From the Times and Democrat via the Drudge Report:
Fourteen officers cordoned off the main hallway of Stratford High School at 6:40 a.m. Wednesday to search for marijuana. No drugs were found."Several officers did unholster their weapons in a tactical law enforcement approach," Lt. Dave Aarons of the Goose Creek Police Department said. "There was no force whatsoever. Everyone was very compliant."
Aarons said he watched school surveillance tapes from four days that showed students congregating under cameras, periodically walking into a bathroom with different students and coming out moments later.
During Wednesday's raid, officers and school employees sealed off the main hallway. There were 107 students who happened to be in the hallway at the time.
Police told the students to sit on the floor and put their hands out, McCrackin said. Officers searched only book bags that the police dog responded to, not students, he said.
About 2,760 students attend Stratford High, the largest school in Berkeley County and among the largest statewide. Two officers work in the school full-time.
We are losing control of our children and it is all our fault.
In this article the school administration, rather than deal with suspcious activity internally, calls in law enforcement to do a drug raid. Before we even talk about how inappropriate the raid was lets compare the actions of the high school administration to the actions of today's parents. Rather than deal with "suspcious activity" by our children in our own homes we send them off to school blitely aware that they are dressed like hoodlums, stay out to all hours of the night and probably cause more problems than we care to know about. Yet when the school contacts us to tell us that our children are in trouble we get all righteous and accuse the school of wrong doing rather than laying the blame at the feet of our precious children. Schools, having grown weary of trying to relate discipline problems to parents who apparently don't care, have resorted to calling in law enforcement to the great detriment of our children.
It used to be that if two boys got into a fist fight in the locker room the coach or principal would wade in, hand out detentions and possibly make a quick call to the parents. If that happened today the police would be called, hand cuffs would be involved and the matter would be settled in court. Is this how we instill trust and respect for authority in our children? No,
of course it isn't. We should be showing these kids that the proper way to end a dispute is to offer an apology and to shake hands, not to call the cops and lawyers in.
Article comments
1 - Craig Lyndall
I graduated highschool in 1997 in the suburban Cleveland area and by the time I was a sophomore, they had instituted dog searches of the school a couple times per year, but these were done effectively and sent the proper message. After all the students were in class, the principal would come over the speaker and tell any students remaining in the hallway that they had a few minutes to get to their classroom, and if they didn't have a classroom, they were to report to the office. Then the dogs would go through and the officers would search lockers that the dogs had identified. No individual students were ever searched until after drugs had been found in their locker. After being at school during 5 or 6 searches, one student had been arrested. They found some pot in his locker, the officers got the student out of class, he was arrested and walked out of the building in handcuffs.
The message was clear that the school wouldn't allow students to have drugs in school. The police to student confrontations were limited to offenders after they had proven to be offenders based on locker contents. They made an example of only those who were guilty and in my mind it was an effective way to keep drugs out of school.
2 - Tom
I work in the drug and alcohol field. These scare tactics, as used as prevention, do not work.
They found nothing, just like the sobriety checkpoints usually yield about a 2% arrest rate.
Is violating our civil liberties worth catching a kid with weed or getting one guy with a BA of .08%
NO