Liberty, we hardly knew ye...
Posted on 11/11/2003 8:09:54 AM PST by CanisRex
GOOSE GREEK--Last Wednesday started out like most any other school day for Ray Glover, a senior at Stratford High School -- until police officers with guns drawn stormed into the school's cafeteria at 6:45 a.m. and began barking orders at startled students. The perplexed Glover said he had no idea what was happening, or why.
"The police came into the cafeteria with the dogs, and then they chased one kid down the hall," said Glover, a tall 19-year-old with braided hair who is known by the nickname "Bolo."
"I know that some students who've never seen a gun in their lives were really scared," he said.
Glover said an officer hustled him out of the cafeteria and into the hallway, placed plastic handcuffs on him and made him lie on the floor while his clothes and book bag were searched.
"He was yelling, telling me to get down," he said. "The police are crazy nowadays. If stuff like this keeps happening, a lot of students won't want to come back to school."
It's been nearly a week since the Goose Greek Police Department's drug sweep sparked both widespread criticism and a state law enforcement investigation. School officials -- tentatively, at least -- still stand behind the drug sweep, which netted no drugs or arrests. Questions about why police officers felt it necessary to draw their weapons on teenagers and whether black students were unfairly targeted have only grown more insistent.
Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union plan to come to Goose Creek this week to investigate whether the group should sue, said Anjuli Verma, with the ACLU's drug policy litigation project in Washington, D.C.
Many Stratford students are more than willing to share their stories.
When Sam and Josh Ody stepped off the bus at Stratford High the morning of the drug search, they headed to their usual spots -- Sam, a senior, to the lunchroom, and junior Josh to the end of the hall by the stairwell where his friends congregate.
Shortly after Sam sat down in the cafeteria, a coach came up and told the students at his table to put their hands on the table. When the students asked why, they were told it was the principal's orders.
Then a police officer came over and bound Sam's hands behind his back with yellow restraints, took him into the hallway and told him to face the wall as a dog smelled his bag. He watched as his binders and folders were dumped out on the floor.
Then the principal, George McCrackin, patted him down, checked his shoes and took out his wallet, asking him where he got the approximately $100 he was carrying, Sam said. The student said he told McCrackin he had just gotten paid at his job at KFC.
"The people I hang out with are not drug dealers," Sam said. "We play basketball. We have nice clothes because we have jobs."
Down the hall, Josh was standing with his friends when he heard a rustling and felt something hit him in the back. When he turned around, he said, he saw a police officer standing behind him with his gun drawn.
"He told me to get down on the ground," said Josh, who then was instructed to put his hands behind his head and stay down.
Sam and Josh said that when the search was over, police told them that any innocent bystanders in the crowd should blame the search on the people bringing drugs to school. Then the students who had been bound were released and told to go to class.
Since Wednesday, Sam and Josh's father, Nathaniel Ody, has tried to meet with McCrackin to discuss why his sons were targeted. So far, Ody said, he hasn't had any luck. It's not like the Ody family isn't known at Stratford High -- four older siblings have been through the school, and both Sam and Josh are athletes.
The brothers and other students interviewed Monday were hesitant to say that race played a factor in the search, but they noted that police searched the hallway where black students tend to hang out and that most of the students involved were black males.
"They handled it the wrong way. Most people aren't used to officers pointing guns at them," said Gerney Glover, a freshman who was sitting near the auditorium and watched police run in with guns. "I really didn't like starting my freshman year off like this."
What the raid accomplished, though not in the best way, was a wake-up call, said senior Scott Rice. "If there were drugs in any school, they're not going to be for a while now."
Chester Floyd, superintendent of Berkeley County schools, said Monday that neither McCrackin nor any district official knew police would come in with guns drawn.
"Had we known that the method of search had changed, the principal would not have requested the intervention," Floyd said. "However, once police are on campus, they are in charge."
He declined to take a position on whether police acted correctly, saying the district would wait until the State Law Enforcement Division ends its investigation.
"But we understand fully the concerns of parents. We have similar concerns. I'm sorry for any student who experienced this if it was unwarranted," he said.
Floyd said he knew of no other drug sweep in any school nationwide in which police came in with guns at the ready. "We want to be first in a lot of things," he said. "But I'm not sure we want to be first in this."
Goose Greek police Lt. Dave Aarons has said several of the 14 officers who entered the school drew their guns as a matter of officer safety because drugs often go hand-in-hand with weapons.
Stratford High is the largest school in Berkeley County and second-largest statewide, with nearly 2,700 students. Because of its size, it has more surveillance than other schools in the county -- about 70 cameras that have been installed within the past two years.
Some parents accuse officers of targeting black students. About 70 percent of the 107 students who happened to be in the hallway are black. At that time in the morning, two early buses have dropped off students from predominately black neighborhoods.
Berkeley County schools will continue to hold unannounced drug sweeps using police dogs, Floyd said, but "the more routine kind," without guns drawn. The sweeps occur periodically at the schools, at principals' request. Generally, high schools hold two or three each year, he said.
"My concern," Floyd said, "is that we get back to some normalcy."
We'll slide and slither right down to Gamorrah.
Liberty, we hardly knew ye...
I'd believe the media more if they named the cops involved in the raid. The students get named. The school administrators get named. Not the cops. Funny that.
So what's your point?
Besides, legalizing all drugs includes "legalizing" prescription drugs (ie, making then as available as any other drug).
Big difference between a legal drug and a legal drug only available by prescription.
No one can "put a hand" on my child, except my wife or I. That is the law in our state. On a practical level I think that is a good law. On a personal level I was beaten by a psychopathic teacher in first grade, as were all the "bad boys" in my class, as had all the "bad boys" in her first grade for the two previous years. She was fired as a result of parents complaints, but hired by a nearby school district anyway. Thus, I would not support corporal punishment by teachers in general.
Despite this I have raised two daughters to ages 20 and 14 without either *needing* to be hit by anyone. Neither has been suspended, arrested, accused or participated in anything that concerned the school. The youngest is a straight A student.
My post is about what I consider the appropriate response of a concerned parent to out of control school administrators and police. My only concern, in such a situation would be to ensure it never happened again. What happened was very, very dangerous. An innocent child could easily have been shot by a police officer who mis-handled his weapon, mistook a pager for a gun, or what ever other excuse they commonly use.
My response to this really is probably not enough for you to speculate on my ability to raise kids, which I assure is is excellent!
Well, no sense in legalizing drugs then, is there?
Well, no sense in legalizing drugs then, is there?
I guess not! So looks like we need to outlaw gasoline, motor oil, plastics, etc.
Except for the fact the legalized and commercialized, thus cultivated, manufactured and sold by drug companies like Merck and Pfizer. This would create new jobs and also a new tax base to be taxed generating more revenue for the government and also removing the need for the tens of billions of dollars a year spent on fighting the WoD and allow federal law enforcement officers to focus on protecting Americans from terrorists rather than trying to protect them from themselves.
Protecting someone from themself is a battle that can never be won. I'd drill that into your head if I could, but I doubt then you'd still get the point. You'd rather still try to use government to force people to live their lives a certain way, send cops into schools to shakedown students, ransack innocent Americans' private properties in botched drug raids (oops, wrong address or bad tip! So sorry!) and even execute American citizens without trials.
It's getting closer.
Same thing happened, someone posted a little bit of information and the knees started jerking.
I got a good laugh out of the thread though, brought back some memories.
Sadly many don't. They give birth to them and release them into the wild.
They terrorize the schools that they can't be thrown out of and tell administrators and police to their faces that there is nothing that anybody can do to them.
It will take someone wiser than me to figure the mess out.
We're taking another hit (the last one was about the cop ordering the 9 year old to the ground at gunpoint) in the paper today for "treating 8 year olds like criminals."
The reporting newspaper is a rag. After the incident with the 9 year old they printed an editorial on Sunday pretty much siding with the officer. Somehow they managed not to print a few things, like the mother having a warrant for her arrest, the toy gun spray painted to look more like a real gun, and probably most importantly, they didn't print the account of an older couple who was coming out of another store and saw the whole thing, siding with the officer that he never pointed his gun at the kid when he saw it was a child.
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