Equity Denied: Reclaiming Safety for All in the Antelope Valley
All people in the Antelope Valley (AV) deserve safety. Residents should not only be free from harm but also live in conditions that create opportunities for youth and adults to thrive.
Youth in the AV should have schools that promote their academic, emotional, and social growth in an environment in which they feel safe. They should be able to interact with others and empowered to achieve their goals without fearing unfair treatment by educators or law enforcement.
Instead, this report finds that AV youth of color are often undereducated, suspended, expelled, arrested, and jailed due to racial bias by the Antelope Valley Union High School District (AVUHSD) and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD). The LASD, for example, stops Black youth in the AV at a rate nearly seven times greater than their white counterparts. And, in 2019, a deputy body-slammed a Black girl at Lancaster High School and sat on her.
As all young people in the AV should be able to thrive, so too should adults. This means they should have quality jobs, economic security, and access to affordable, quality housing.
However, because of biased policies in the AV’s two main cities—Palmdale and Lancaster—many Black, Latinx, and Indigenous adults struggle to make ends meet while constantly serving as targets of law enforcement stops, searches, harassment, uses of force, and dehumanization.
Together, these inequities undermine the safety and wellbeing of residents of color and push youth of color out of school and into the criminal legal system. This process, often referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline, reaps devastating consequences. It tears families apart and negatively impacts their health, wealth, and freedom. It also undoes hard-fought struggles for racial progress.
This report provides a data-driven evaluation of the school-to-prison pipeline in the AV. It analyzes publicly available data on LASD stops and AVUHSD school discipline data which show that youth of color and youth with disabilities are disproportionately harmed.
More broadly, data also show how Palmdale and Lancaster government decision-making results in inequities across social determinants of safety, such as economic security, housing stability, and health care. These inequities undermine Black and Latinx community members’ safety and wellbeing. The report also shows how public budget information reveals how investments in alternatives to policing and punishment would prevent these harms and improve safety in the AV.