Storm swirls around drug sweep

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.

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.

As the Feds (should have!) learned back during Prohibition, you'll never stop people who want to from buying inebriants. You never have, and you never will.

However, money for whiskey no longer goes to the Black Market because the Government made it legal. The exact same dynamic applies to "illegal" drugs.

But for the badly failed War On Drugs, the money spent on drugs would not be going to the terrorists. And that is just a tiny fraction of the monetary cost to society of the badly failed WOD, and the most severe cost to our society is not measured in mere dollars. Read on....

It would be another matter if the WOD were in any measure successful, but it isn't. Every angle you look at it from, it's a complete disaster.

We incarcerate non-violent drug offenders in cells with violent thugs, giving these drug perps a criminal record and a criminal education which combine, at huge taxpayer expense, to almost guarantee that this will now be a lifelong criminal wth no way out of the loser-cycle.

We spend million$ keeping mandatory drug sentence perps behind bars, forcing our overcrowded jails to turn rapists and muggers and worse back out on the streets early to make room for the druggies. This has a devastating effect on our society.

Within hours of having been arrested, the drug user or dealer is replaced with another, making the exercise even more meaningless.

And now we are told, by the very people who errantly insist on making it so, that illegal drug dollars are financing the biggest single threat to our National Security—terrorism.

Too difficult a concept?

;-/

"you'll never stop people who want to from buying inebriants."

Of course not. But you can try to minimize it. You can use the laws to send a message, especially to teens, that drug use is unacceptable in our society.

As an example, teens say that marijuana is easier to obtain than alcohol. Yet twice as many teens use alcohol as marijuana. Why? Because society says alcohol is OK.

Not convinced? In Alaska, marijuana is legal (for adults, at home, under 4oz.). Teen use of marijuana in Alaska rose to twice the national average. The citizens of Alaska were so outraged that they drafted and passed a referendum to re-criminalize possession.

"It would be another matter if the WOD were in any measure successful, but it isn't. Every angle you look at it from, it's a complete disaster."

What a bunch of crap! Drug use is down from the 70's, and has been flat for the last 15 years. The chart below is for marijuana, the most popular recreational drug. Go to the (anti-WOD, btw) website on the chart to see that the trends for other drugs look the same.

What? Confused by the facts? I guess that since drug use isn't zero, the WOD is a failure "from every angle", huh?

But legalizing alcohol use was a roaring success? 100,000 people dying every year (not including traffic deaths) from alcohol related problems is a success? 14 million alcoholics is a success? Arresting 1.5 million people each year for DUI because they might commit a crime is a success?

How many people died from alcohol during prohibition? How many broken homes and broken lives were caused by alcoholism during prohibition? How many DUI arrests during prohibition?

You have a very strange way of defining "success".

I had seen the same interview with Chester Floyd on TV and Chester appeared to really get into the police action. Now Chester is back peddling fast.

Police have a tough job when politicians don't enforce laws on the books and judges release felons back on the streets again, it's like full employment for criminal lawyers.

Our police are being conditioned and used by policies created from judges and politicians with end results like Goose Step Creek.

Police get photographed using unprofessional behavior and a little bullying workplace aggression as in the picture below.

Printing one side of a story, while making accusations is wrong. The wronged person does not get any chance to defend himself and gets smeared in the newspaper. In our particular incident, the officer was getting threats from as far away as Moscow. And the story in the paper was not true.

And in this particular case, these cops were doing their job. They were brought into the school at the request of the school, regardless if they found something or not. If they were told there were weapons and drugs in the school they did what they were supposed to do.

People don't like it but the people are barking up the wrong tree in my opinion.

"But legalizing alcohol use was a roaring success? 100,000 people dying every year (not including traffic deaths) from alcohol related problems is a success? 14 million alcoholics is a success? Arresting 1.5 million people each year for DUI because they might commit a crime is a success?

You have a very strange way of defining "success"."

Excuse me, but these are your words, not mine. I never said that legalizing alchohol was a "success." I said that legalizing alchohol took the money people spent on booze out of the Black Market. Which it did, by the way.

Your need to erect and then topple otherwise nonexistent straw men does not enhance your argument, and only paints you as a deceptive extremist who is willing to deceive in order to further his lacking agenda.

You make a good point, though, in that your comparison points out that drugs are drugs, and that it is indefensibly hypocritical in the extreme to legalize deadly booze and make illegal something as relatively harmless as pot.

Go peddle your illogical, deceitful, reactionary phlegm on someone gullible enough to take the hook.

;-/

You have a very strange way of defining "success"."

Your need to erect and then topple otherwise nonexistent straw men does not enhance your argument, and implies strongly that, absent the deceit, you have no other way of advancing your lacking agenda.

You unintentionally make a good point, though, in that your comparison points out that drugs are drugs, and that it is indefensibly hypocritical in the extreme to legalize deadly booze and make illegal something as relatively harmless as pot.

You would do far better to go and peddle your illogical, deceitful, reactionary phlegm on someone gullible enough to take the hook.

;-/

You are conflating a litany of errors: Alcohol has always been 90% of addiction and death due to use of intoxicants. This is true, with small variations, throughout the world and throughout history, no matter what other drugs are legal. And, if you think about it, this is also obvious: Hard drug use is such a minority pursuit, and it is self limiting, and hardcore addicts don't pay attention to laws, so laws are utterly doomed to make little if any difference in hard drug use. Ironically, your marijuana graph shows "success" in supressing what would be a more benign intoxicant.

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