Posted on 08/19/2002 11:53:25 AM PDT by USA21
Raid on Kmart lot leaves shock, anger
Teenagers, parents question arrests of 425 outside store
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.
Steve Campbell / Chronicle Soneary Sy is overcome with emotion outside the police station as she waits for her son to be released. Sy said she waited all night for her 17-year-old son, a straight-A student, to come home.
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.
Steve Campbell / Chronicle Brandi Ratliff, left, and Kyesa Scott, both 18, comfort each other after being released from police custody. "It was traumatic," Ratliff said of her arrest in a Kmart parking lot and a 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."
Well your experience was completely different than mine. All I know is my boss liked having the kids as customers. Perhaps he had better luck with them because of his attitude. Incidently your contentention that the place was empty after 10:00 is pretty funny. Where I worked it didn't start getting really busy until after about 10:00 when the kids would start getting out of the movies or going out crusing.
"Wouldn't it make more sense to arrest those who intimidate customers, etc., on an ongoing basis, rather than organize mass arrest opportunities to further...what?
"Budget enhancements? Promotion opportunities? What??"
This was a "don't bother us anymore" arrest.
They did it in such a way as to guarantee that they'd stop receiving calls to "do something" about the punks congregating in the parking lot.
It's like when you put your foot down and insist that your kid do some chores, and when he's done, you take one look at the results and instantly wish you'd never asked for the "help".
Just as our kids "teach us a lesson", the cops taught the Upstanding Citizens a lesson -- by arresting their kids on trumped-up charges.
Sure, the charges will be dismissed -- after tens of thousands of dollars in the aggregate (or more) are spent on lawyers, expert witnesses, time lost from work, etc.
Exactly where did you get your assumption that these were ALL 18,19, and 21 year olds? Because those interviewed were 17-20?
I in no way condone police selectively enforcing laws, but how would any property owner on this board feel if they had an un-invited group (especially one that is as large as this group was) loitering on their property. Knowing these teenage groups as I do, I know they don't hand around somewhere without making some sort of mess or tearing something up. And what if that same property owner had asked them not to hang around on thier property?
There were over 400 arrested, how many did not get arrested?
And someone wants to talk about "boot lickers". How about if the owner of the shopping center were sued because someone was run over, shot, beat, or otherwise was hurt on the property? Everyone here should know as well as I do that the liberal "justice" system would hold the property owner accountable - even if he tried to get rid of the loiterers.<p. I also take it, as these kids were out at 12:30 AM on Sunday, that they were not your typical church-goers?
Why in the heck was she separated from her father after midnight in the vicinity of hundreds of other teenagers???? He is lucky not to be up on neglect charges.
Obviously you do not believe in the right to conduct a business without having 500 teenagers in your parking lot!
Good luck collecting on them. Or even filing them for that matter. K-Mart is in Chapter 11.
I only needed my driver's license. And I just spent time in Canada, and all I needed to get back and forth was the same.
I mean really, no stopping and searching at the border, what kind of police state is this?
Anyway, you are mischaracterizing the term "checkpoint". In a police state, a checkpoint is where everybody is stopped in order to check "papers" and determine if you are going somewhere you are allowed to go. IOW, to restrict movement.
If you live in NJ, chances are you've been stopped for at least one of these.
Nope, I live in PA, and I've never seen a checkpoint. Once again, a pretty weak police state.
In Philadelphia and most other cities, groups over a certain size require a police permit for such picnics.
Permits for large gaterings on city property are nothing new, to claim it is, and that is somehow the beginnings of a police state is silly.
No, we ain't the USSR, but it would be a hard sell to claim we're moving in the direction of more freedom rather than less.
Whether we are or aren't, to call the US a police state is a ridiculous statement.
Yup. I remember one time I was driving down "the strip" in heavy traffic and pulled into the nearest parking lot to use my cell phone. Within one minute my car was surrounded by a bunch of punks who closed in on it for no other reason than I was there, and I was not "one of them".
The cops should have been enforcing the laws against the actual punks all along, so that the problem would not have festered like a boil.
Instead, they chose to ignore it -- and ignore the irate calls demanding that they "do something" -- until they finally chose to "do something" that was so outrageous that they could be confident that no one would be silly enough to ask them to "do something" any time in the forseeable future.
Maybe you were lucky with the kids you had--or maybe it was back when kids were, as a whole, much better behaved.
Incidently your contentention that the place was empty after 10:00 is pretty funny. Where I worked it didn't start getting really busy until after about 10:00 when the kids would start getting out of the movies or going out crusing.
No, nowadays the kids stand around in the parking lot and scare off the potential customers, and they don't go back into the restaraunt after buying their burger and fries.
the SS said that too
EBUCK
THEY DID
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