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."
EBUCK
I don't know about nowadays, this was 7 or 8 years ago and it was pizza. Our biggest problem was getting them to leave after finishing their food, so we could seat others. Of course the main reason they were there in the first place was to hang out with their friends and since the place was packed it was kinda hard to get upset with them.
Like the PATIOT ACT
That's generally what cops do when they run in packs.... worse than a pack of wild dogs I have to wonder if there were any "no loitering" signs posted anywhere in the parking lot. If not it looks like a lawsuit to me.
Things have gone downhill after eight years of Clinton. Notice that now they hang out in the lot and deter anyone from showing up in the first place. Kinda hard to seat customers when they don't even come into the lot.
Some strip malls are known as ricer hangouts. Normal people avoid these places.
Not necessarily, kmart here in town is open 24/7, and it normally has 10-20 customers (not counting employees) after midnight.
It's a wonder they don't have to claim bankruptcy with a policy like that.
Our local K-Mart closes at midnight and they have to pretty much throw customers out at closing time.
EBUCK
The the problem is not a "police state", the problem lies in your relationship with those in authority. Maybe thats where to get help.
Private property/trespassing does not mean "police state".
Private property what that ?
part of the U.N Police and Military Exchange
In the American police state today, the cops sometimes don't bother to knock ' they just shoot the locks off the door.
Such was the case in Compton, Calif., last month. At 11 p.m. Aug. 9, a Special Weapons and Tactics Team, supposedly serving a search warrant in a broad-ranging narcotics investigation, performed a 'high-risk entry' on a private home. There was no knock. The cops blew off the locks on the front and back doors simultaneously.
When they went in, their guns were still blazing.
A retired grandfather was shot twice in the back and killed. His widow was hustled out of the house in nothing but panties, a towel and plastic handcuffs. She and six other 'suspects' were taken into custody and interrogated. But no charges were filed.
Investigators seized $10,000 in cash, a .22-caliber rifle and three handguns, but the drugs the cops were looking for were nowhere to be found. The family said the money was the life savings of Mario Paz, the 65-year-old killed in the storming of the house. He had taken the money out of a Mexican bank in anticipation of Y2K problems. Police claim they thought Paz was reaching for a gun. His widow, Maria Luisa, says that notion is crazy.
But here's the most interesting twist on one more 'dynamic entry' gone awry. The 20 cops who broke in to the Paz home last month were not L.A.P.D. officers. They were not L.A. County sheriff's deputies. They were members of the El Monte police force -- operating way outside their jurisdiction.
Why? Because the 'war on drugs' allows them to do so.
'We go all over,' explains El Monte Police Sgt. Steve Krigbaum, the head of the narcotics policing division. 'If we can show it directly impacts nark activity here, we'll go after it.'
And go after it they did. An investigation of the raid shows that after the police shot the locks off the doors, they fired a 'diversionary device' into a back bedroom window, threw a flash grenade on the ground behind the house. The lawyer for the Pazes says the cops fired indiscriminately into doors while the family slept.
'It was like war,' said Luz Escamilla, who lives next door.
You know, it is like war -- this situation in which we find ourselves in America today. There's an us-against-them attitude from police agencies that I have never seen before. Worse yet, there's no such thing as a local cop any more. It seems that local police have all been deputized as FBI agents in training, nationalized and militarized beyond necessity, beyond reason and beyond hope.
I'm worried about our country. Six years later, the truth about a nationally televised and highly publicized siege and massacre in Waco, Texas, is just beginning to filter out. How do the Paz families of the world expect to get justice and be treated fairly when there is no accountability at the highest levels of government and law enforcement for tragedies of the magnitude of Waco?
Think of how our civil liberties are being eroded: Possession of firearms, a constitutionally guaranteed right, is enough to make you a suspect and, perhaps, justify your untimely death at the hands of the police state; possession of cash, once considered a basic necessity, is treated with suspicion and your loot is subject to confiscation; and God forbid you should be a dissenter, a critic, someone who makes waves. The fact of the matter is no one is safe from the lawless American police state today.
You can be sleeping soundly in your bed one night. It's not the knock on the door you have to fear. It's the sound of your locks being shot off -- along with your constitutional rights.
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