Gunshots in the grandstands: Why violence at high school football games is spiking and what can be done

In the middle of coaching his team’s first game of the season, Lloyd Johnson looked up into the stands at Fremont High School in Oakland and saw fights breaking out, one after another.

The same thing happened that night at Piedmont Hills High School in San Jose with fights among spectators forcing the game to be canceled.

Fan violence is happening elsewhere, too, sometimes involving gunfire. In Sacramento, 15 shots were fired at a recent youth football game. At a high school game in South Los Angeles, a stray bullet sent a woman to the hospital. At a game in Oklahoma, a 16-year-old was fatally shot and four others were wounded. There was another shooting fatality in Louisiana. Shots have been fired at games in St. Louis, Baltimore and Chicago.

This year, there have been 39 school shootings at high school sporting events nationwide, according to David Riedman, a data scientist who founded the K-12 School Shooting Database.

With football season not yet at its midpoint and basketball season still to come, this year’s total could end up around 60. That is more than twice the pre-pandemic total of 25 in 2019, and six times more than a decade ago, Riedman said.

Riedman, who was working at a Homeland Security think-tank in Washington, D.C, when he began tracking cases, estimates that one in six school shootings takes place at sporting events. Most often, it’s a football game.

“What’s interesting is that almost all of these shootings at sporting events are disputes that escalate into a shooting,” he said. “So it’s not somebody who was planning to commit a shooting that night. It’s somebody that when there was an altercation because they were armed, it turned into a shooting.

“That’s a similar trend to a pattern during school-day shootings as well. They’re not planned attacks. They’re fights. What seems to be different is there are more teenagers with guns than a decade ago. And habitually carrying a gun with them.”

In the Bay Area, schools have been on high alert since shots were fired in the parking lot of a championship game two years ago at Westmont High in Campbell, said Central Coast Section commissioner Dave Grissom.

“Since the pandemic, behavior in general has been more of a complicated issue,” he said.

“It’s just a societal issue, it’s just unfortunately the way it is right now,” said Kevin Collins, the longtime coach at Lincoln High School in San Jose. “Anytime you have a game, it’s in the back of your mind, ‘I wonder if something might happen.’ You take all the precautions you can but you really can’t control the crowd.”

At the Piedmont Hills game that night, a San Jose police officer was on hand to help restore order before the fights escalated. But staffing high schools with police officers has been a controversial issue in many municipalities.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, several major city school districts moved to remove police officers from their campuses. One of them was the Oakland Unified School District, which unanimously passed a resolution that schools could no longer employ law enforcement or armed security guards at school-related events.

The objective of the George Floyd Resolution was to keep Black students from being targeted by law enforcement officials at a disproportionate rate. Oakland Unified estimated that Black students, despite making up only 26% of the enrollment, accounted for 73% of the arrests between 2015-20.

As such, there were no security officers, only teachers and school administrators, on hand to stop the fighting once it started at the Fremont. The Oakland Police Department was eventually called to the scene, but the fights had already spread throughout the stands.

“It’s because they took the policemen away,” said Johnson, the Fremont coach. “We used to have two cars of policemen at each game. These kids see (no police presence) and they erupt.”

The following week, the Oakland Police Department agreed to have at least one police officer at every game in the Oakland Athletic League, according to league commissioner Franky Navarro. OPD agreed to cover the cost of overtime for officers at football games through the end of the season. The plan will then be re-evaluated and could extend through the basketball season.

OPD has been “super supportive,” said Navarro. “They feel like even though it’s an overtime cost, it’s a much lower cost than if something were to happen and they had to respond.”

Navarro said metal-detecting wands will continue to be used at all games to ensure there are no weapons on site. He thinks the most effective method is to properly staff games with school employees who already have established relationships with students.

There is agreement on this, but it’s easier said than done.

“It’s about staffing,”  Los Gatos High School athletic director Ken Perrotti said. “You have to have the bodies.”

Riedman cautioned that school officials and metal detectors aren’t enough. He said schools need emergency action plans at sporting events, too.

Los Gatos is one of the schools currently working to build one, Perrotti said.

Said Riedman: “If you just take a halfway approach of, ‘Maybe we’ll put a couple metal detectors and some random officers,’ that doesn’t do much for a crowd of a couple thousand.

“Schools do extensive training for your indiscriminate shooter coming in during the school day when kids are in classrooms. Most schools have never done any training or have a written plan for what they’re going to do if there’s a shooting at a football game.”