He sure does!
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."
Still surprised though, that you a ten-year-old could be arrested for not actually doing anything wrong.
Were you born an a**hole or did your wonderful, virtuous parents (who would NEVER dare to do something so irresponsible as see a movie after 8:00 PM on a Saturday) raise you to be one from an early age?
There may not even be a ten year old who got arrested. The reporter never saw her or talked to her. Emily Demmler, one of those arrested, claims that even a ten year old was arrested.
Well, I'd be very surprised, if that's what happened. Because you would not normally expect enough cops to be available at immediate notice to go and bust 425 people. It sounds to me to be a planned affair.
I think you answer your own questions. With over 400 people, why would a cop say, "Oh, I'll believe this one, but not that one"? Answer, a cop would not. If the kid "was in the middle" of it all, I doubt the story is true. I bet more than one kid tried the "but I'm with my parents....and they are right over there..." story.
BUMP!!
I just re-read it.
This could all be a lie.
That said, I think it was handled poorly. I think seeing a few of your friends riding off in the back of a police car, for a few weekends in a row, would encourage most of them to go elsewhere. This mass "equal treatment" arrest was a bad idea.
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This was probably not a new problem or the first time they were there.
Our town is much smaller but businesses have the same problem. These kids come in cars which take up parking spaces, then the customers come and have no place to park, so they leave. They hang around and leave a mess from drinks and food in the lot, turn their car radios on full blast.
Most business owners do ask them the leave, post No Loitering signs and when all else fails, they call the police.
425 is NOT a small group of kids and was probably an on going problem and calling the police was the owners or managers last resort. Of course the police and the manager are the bad guys. These kids wouldn't do anything wrong now would they?
How does a 10 year-old get separated from her dad at midnight?
For starters, I don't accept that a parking lot accessible to anyone with a car is 'people's private property.' Secondly, I'll bet there was plenty of genuine crime being committed in Houston, while these teenagers were being rousted for doing nothing. But most of all, what hot dog ordered such a pointless bust, which will needlessly result in hundreds of kids, their friends and their parents viewing the local police with contempt?
I'd wager that not all 450 kids were straight A students.
There seems to be a bias in this story. The only examples of people arrested are either "straight A students" or little children. I'm surpised they didn't also throw in that Mother Teresa was arrested.
Those 450 teens probably run the spectrum, from teens hanging out eating ice-cream, to those hanging out and drinking beer, to those hanging out and doing drugs. The problem is they are all "hanging out" and killing the K-Mart's business. If you've ever seen teenagers hanging out or cruising a shopping center parking lot (a common sight in rural America) you know the last thing you want to do is pull in and get in the middle of that.
Don't forget about the lawyers also. If K-Mart failed to complain to the police and have the teens run off, then the first time somebody got hurt, some lawyer would argue that K-Mart approved of the teens gathering on K-Mart property because they didn't do anything to stop it. The lawyer would promptly sue saying they were responsible for any trouble that the teens cause.
The police apparently screwed up. All they really needed to do was put a patrol car in there and run everyone off for a few weekends, and eventually they would find somewhere else to hang out at.
I think the "my Dad only to took me to the 7:00 p.m. movies" line was the one that gave you away.
Yeah, those ten year old girls are a real threat, aren't they?
Of course it was planned. Nobody can tell me that 425 people, including paying patrons at the adjacent Sonic restaurant, defied a police order to leave, and so the police had no choice but to begin arresting them. And the suggestion that the media is covering up that act of defiance is absurd.
I am really surprised at the number of people here who see nothing wrong with what happened here. Surprised and disappointed.
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