In the situation described in this article the administrators could see the students acting suspciously. I'm assuming they could even identify which students it was. Did the principal go down to where the activity was taking place and check it out? Did he send the two police officers who were assigned to the school down to check it out? Did he call in the students involved in the suspcious activity into his office for a talk? No, he called law enforcement and organized a drug raid as if this school were some sort of a crack house. Armed officers, with guns drawn, pounced on over 100 random students and probably scared them to death.
The fact the officers failed to even find any evidence of illicit activity in the school is just going to make matters worse. Either the activity seen on the surveillance tapes wasn't nearly as suspicious as first thought or the Goose Creek Police Department is pretty inept. Either way, it seems that a simpler and more direct solution to the "suspicious activity" would have been to confront the students engaged in the activity while it was going on.
Nobody is even talking about the civil rights implications yet. The officers raided the school based on suspcions arised by a surveillance video, yet most of the students caught in the raid weren't even seen on the video. The police had no reason to subject them to the raid. If they had a video then they could have identifified some of the students on that video and searched their lockers.
To say that these kids are going to feel a certain amount of resentment towards the school and the police department would be putting it lightly. Wouldn't you feel a bit resentful if an officer burst into your office and pointed a gun at you because some of your co-workers had been acting suspiciously?
You know you would and these kids are going to feel the same way.
Tom's Nap Room: Stop Big Brother
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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