Posted on 08/19/2002 4:58:54 AM PDT by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin
A crowd of angry teenagers and their parents accused police Sunday of arresting many innocent bystanders during an overnight raid on a west Houston parking lot where youths apparently congregate. Scores of Houston police officers swarmed onto the Kmart parking lot in the 8400 block of Westheimer about 12:30 a.m. Sunday and arrested about 425 people for criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor.
Houston Police Department spokesman Martin DeLeon said many cars were towed. DeLeon said business owners have been complaining about youths gathering on their parking lots on weekend nights and causing a commotion. DeLeon said he did not have more details about the incident because the two captains in charge of the raid, M.A. Aguirre and J.P. Mokwa, were sleeping Sunday after working all night.
The Kmart store is open 24 hours a day, and many of the people at the HPD station at 61 Reisner said Sunday that they had simply been shopping or eating at a Sonic drive-in restaurant that adjoins the discount store's parking lot when they were arrested. Kmart and Sonic supervisors referred all questions to their corporate headquarters, which were not open Sunday.
"We went to use the restroom at Kmart and to buy a Scrunchi (hair band), and when we came back to our car, cops were coming in (the parking lot) and they tied our hands," said Brandi Ratliff, 18, who said she was a straight-A student at Waller High School and never had any problems with the law. Ratliff said that even though she and two friends told police they had just come out of the Kmart, all three were arrested and spent the night in jail.
"It was traumatic," said a tearful Ratliff on Sunday morning after her parents drove from Stafford to pay her $300 bail at the downtown city jail. "It was sick where they were holding us. A prostitute was fighting with another woman. The food they served was food you would serve to a dog, not a human."
Ratliff and her two friends, Kris Karsteter, 21, and Kyesa Scott, 18, all had pink marks on their wrists from where they said police had tied plastic handcuffs too tightly. Scott said she didn't have the money to pay bail and so she pleaded guilty to avoid spending another night in jail. Emily Demmler, 19, said: "All I was doing was eating ice cream."
Demmler said the only trouble she'd previously had with authorities was being called into the principal's office twice in elementary school for gossiping. She said she pulled her car into the Sonic lot shortly after midnight so she and her two friends could get some ice cream after a night of karaoke. After about five minutes, police "just swarmed," Demmler said.
"We thought we were in the middle of a drug bust, and we thought, `We're cool; we're not doing anything wrong,' " said Demmler, a part-time lifeguard at the Jewish Community Center who is starting college this fall at the University of Houston. Instead, all the patrons at the Sonic were ordered by police to march to the Kmart lot, where they joined throngs of other people who were being arrested, she said.
"My purse and my friend's purse were still in the car ... but the cop wouldn't let me get them," said Demmler, whose mother eventually recovered her car and both purses. "We asked police why we were being arrested, and they said, `Everybody is receiving equal treatment from the Houston Police Department tonight.' It didn't matter what you were doing; they arrested you."
Demmler said many youths appearing to be 13 or 14 were arrested and taken to juvenile detention facilities, adding, "They even arrested a 10-year-old girl who was having dinner with her father and took her to juvenile detention. "She got separated from her father and I asked her how old she was, and she told me she was 10," Demmler said. "She was dazed."
In a phone interview, Demmler claimed to have "huge marks on my arms" from tight handcuffs. Leanne Williams said her 19-year-old son called her from jail and told her he showed police a receipt for bottled water from Kmart, but he was still arrested. She said her son called her five times from the downtown jail, but police still couldn't locate him at 11 a.m. because his paperwork had been delayed.
"I gotta spend my Sunday at the jail searching for my son they can't find," said her husband, Jerome Williams. Soneary Sy didn't know her 17-year-old son, a straight-A student, was arrested until he called her at 6 a.m. "I didn't sleep all night waiting for my son to come home" said a sobbing Sy, a Cambodian immigrant who moved to Houston 22 years ago. "He tried to go to Kmart and as soon as he got to Kmart he was arrested."
Really?
The Kmart store is open 24 hours a day
So, I guess Kmart doesn't invite its late night patrons to use its parking lot, huh?
"We went to use the restroom at Kmart and to buy a Scrunchi (hair band), and when we came back to our car, cops were coming in (the parking lot) and they tied our hands," said Brandi RatliffHere's my one question that I'd like answered, if anyone can find it in the local coverage: Was the riot act read to these folks before they were arrested, or was this carried out like a 'raid', as described in the article?
`Everybody is receiving equal treatment from the Houston Police Department tonight.'Guilty, not guilty, passive, noisy, 10 year old, 18 year old, shopper, loiterer. Why the hell didn't they just tell the kids to leave?
? ..... If the storeowners get to where they find it a problem then the cops usually start running people off and they move to a new area for a while.
Never Ever have we had to resort to mass arrests, I hope their dept gets their arses sued off! And if my children weren't welcome in the Kmart parking lot I'd make sure my car and money would'nt be found in there either.
This was unreal but not surprising after I read this...... called into the principal's office twice in elementary school for gossiping.
I'd take that wager. Teenagers who have cars and make straight A's are not necessairly the product of government check, crack households. Also, this happened on a Saturday nitht.
How can you 'criminally trespass', in the parking lot of a department store that's open 24 hours a day?
This was SATURDAY night.
I'm sorry, but this is outrageous conduct by the Houston Police Department. They arrested everyone in sight, including people who were valid customers of both the Sonic and Kmart. There is no excuse for arresting a teenager who was getting ice cream after a date. And a 10- year old girl with her father?? GIVE ME A BREAK.
There's no doubt that a large percentage of those kids there were loitering, but you can't arrest everyone who was there!
I'm sure the towing companies made a fortune towing every car in sight, and the city will make a fortune on the impound fees. Of course, they are going to lose it all when the false arrest lawsuits are filed.
The proper thing to do was to cruise into the parking lot and tell the kids to leave or they would start arresting in 5 minutes. Shoo them off.
Not this. This is BS.
Kids need places to hang out but private property laws need to be respected too. If you own a business, 450 people don't have a right to be on it when you don't want them there. I doubt these people were all as completely innocent as they claim, there was probably quite a lot that was going on --like drugs, drinking, fighting and scaring off customers.
I agree with you completely, I was just explaining the recent cultural phenomenon.
What fascist rubbish. You don't know anything about the families of the kids who were arrested. Keep defending the cops who cuffed a ten-year-old kid (having dinner with her dad) for 'criminal trespass', zhabotinsky.
How do you know this didn't happen? The cops always gave us time to beat it. I imagine that was the case here. But the media is trying to make a point so that was probably left out.
If there had been a riot, people would be blaming the police for allowing it.
A very interesting remark about equal treatment. Perhaps the offending youths were mostly of a particular race, and the cops just arrested everyone in the vicinity to avoid any accusations of bias. That's the only way they can avoid being branded racist by taking in minority criminals, need to bring in a few innocent kids to even out the quotas.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.