chief Bob Burgreen already suspected.

“I have my school police people working with city police to make sure that everybody knows what the steps are to be taken, and who is going to do what, if we have another occurrence in the future,” Payzant said.

In a separate investigation, Payzant has appointed a three-member committee of non-Gompers school administrators to report to him within a week on the actions during the demonstration of principal Marie Thornton and several teachers. Parents have complained that Armster and other unidentified teachers put students in jeopardy by encouraging them to walk out of classes.