It is exactly this kind of delay, in a life-or-death emergency where every second counts, that officials at Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) hope their anonymous reporting app, LASAR, will prevent. And they’re encouraged by what they’ve seen so far.
Explaining the app Thursday at the California IT in Education Conference in Sacramento, Lt. Nina Buranasombati of Los Angeles School Police Department said the idea was a group effort. The tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas inspired the district to create a safe-school task force comprised of parents, teachers, administrators, faculty and law enforcement who met quarterly to discuss ways to make schools safer.
“They developed metrics to track policy progress and effectiveness, to create strategies, to improve existing policies, and to make recommendations for new programs,” she said. “One of those new programs was LASAR, and that was how the idea of LASAR was born.”
Buranasombati said the app's official launch was in March, funded by a grant secured by LAUSD’s Information Technology Services (ITS) department, built by the safety technology company Kokomo24/7, governed by the district, and owned and operated by her department.
Alfonzo Webb, LAUSD’s senior director of school operations, said the publicity plan for LASAR involved writing messages through Blackboard Connect, a PSA video, posterboards, a slider on the district’s website, social media posts, emails to families and employees, a podcast, and a story in the Los Angeles Daily News.
According to LAUSD’s ITS Senior Administrator Douglas Le, submitting a tip through the free app entails selecting an incident type, specifying a location and providing details; there are options to attach photos or videos and to remain anonymous or leave contact information. Reports go directly to the watch commander’s office via text and email alerts. If they find it’s a school-wide emergency, school staff and everyone with the app are automatically notified.
“Once we receive the information, we triage the situation to determine what type of response is needed,” Buranasombati said. “It’s not always going to be a police response.”
Since March, she said, her department has received 591 reports, most of which came in outside of school hours. Only 14 percent of them required a police response, and 60 percent were handled by school staff.
LASAR has had 6,886 downloads to date, a fraction of the district’s more than 570,000 students, but Buranasombati offered several examples of when it may have saved lives. In one case, an unknown person used LASAR to report a student with a knife. With a detailed description and location, officers found and arrested the student, confiscated the weapon and learned he had brought it anticipating a fight with another student.
She contrasted this with another incident with much less timely reporting, the kind LASAR is intended to prevent: A student sent a direct message to the school’s Instagram account containing a photo of an AK-47 rifle with the caption “should I take it to school,” which went unread for three days. Once the school forwarded the message to law enforcement, officers took 19 hours to investigate, went to the student’s house and wound up arresting his father for improper storage of a firearm.
Buranasombati said mitigating these threats requires a tool that provides timely reporting, actionable information and anonymity.
“[Students] want to tell, but they don’t want it public. They’re not going to go to a tip jar, they’re not going to go up to the teacher, they want to remain anonymous, so we used it in our call to action and it worked. We received tips and were able to get everybody involved, and it worked out for us,” she said. “It has been less than one year since its rollout, and it’s working wonderfully for us.”
