Law Enforcement: Goose Creek Agrees to Pay Up, Change Ways in Settlement of Notorious High School Drug Raid Case http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/444/goose-creek-drug-raid-settlement.shtml A federal judge Tuesday gave final approval to a landmark settlement in the case of the heavy-handed 2003 police drug raid on students at Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. Under the terms of the settlement, the Goose Creek Police Department, the City of Goose Creek, and the Berkeley County School District will pay $1.6 million for violating the rights of nearly 150 students caught in the raid. The trio also signed a consent decree barring police from conducting law enforcement activities on school grounds absent a warrant, probable cause, or voluntary consent. Caught by both school and police surveillance cameras, video of the raid helped make the case a cause celebre. The tapes show students as young as 14 forced to the ground in handcuffs as officers in SWAT team uniforms and bulletproof vests aim guns at their heads and lead a drug dog to tear through their book bags. Authorized by Principal George McCrackin because he suspected a student was dealing mar1juana, the raid came up empty: no drugs or weapons were found and none of the students were charged with any crime. "They hit that school like it was a crack house, like they knew that there were crack dealers in there armed with guns," said 14-year-old Le'Quan Simpson, who was one of the students forced to kneel at gunpoint in the school hallway and whose father served on a SWAT team. Simpson's father, Elijah Simpson, a local deputy sheriff who has served on SWAT teams, said, "This was clearly a no-shoot situation no matter how you look at it. A school drug raid is not a SWAT situation, but that's how the Goose Creek police handled it." The police raid was unnecessarily dangerous, the older Simpson added. "It was crossfire just waiting to happen. If one door slammed, one student dropped a book or screamed, and then those guns would have gone off all over the place. Did you see the way they were swinging those guns around? That's not how you do it." Following the raid, the ACLU brought a lawsuit on behalf of students' families charging police and school officials with violating the students' right to be free from unlawful search and seizure and use of excessive force. The lawsuit demanded a court order declaring the raid unconstitutional and blocking the future use of such tactics, as well as damages on behalf of the students. Joined by local attorneys, the lawsuit grew to include 53 of the affected students. The American Civil Liberties Union represented 20 of them, including Simpson. "Goose Creek students now have a unique place in our nation," said Graham Boyd, Director of the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project. "They are the only students in the nation who have complete protection of their Fourth Amendment rights of search and seizure." Marlon Kimpson, a lawyer with Motley Rice LLC, the firm that represented most of the students, said students involved in the drug sweep must file claims by July 28. A claims administrator appointed by the court will then evaluate each student's claim and determine which students are eligible for the funds, Kimpson said. "Any student who was searched and seized on Nov. 5, 2003, is now eligible for compensation and they have received notice of that," Kimpson told the Charleston Post & Courier. "It is now incumbent on the students to take action and have their claim considered." Under the terms of the settlement, the affected students will divide $1.2 million among themselves, while the lawyers will pocket $400,000. Depending on the number of students who agree to the settlement, each could walk away with between $6,000 and $12,000. The powers that be have learned a lesson, said Kimpson. "McCrackin is no longer in charge, the police have agreed to additional training and school district has vowed to change its policies with respect to the way they conduct drug raids," Kimpson said. "You must conduct drug searches according to the US Constitution. This settlement and this class-action lawsuit is notice to police officers and school officials across the nation that students don't shed their constitutional rights merely by entering a schoolhouse door."
This action was hardly "national policy." Some idiot local administrators screwed up and went to far.
The "war on drugs" and the mentality it engenders led directly to the actions of the administrators in question.
Back in my day (rimrocker leans back in is rocking chair and gazes wistfully into the past) we didn't have backpacks... we carried our books in our hands like God intended. And Mary Jane was where it ought to be... in your locker or your car's glove compartment. And the smell on only 12? Shoot, kids today are pure amateurs. it was rare day at my HS when you couldn't smell reefer on 12 kids. At lunch the potheads would disappear into the cemetary across the street and light up behind Sam Houston's grave stone. After school you could see clouds emanating from numerous vehicles as they left the parking lot. (of course, we only had 12 successful people come out of my high school... everyone else is still sacking groceries at Safeway.
zrb and bamaslammer? i was just about to type what year is this when i scrolled back down and saw it was a thread from three years ago, lol.
Radley Balko at the Cato Institute just released a paper on the militarization of police forces in America. The summary: Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home. These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects. This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform. Full paper here: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476 Check the Cory Maye link in my sig for the ridiculously tragic story of one such botched SWAT-style drug raid.
Reason and Logic won't work on a macroscale. The Enlightenment's greatest error. PS: COME BACK GREENVEGAN
Yeah, in Dallas last month they used SWAT to break up a poker game. They issued tickets to all the players which should tell you how dangerous of a situation it was.
Yet in the thousands of schools across the country that go to school everyday, how often does this happen? If it were a national policy or the war on drugs to blame, would we not see this almost every week? How long have we had the "war on drugs" and how many times has this happened? Once? Twice? Its like me blaming the "national policy" of free speech for some racist spouting off his ignorant views at a KKK rally. Sure, he's an idiot, but I blame him for his stupidity, not the national policy that allowed him to do it. I blame the admins of the school for their stupdity.
