Police Practice

Operation CleanSWEEP
The School Safety Program
That Earned an A+
By Gary S. Penrod

When it comes to school security, the news is both good and bad. The bad news is that Wnothing can prevent a highly motivated individual from eluding even the best security measures whether at the White House, the courthouse, or the schoolhouse. While this represents the bad news of harsh reality, the good news reveals that, in fact, schools can put into place a wide variety of proven, and highly effective, safety procedures and precautions. These security measures—when used in a wellorchestrated manner—can provide a school with a tremendous web of interacting defenses, all of which contribute to making that campus a safer place.

In San Bernardino County, California, an innovative program has succeeded in reducing crime on high school campuses in recent years. A triple partnership program, Operation CleanSWEEP (Success With Education/Enforcement Partnership) includes the office of the superintendent of schools, the sheriff’s department, and the court system. This dynamic and dramatically effective program has taken the most productive elements of other approaches and melded them together to make a three-pronged attack on school crime through juvenile citations, security assessment, and special projects. As a result, many school officials and parents regard Operation CleanSWEEP as the premiere safe-campus program in the area today.1

NEED FOR THE PROGRAM
The need for a program to reduce incidents of crime and violence on school campuses in San Bernardino County grew out of concern that youth in the county flouted the law on high school campuses and received neither genuine punishment nor rehabilitative guidance. The practice of suspending or expelling students appeared to incubate bad attitudes in at-risk youths without inculcating either a sense of personal responsibility for the behavior or a sense of how youths’ actions would affect their future career goals. Therefore, in 1997, the sheriff’s department set out to find a better way. It formed a committee of