LAUSD's Finest: Los Angeles School Police

Three years ago, Los Angeles School Police Officer Ian Mitchell King walked into a high school ceramics class at University Senior High School in West L.A. and asked an attractive blonde senior, Regina Shapiro, to take a “stroll” with him to his on-campus security office. There, he told her to sit on his couch and declared, “This is about us. I’ve taken a personal interest in you.”

Shapiro, bewildered and nervous, later described to a judge how King subjected her to 40 minutes of relentless sexual innuendo, told her she had a reputation as a “ho” and asked if she gave “blowjobs under the table.” Despite her protests, he finally succeeded in pressuring the upset girl to lift her shirt so King could take a prurient peek at her belly ring.

King was a sworn police officer allowed to carry a gun for the Los Angeles School Police Department, a tiny, little-watched and never-reformed force that operates far below the radar of most Angelenos yet has the power to pull over, question or arrest almost any resident — student or adult — in a 710-square-mile area. King stood close to the door, Shapiro’s only escape route, and she remembers looking out the window of his half-daylight basement office, watching the rain, to shake her foreboding sense of not being free to leave. When King finally led her back to class, she later recounted, he said he was “going to make me like” him and warned, “Don’t say anything to anyone because we don’t want rumors going on about you.”

The outrageous event and Shapiro’s recollections are contained in court transcripts and documents obtained by L.A.Weekly. Shapiro refuses to comment. But although the girl promptly reported to her principal King’s leering come-on, the 340-officer police department sworn to protect Los Angeles schoolchildren failed her on almost every level: The school district’s Internal Affairs unit let crucial weeks slip by without interviewing Shapiro — a huge no-no. Two months later, Shapiro has since testified, an anonymous man identifying himself only as a lieutenant or sergeant with the department called her late one night and pressured the teenage girl to drop her complaint. She recalled the voice saying, “You’re going to be here every two weeks in trial. . Your college plans are going to be ruined.”

The manner in which School Police Chief Lawrence Manion handled the allegations against Officer King would have chilled to the bone any parent.

King was not fired. In fact, the Weekly found, Manion rewarded him. After giving King “light duty” at headquarters, Manion handed him a coveted new assignment as a “patrol officer” with the power to approach and arrest any Angeleno almost anywhere in L.A., young women included. Ian King became the quasi–LAPD officer he always dreamed of being, crawling the city’s streets in his black-and-white Crown Victoria.


Source