Photographs by Beverly Poppe
The month of February was off to a good start for Filiberto “Phil” Arroyo. On the fourth day, he was sworn in as the police chief for the Clark County School District. After competing against 60 other candidates and undergoing countless grueling interviews, he was elated to get the job. It was cause for celebration.
Eleven days later, there was celebrating of a different sort. It was his 23rd wedding anniversary, and he was enjoying it with his wife. That’s when the text message came: A student had been shot. Chief Arroyo called dispatch, only to find out that Palo Verde freshman Christopher Privett had died. “I felt as though all the air had been taken out of me,” he recalls. “I turned to my wife and could not utter a single word. … All I could think about was the boy and his parents. How their lives had just been completely shattered in a matter of seconds.”
It got worse. That same day, a juvenile shot a man in the stomach near Whitney Elementary School. The nine days that followed were more blurs of gunshots, with four more shootings. Though none of them actually took place on campus, they were all close enough to be associated with the schools. Chief Arroyo had no choice but to hit the ground running and find a way to stop the violence. So far—knock on wood—calm seems to have set in. And in those quiet moments, Arroyo has time to take reporters around for the day, and to say, with a straight face, the following: “When you really look at the overall picture, the school is pretty much one of the safest places the child can be.”
If anyone would know, it seems this guy would.
•••••
A cop’s past
Arroyo’s parents immigrated from Cuba in 1967, with him and his sister in tow. He was raised in a poor neighborhood in Miami, and grew up to become a police officer there (his sister, oddly enough, became a public defender), and later became a school police officer.
You wouldn’t know it to look at him. With his white button-up shirt, his gold tie and tie tack and his goatee, the 47-year-old looks more like an accountant or a computer tech. His face carries an innocence, and to look at him even now, there’s no question he looked almost the same way when he was a kid of 5.
And then he speaks, and the whole cop thing starts making sense. His soft voice contrasts with what comes out of it, as he shares some of his police endeavors in Miami.
“This guy was a nasty guy, and we had been chasing him for about 20, 30 minutes, and finally I’d given up on him in the sense that I knew he was not going to stop on his own. He’d tried to veer officers off the road. He’d clipped a couple of our oncoming cars. So as I’m following, he takes a turn around an intersection, and I didn’t want to make the same turn, so I go through the parking lot. Well, I didn’t realize it’s a car wash. And in Miami, because of the sewage, the car washes have high sloping hills. When I hit the top of the hill, I was airborne. And when I come down at the other end, guess who I see? His face, in the air. T-boned him, inadvertently, and we both went through the restaurant. The cars literally were inside the restaurant. It took Fire and Rescue about 20 minutes just to get both of us out.”
And that’s not all.
“I was in a task-force unit, so basically that’s narcotic for vice, prostitution. And being the younger of the group when I came in, they always use the younger guys who can blend in to fit the mold. I’ve been robbed so many times at gunpoint and at knifepoint, I got beat up by three kids with a lead pipe, in a park. And they were juveniles! I was 26 years old, and there were these three guys supposedly going around beating up guys for money. So I went in, and I tried to play the role. Covered up, by the Bay, and there were three kids that were in their teens, like 13, 14. And they proceeded to beat the crap out of me with a lead pipe.”
Still more: In his 12 years on the force, Arroyo was in eight riots, and has been shot at more times than he can count. He’s spent time dealing with cases involving drugs, prostitutes, slaves and so much more. Basically, he’s seen the worst of the worst. It’s stories like those that establish credibility for the man tasked with watching over the district’s 308,783 students. Who better to be at the helm when school violence takes an unexpected leap?
A man can only take so many bullets whizzing toward him. In need of a break from the drama, Arroyo took a position with the Security Operations division of the Wackenhut Corporation in Miami. He was appointed captain and project manager of the West Palm Beach Assessment Center. As he watched the kids cycle through the revolving door, he was struck by how unnecessary it all seemed. If someone had just intervened in those kids’ lives, he thought, it wouldn’t have come to this.
“I realized that I had missed out on something while being a cop. Something that’s important: our future.”
So he took a 40 percent pay cut—“my wife almost killed me!”—and returned to law enforcement, this time in the Palm Beach County School District, where his focus became juvenile gang violence within inner-city schools.
And with that, he returned to the drama. Through years of lockdowns, shootouts, bomb threats and more, he worked his way up the ranks and became a lieutenant. When he saw the Clark County School District was looking for a captain, he applied and got the job in 2005. Two years later, when former Police Chief Hector Garcia stepped down, he saw his opportunity. His move was a defensive one. Though he hadn’t had aspirations to be police chief, he didn’t want the district bringing someone in from the outside.
“It’s not something I came out here looking for. And I’ll be very sincere: If it hadn’t happened as it did, I would have been very happy as a captain. Not that I can’t do the job. Again, it’s just something I had not planned on doing so young in my career.”
Connecting with CCSD’s students
So he took the leadership role over a sorely understaffed department. Right now, the school district has about 150 officers, which is 20 shy of the optimal number. But even the optimal number of officers is disturbing, at least to Arroyo.
“We have 341 schools. Our maximum manpower is 170 officers. The West Palm Beach School District Police Department has 163 schools. They have 170 officers. I rest my case.”
That roughly translates into two police officers per high school, and, when possible, one placed into middle schools with more than 1,500 kids. They also have up to eight officers on patrol at a time. For the entire county.
Thanks to two pilot programs, police officers with the Henderson Police Department and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department have become involved with a handful of schools, teaming up with the school police. Following the recent shootings, the presence of those police departments and the North Las Vegas Police Department also increased around the schools.
“We’ve been full-force out there, making sure that not only the schools but the communities are addressed,” says Arroyo. “And I think it’s paid off over the last several weeks.”
But even if it’s been quiet on the shooting front, there’s always something going on—something that we in the community likely won’t ever hear about. Arroyo’s candid about the issues that schools encounter, and readily admits that there are generally three or four lockdowns a day, and they usually don’t make the papers. Bomb threats occur, and don’t get reported. Kids bring weapons to school, and it doesn’t make the news.
“All these things happen, and most people don’t know. They have no clue. No clue whatsoever. And we’re able to do this with the amount of people we have.”
From what he’s saying, and considering what he sees and hears on a daily basis, you’d expect a school police chief to have a hardened attitude toward the kids. But there’s no such evidence. Compassion and understanding seem to be his guiding emotions.
He recalls an incident where he worked in Florida. One morning, many of the school buses were running late, and by the time the kids arrived the cafeteria was closed. The students were up in arms. They began rioting.
Rather than dismissing the violent response, Arroyo has clearly gone over it time and again in his mind, searching for an explanation.
“From the look of it you’re going to say okay, these kids are rioting. They’re rambunctious for whatever reason, they’re turning to violence. But you have to realize why. Most of these kids didn’t have dinner last night. And that’s the key issue: The foundation at home. And if they don’t have it, it’s kind of hard to really go in and try and curb something from the outside. I mean, it can be done. And I’m not a Hillary supporter, don’t get me wrong, because I’m not going to try to go into politics. But the greatest thing she ever said, and it’s something we’ve always gone by, ‘It takes a village, folks.’”
Of course, the Las Vegas village is one of transience, where residents often complain about the lack of community. Plus, parents often have to work long hours just to get by, which often means their kids are unsupervised after school and on weekends.
“Most of our problems, believe it or not, occur between the hours of 3 and 6 in the afternoon. The period that kids leave school to go home, or after they get home and there’s no parent there because the parents are working. That’s one of the things that I believe needs to be addressed.”
In saying that, Arroyo emphasizes that he’s not knocking parents and he’s not shirking the school district’s responsibility. He wants to create programs that bring parents into schools as volunteer sponsors. Anything that will help them to feel more involved with their children and the community.
As he talks about students, Arroyo grows emotional. His eyes get glassy as he recounts an anecdote about a high school girl who is scared to walk to school because of the female gangs she encounters on the way there. He rehashes a story he just heard from a principal, about how four of his key students had been arrested for armed robbery over the weekend. The kids were football players who were expected to receive college scholarships. As he tells the stories, you can practically see the weight mounting on his shoulders.
“You have kids who you’ve been pouring your heart and soul to, and you think that they’re getting somewhere, and just when they’re almost there, because of that one instant, that bad choice, they lose everything. And now those kids are going to be lost. Completely. And it sucks,” he says, vehemently.
Where personal meets professional
Each kid in the district might as well be Arroyo’s. He says it, sure, but you can see in his eyes that he also lives it. He has two sons of his own, ages 17 and 22, and that’s helped prepare him for the job ahead of him.
When he was a lieutenant in the Palm Beach County School District, there was an incident near his youngest son’s elementary school. Following a rash of armed robberies, a team of six men with AK-47s barricaded themselves in a home near three schools—one of which was his son’s.
Arroyo moved his men in and cordoned off the area and a two-mile perimeter. They began quietly evacuating all of the kids onto school buses and moving them out. After three hours, they’d gotten everyone out safely—and then gunfire erupted. A shootout left a number of the gunmen dead. In the midst of it all, Arroyo got a call from the principal. They’re missing one child: his son.
“It’s not like you can just let go of what you’re doing,” he says. After about two hours they found his son, unharmed, in a park. There had been some confusion about where he was supposed to go, but he was fine. His father, however, was still shaken. “It was a long two hours,” he shakes his head. “A very long two hours.” The memory grounds him.
Chief Arroyo is a man who blends. Perhaps it’s all those years undercover, or maybe his subtle shyness. But put him in a room full of principals for a game of “find the police chief,” and good luck. Part of it is his lack of uniform. And then there’s the goatee (which he can only keep as long as he’s not wearing the uniform). But something else is missing ...
“I’m a very passive individual,” he says. “I don’t even carry a gun.”
In fact, he’ll go to meetings with chiefs of police across the Valley, and he’s the only one in a white button-up shirt. The only one who’s not packing. In doing that, he’s imparting a message: “I’m human, just like you.” Without the badge and the polyester, without the weapon, he’s easy to relate to. The average person can quickly see that he’s passionate about what he does, and he’s a good listener. Whereas, were he in uniform, his authority would be at the forefront more than his interpersonal skills.
Plus, he’s involved. Arroyo regularly stops by schools and talks with superintendents and principals about what’s going on; he asks them what they need, and they maintain a working dialogue. That’s important to those who are in the schools on a daily basis.
“I was very supportive of his appointment,” says Jolene Wallace, Southwest Region superintendent. “He had been in the district. He knows our principals, our administrators, and a good thing about him moving up is that when you get to the executive level, you’re kind of removed from the schools. But because he was not that high up, he still had a connection with schools. And that’s what we wanted. Someone who understands when a principal calls it’s really an emergency. When you’ve got 3,000 kids on a campus, you’ve got to understand that it may not be the most serious of crimes as crimes go, but the impact of it on young people makes it much more serious for a principal.”
•••••
But now, almost three months into the job, some of the first signs of contention are arising. The issue is metal detectors. It also came up under former Clark County School District Police Chief Hector Garcia, who resigned in August 2007. Earlier that year, Garcia paid nearly $12,000 to an associate to study the feasibility of metal detectors in Canyon Springs High School. The study recommended that school police carry small, handheld metal detectors, rather than relying on stand-alone metal detectors. (Soon after his resignation, Garcia took a job as vice president of the School Safety Advocacy Council, the same company that performed the evaluation.) In February, a different consultant was brought in by the school district and came up with the same conclusion: handheld metal detectors.
Chief Arroyo’s hackles raise at the issue. Because of the studies, not surprisingly, quite a few teachers and principals want these metal detectors. What they may not know is that their school police officers already have them.
“Unbeknownst to this person or people who put this report together, all our officers have metal detectors. They always have,” says Arroyo. The detectors they carry are about four times as big as the microphone-sized devices the report recommends.
“Why is it that big?” queries the chief. “Very simple. If I’m going to stop somebody who I believe has a gun, as the report states, I don’t want you anywhere near me. Because, let’s say you don’t have a gun. If I have to come in close to you to pat you down, I’m giving you the ability to get close to my gun. I don’t want that. Or my pepper spray or my baton. … The report states that they recommend this other metal detector that can be used by staff members, by police officers as the kids are going through [the halls], and that opens up a whole can of worms, because how close are you going to get to a kid? You have to physically get real close.”
Still, because of the report’s recommendations, the school district purchased and distributed the small handhelds as part of a pilot program. Arroyo says they’re realizing that all of the issues raised above are proving true, and then some. He’s working on a report that outlines what they’re learning. Admittedly, he’s leery of how teachers and principals will respond.
“We’re still trying to get over the bumps. And I’ll be very sincere, as you can see by the bumps I don’t think we’re going to be able to get over them.”
But, of course, that’s his job. Even without the uniform and without the gun, even with that goatee, Arroyo holds a controversial position of leadership within the schools. He has an approach that’s a touch kumbaya, a tad utopian, but overall refreshingly real.
“I have no ego. I have no problem asking for help. Because the only way we can take care of things is by working together.”
Kate Silver is a local freelance writer.