South Carolina community split over armed police drug raid at school

[beevul]

" This small community just a few miles north of Charleston is split over whether police went too far last week when they conducted a high school drug sweep with their weapons drawn. "

"More than 100 Stratford High School students were ordered to crouch in a hallway, some restrained with plastic handcuffs, while 14 officers and a dog searched for drugs. "

"I'm angry," parent Sharon Smalls said at a Berkeley County school board meeting Tuesday. "My child was slammed to the ground with a gun to his head. Someone has to take responsibility."

"The way the raid was conducted was decided by Goose Creek police, said city spokeswoman Casey Fletcher. "This was a one-time specific operation to address a specific documented problem," she said. "Any time that there is drug activity going on, the police officers believe that there's a reasonable expectation that there may be a threat of violence."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/11/12/national0238EST0432.DTL

This REALLY stinks.


Edit: Hope I didnt miss this posted in another forum, if so, my apologies

[girl gone mad]

1. How can any parent be split over this?

If it were my son in that hallway, I would probably pull him out of the school.

[beevul]

3. I completely agree

I just wonder, how can this be legal?

If I were one of those parents, Id be raising hell over this.

[bluestateguy]

2. Strike

If the parents kept their kids home from school on a chosen day people would notice.

[beevul]

4. Like ...if 75% stayed home on a single day?

How bad would that hurt the average school district funding for 1 day?
I must admit, I dont know alot about educational budgets or how the money flows within them. It would have to be a chunk though, one would think.

[Old and In the Way]

5. We are so screwed as a society, if we can't all be outraged with

this behaviour of "law enforcement" personnel.

Is this a dry run for the forthcoming police state? Everyone associated with this "raid" should be summarily fired.

If there are a significant % arguing in favor of this event, there will be nothing to stop the entrenched powers from making this isolated case become the norm.

Welcome to 1984, I think we're creeping past Fahrenheit 443....

[beevul]

6. My thoughts exactly.

"Is this a dry run for the forthcoming police state?"

Scary thought indeed.

If this type of event goes by without the scrutiny it deserves,
were in deep trouble.

I have to wonder though, dont any of those people have kids?
Would any of the folks perpetrating this "raid" would feel ok about the guns pointed at, and the zip tie cuffs on their kids?

Where do they find people like this?

[CandyCrim21]

7. Okay....

I can understand people being concerned about a "growing drug problem" in the school but for them to enter the school with their weapons drawn and have students crouching down in the hall ways......, come on! That is a little bit over board there. Maybe those police men were just on a power trip or something but if one of those guns had gone off during a little adrenaline rush shooting through a police officers viens for a minute....sorry, it would have been all down hill from there. No body would be questioning weather or not the law enforcement went over board or not. In my school we used to have random drug sweeps. But they would bring in a few cops and the dogs during class and we would all just go about our buisness while the search was going on. There was staff in the halls and everything in case any kids tried to bail out and they had the dogs sniff all through the hall ways and the parking lots. I'm sorry but I just think that to conduct a drug search at a high school like you would a drill in the army is a little much. Aren't law enforcement officials only supposed to draw their weapons when a threat is posed? What real threat was their in this scenario? Sounds like a little gun power gone to a few peoples heads here. I'm thinking intimidation.

[northzax]

8. perfeclty understandable reaction

from the police. perhaps, in our overly armed society, the cops should simply ask everyone politely not to shoot them, and go about their business?

or do you think schools are completely safe places? here's an article about a 15 person brawl that took place, over drug related gang issues, at a DC high school this week. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23916-2003Nov10.html

think the police should have just asked everyone nicely to stop? After all, a student had been shot at another DC high school last week, and there had been a shooting outside this same school the day before. people can't have it both ways. when you live in a society where firearms are easily avaliable even to a high schooler, then you have to expect the police to come in with overwhelming force. I'm highly amused by the fact that this forum sees daily celebrations of someone using deadly force to save property, but expects the police to get shot.

[DoNotRefill]

9. by that line of reasoning cops should use SWAT teams for speeding tix...

After all, just like domestic violence situations, routine traffic stops are very dangerous, and some cops get shot while doing it...

The paramilitarization of the police forces MUST stop. If cops want to play assault games like that, they should be Marines, not cops.

There is NO excuse to point a gun at a person unless you think there's a real and present danger that they're going to kill you.

[CandyCrim21]

13. Thank You!!

[1a2b3c]

16. Very liberal of you

Yep. There are lots of guns and lots of crime that revolve around the war on drugs. This gives the cops a perfectly good reason to treat everyone at the school like a criminal by pointing their guns at the students.

[Liberal Classic]

10. Zero Tolerance and the Drug War

What lessons are children really learning in school? Obey. Submit to search. Tolerate the Waffen SS.

[jhfenton]

11. Another sad example

of why we need to end the War on Drugs and the War on Guns. The resulting paranoia leads to mindless "Zero Tolerance" policies and paramilitary police raids on our schools.

* Draw a gun --> Expulsion
* Right about a gun in a journal --> Expulsion
* Share your asthma medication with your asthmatic girlfriend --> Expulsion
* Play high school sports --> Submit to a compulsory drug test

This is just one more reason to consider home schooling my one year old.

[CandyCrim21]

19. Agreed! I keep hearing......

everyone say that in order to end all the gun violence that the demand for drugs needs to go down etc... BUT has anyone stopped and thought about the economy? Some of these kids growing up in inner cities and in places where gun crime and drugs are significant see where the money is being made. They don't want to work their asses off 40 hours a week and still be struggling like they see their parents doing. Why do that when they have a shot at the big time selling drugs? Sure its a little more dangerous but thats nothing that they havent grown up with anyway so its like another day at home. Honestly, in MY opinion, I don't think any of these situations are going to improve until the economy is bettered. Its like a circle. Economy=stress=drugs=violence=fear=gun crime. Granted thats pretty black and white but anyone got any better ideas?

[jhfenton]

20. Ending the failed durg war would be a start.

I don't think that the short term economic situation has had much impact, but otherwise, I think you're right. The culture of economic hopelessness in the inner cities, combined with the lure of easy money from drugs is the disease. The symptom is violence.

[drfemoe]

12. But the plan

didn't work. If the quote from the article below is true, the cops not only used excessive force and illegal search (imo) (known drug offenders at the school doesn't put sufficient 'suspect' on ANY or ALL the students at the school) .. they let the real druggies get away!! The article doesn't say, but I wonder if they searched the bushes after the raid ... I think this is dangerous because it allows the assumption that 'some' criminals in a given location can be used to presume guilt on every one else in the same location (school, church?, political meeting?, mosque?, household?).
.. or maybe just on the black students, which is also the possibility raised in the article.

Monique Gonzalez, a senior at the school, says she saw students during the raid running from campus, dumping drugs along the way.

"There were kids throwing pills and things in the bushes. People were taking bags out and throwing them on the ground," said Gonzalez, who was at a shopping center less than 200 yards from the school during the raid.

[jody]

14. Unless students were in clear and present danger, the chief of police

should be fired. A special commission representing all segments of the local community should investigate and recommend specific actions and changes in policies/procedures to prevent such things from happening again unless absolutely necessary to prevent harm to students and staff.

[beevul]

15. From other sources:Police go too far during a drug search in high school

"Every now and then, a story leaks out from the borders of some despot's police state about a commando-style raid on an innocent household, police violently tearing through belongings, shouting and throwing children to the ground while waving loaded firearms. "

"It was a blow to Americans, who count themselves lucky not to have to live in a land of insanity and sadistic abuses of police power, to hear that all of this happened on American soil, when police burst into Stratford High School in Goose Creek, S.C., weapons drawn and eager to rough up a few drug dealers. They left that day empty-handed, but what they left behind among hallways littered with emptied lockers and scared students was an injustice that is inexcusable in a country that values freedom, justice and the concept of one being"innocent until proven guilty.""

""I don't think it was an overreaction," said Lt. Dave Aarons from the Goose Creek police department. "Anytime you have qualified information regarding drugs and large amounts of money, there's a reasonable assumption weapons are involved."

"If the United States is going to accuse countries on the other side of the world of ruling by unjust force and tyranny, it's important that Americans never act like those they call their enemies, or Americans will be no better than those they fight against."

http://www.thebatt.com/news/558435.html


"The aggressiveness of the officers has brought scrutiny from several civil rights groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which says black students were targeted in the search. State police and other outside agencies have been asked to investigate."

"Carver, who stood up during the raid after he heard a dog barking, was sent to the principal's office for disobeying orders and suspended for three days. A dozen students who police say disobeyed orders were restrained."



""The search seems to have been conducted in a part of the school frequented by African-American students who ride buses to school," the state NAACP chapter said in a news release. "There was no reported effort to search arriving personal vehicles, the predominant mode of transportation for white students."

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20031113_527.html


Sigh...disheartening to say the least. I feel for all those involved.

Everything about this makes me....verry angry.

Edit: removed redundant info

[Lefty48197]

17. We have guns so we can do whatever we want

If you don't like it, then get your own gun and stop us.
Such is the logic of using guns for personal defense.

[1a2b3c]

18. I dont have a gun so you dont need a gun

Such is the logic for people who dont like others to own guns.

Makes little sense, as did your post.

[demsrule4life]

21. A little sense?

I give it no sense at all.

[SlavesandBulldozers]

22. give the government an inch

and it will hold a 9mm to your sons head, handcuff him, yell at him, and when they find no drugs tell him to get the f off the ground and get back to class.

South Carolina is obviously so full of stupid hicks it doesn't know when its being trounced by a police state. If the police were black, though, then it'd be a different story.