Who is guarding the guards? Who is policing the police? You must wonder when it is discovered that private D.C. school security guards, who are hired to protect the schoolhouse from predators, are criminals themselves.
Lest we forget too quickly, a security officer, working for contractor Hawk One Security Inc., which provides security for D.C. government buildings, was arrested last week on armed-robbery charges, reportedly using his work-issued weapon. He is definitely a candidate for the “Knuckle-head in the News” contest sponsored by WTOP Radio.
So are the D.C. folks. There are enough mea culpas to be passed around by those who did not conduct complete, comprehensive scrub-a-dub-dub background checks on adults hired to work near vulnerable children.
“Internal control weaknesses in the pre-employment hiring process [by D.C. Public Schools] contract security personnel led to the questionable placement of some security officers in the District’s school system,” states a report officially released by the D.C. Office of the Inspector General (IG’s office) on Friday. “As a result, there are contracted personnel working in DCPS who may pose a risk to the secure environment of students and staff.”
The IG’s office randomly selected 30 security personnel from among 400 working in the school system. A background check found eight of the 30 officers had criminal histories, including four who did not disclose their arrest records on their affidavits. That omission should result in their immediate disqualification.
Two of the men in question, working for Watkins Security Agency of D.C. when it had the city contract, had felony convictions. At the rate of misrepresentation the IG’s office found, conceivably one-third of the school’s security force could have disconcerting backgrounds.
The IG’s office’s findings, which were reported first by The Washington Times, revealed that school “security officers’ licenses may not have been granted had their criminal background and other pre-employment information been sufficiently reviewed by the contractor [Watkins Security at the time] and responsible District officials.” Also, “The contractor did not fully meet the contract requirements for security training.”
In the 46-page report, everybody — the schools, the contractor, the police — says it’s somebody else’s fault, somebody else’s responsibility.
Shouldn’t there be, as the IG’s office suggested, better record keeping, including an up-to-date roster of all private security personnel at the police department’s disposal? Once the police issue a license, they really don’t know whether the guard is assigned to a warehouse in Northeast or a school in Northwest.
Can it really be so hard to go through the list of guards, which is supposed to be updated daily, and weed out the culprits? Wouldn’t an increase in the financial penalty for either the applicant’s falsifying records or the contractor’s not regularly reviewing them provide extra incentive for compliance? The police department, in a letter from Chief Charles H. Ramsey, said it has had some initial problems in its licensing procedure of private security personnel. It already has adopted some of the IG office’s recommendations and is hiring staff designated to improve the process. But the letter also infers that the contractor and the school system should share some of the blame.
The school system has tried several approaches and several security contractors. Superintendent Clifford B. Janey proposed going back to the 1990s model of having the school system handle security through guards it hires. But its oversight of school security didn’t work so well before, and the police department isn’t off to such a good start either.
Times reporter Jim McElhatton remembers that 18 months ago D.C. officials were tipped off to the problem of former offenders working as school security guards when a school volunteer informed them that she recognized a guard as someone she had seen while volunteering at the DC Jail.
In two years, the IG’s office has issued seven reports about the status of school security. It shouldn’t have taken so long to fix this problem.
The IG’s office did its job in reporting these dismal findings. It’s up to the Metropolitan Police Department, school officials and the contractor to adopt the 10 no-brainer recommendations to improve this unacceptable situation.
With a daily diet of scary “Knucklehead in the News” stories revealing how abusive some adults can be toward children, it is imperative that all personnel who work in close physical contact with children be put through the extraordinary training and extreme scrutiny measures before they can be employed.
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