While students across the District sat in their classrooms for the first day of school Monday, D.C. police hosted its first group phone call of the year.
At 1 p.m., Assistant Chief Andre Wright said anyone who has anything to do with school safety dials in. School administrators, Metro officials, nonprofit organizations and community safety ambassadors participate.
The daily call isn’t new this school year, but it gives law enforcement the chance to debrief on things that may have happened before the school day started, what may be happening during the school day and then, what the plan will be for dismissal.
“Because we share this very important information, and we work very collaboratively, and (have) been doing it for a long time, we’ve been very effective at making sure that we ensure safe passage for our kids,” Wright said outside of Ludlow-Taylor Elementary in Northeast on Monday afternoon.
There isn’t a time limit for the daily call, Wright said. Sometimes it’s short because there isn’t anything to report, and sometimes it lasts longer “because we want to make sure that we get it right. We’re not in a rush.”
The collaboration often proves beneficial.
In some cases, students will leave one school and want to confront kids at another. When police learn about that possibility, “we adjust our deployment accordingly, to make sure that we’re there at that school to prohibit any sort of acts of violence from occurring.”
In other instances, students either mistakenly or intentionally try and bring something inside a school that, Wright said, isn’t safe for a school setting. Police are usually able to learn about those situations and respond as needed.
“We meet, we discuss, we share information in real time,” Wright said. “We’re able to abate a lot of these instances.”
The daily call, though, is just one part of the department’s approach to keeping students safe. Police also conduct traffic enforcement around school buildings, and when officers see erratic or reckless driving, they educate drivers and, in some cases, give out tickets.
“We do it with one goal in mind, and that is to make sure that motorists understand that they need to pay full time and attention to our little ones,” Wright said.
To concerned neighbors and community members who worry about violence in neighborhoods around schools, Wright recommended they “find out about how you can become a part of the solution, so we can abate those concerns together.”
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