Police, school district defend drug raid

Monday, November 10, 2003 Posted: 1:41 PM EST (1841 GMT)

Police raid a high school for drugs in Goose Creek, South Carolina.

(CNN) -- After complaints from parents and students, police in Goose Creek, South Carolina, defended their decision Friday to send a team of officers, some with guns drawn, into a high school earlier this week for a drug raid that turned up no drugs.

The Berkeley School District north of Charleston, South Carolina, also defended its role in the incident, which has triggered outrage among some in the community.

Stratford High School students described Wednesday's incident as frightening.

"They would go put a gun up to them, push them against the wall, take their book bags and search them," Aaron Sims, 14, told CNN affiliate WCSC. "They just came up and got my friend, not even saying anything or what was going to happen. ... I was scared."

Sims said his mother was "a little angry," but his father understood and "thought it was necessary."

Lt. Dave Aarons of the Goose Creek Police Department said the raid, the first the department has done at a school, followed a police investigation into drug activity that began after a student informed school staff about drug sales on school property.

Police monitored video from school surveillance cameras for several days and "observed consistent, organized drug activity," he said. "Students were posing as lookouts and concealing themselves from the cameras."

When the principal saw more of the same suspicious activity on the school surveillance video, he asked for the officers to respond, Aarons said.

On Wednesday, 14 officers went to the school "and assumed strategic positions," he said.

Within 30 seconds, officers had moved to "safely secure the 107 students who were in that hallway," Aarons said. "During that time some of the officers did unholster in a down-ready position, so that they would be able to respond if the situation became violent."

"The school also designated faculty to secure the hallway to keep other students from entering," Aarons said.

Anytime narcotics and money are involved he said there is "the reasonable assumption that weapons will be involved. ... Our primary concern was the safety of the students (and) everyone else involved."

'School had no knowledge that weapons would be drawn'

Aarons said "12 to 14 students" were placed in handcuffs or plastic flexcuffs "due to their failure to respond to repeated police instructions to get on their knees with their hands on their heads," after one of the lieutenants explained to the students what was going on.

A canine unit was brought in and the dog responded positively to 12 book bags, which were then searched by school officials, said David Barrow, secondary school supervisor for the Berkeley School District. But no drugs were found and no arrests were made.

"The school had no knowledge that weapons would be drawn," Barrow said. "We understand students' and parents' and the community's concerns about this particular search. We will work internally and with local law enforcement to be sure these issues are addressed."

Still, he said, the school was concerned about possible drug sales on campus, and believed action was necessary.

Jared Weeks, 14, told WCSC that police were aggressive.

"They kind of pushed us against the wall and started searching us," Weeks said. "I didn't think all that was called for."

Weeks said he was "kind of nervous," but not scared "because I didn't have anything to hide."

He said there are a lot of drugs in the school, but that this sort of raid was unnecessary. "There is certain people that you know sell drugs," he said. "They could have just searched those people."

Aarons said police believe the drug-dealing students were tipped off.

"I don't think it was an overreaction," he said of the raid. "I believe it was one tactical method by which we could safely approach the problem to ensure that everybody was safe."

He said the incident is being reviewed, as is every police operation.

FBI reviews police shootings of 2 teens

Justice Department will get results, decide if civil rights probe warranted

By ROBERT CROWE
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

The FBI is looking into the recent shooting deaths of two teenage boys at the hands of Houston police officers, federal officials said Wednesday.

Bob Doguim, Houston FBI spokesman, said the agency initiated separate fact-finding missions, or preliminary inquiries, into the deaths of Eli Escobar Jr., 14, on Friday, and Jose Vargas Jr., 15, on Halloween night.

"(The pair of inquiries) doesn't mean there has been any kind of civil rights violations (by police)," Doguim said. "It just means we have determined circumstances are such that it deserves a review."

FBI officials in Houston opened independent reviews of each incident within days after it happened, he said. Witnesses, family members and the police officers involved in each incident could be interviewed. Doguim said the agency's review of the shootings is not an official investigation.

The agency will forward results of the inquiries to the Department of Justice, which ultimately will decide whether to conduct an investigation of civil rights violations.

Contacted late Wednesday, two Houston Police Department spokesmen said they were not aware of the inquiry.

"I haven't heard about it, but I do know in the past the FBI did it as a matter of procedure," said department spokesman Alvin Wright.

While Doguim said the FBI's review is a standard practice, he acknowledged that community response to police shootings of civilians can be taken into account when weighing whether to conduct an inquiry.

"It's our responsibility to be in tune and in touch with what's going on in the community," Doguim said. "That's who we serve."

Public outcry against the Police Department has swelled as watchdog groups and community activists have mounted a campaign to scrutinize the actions of the officers involved in the shootings.

Angel Perales, Escobar's second cousin, was pleased to learn about the inquiry.

"I think it's a very good thing having someone else investigating," he said. "I feel if HPD does its own investigation, nothing will come out true. They do need someone else to look into this matter."

Escobar's mother, Lydia, too upset to discuss the inquiry, said she was planning funeral arrangements for her son.

Terry Bryant, an attorney for the Vargas family, said the FBI began its inquiry into Vargas' death within days after he was killed outside a movie theater parking lot in west Houston.

"If I were a minority, I'd be very careful about driving around the city until the FBI can help clean up the situation," Bryant said. "I generally think the FBI is taking it very seriously."

On Oct. 31, officer R.K. Butler fatally wounded Vargas in what police described as an accidental shooting near the AMC Studio 30 movie theater on Dunvale.

Butler and another officer were working off-duty security jobs in the theater parking lot when they saw Vargas driving a Chevrolet Blazer and became suspicious, investigators said. Vargas drove onto Dunvale and Butler followed in his own car, chasing the Blazer northward until Vargas was stopped by traffic near Westheimer.

Butler walked up to Vargas and put his gun in the driver's window, but Vargas accelerated, police said. The door frame struck Butler's arm, they said, and the gun fired.

In the more recent incident, Escobar was killed about 5:30 p.m. Friday while fighting with officers Arthur Carbonneau and Ronald Olivo outside a friend's apartment at 3130 Mangum, in northwest Houston, police said.

The two patrolmen, who were looking for a suspect in an earlier assault, were trying to subdue Escobar and handcuff him because he had not followed their commands, police said.

An attorney with the Houston Police Officers' Union has said Carbonneau's gun fired accidentally after Escobar kicked the officer's hand.

GOOSE CREEK, S.C. -- It was partly a tip from an informant, partly the activity he saw on the Stratford High School surveillance cameras that led the school's principal to call in the police for an early morning drug sweep here on Nov. 5.

But it was also tape from the surveillance cameras, showing the police drawing guns on students, handcuffing them, making them kneel facing the wall and finding no drugs at all that has set off protests and created a racial divide.

For many residents of Goose Creek, a pleasant bedroom community north of Charleston, it was particularly disturbing that though blacks make up less than a quarter of the 2,700 students at the high school, two-thirds of the 107 students caught up in the sweep were black.

The legal consequences of the raid are still emerging. No charges were filed against the students. Instead, the local prosecutor has asked the state attorney general and the United States attorney's office to decide whether students' rights were violated. A class-action lawsuit on behalf of the students has been filed.

The timing of the raid, which began at 6:45 a.m., apparently contributed to the racial skew: only the earliest buses, filled mostly with black students, had delivered their passengers; the later buses and students who drive had not yet arrived.

The principal invited the police to hide in utility closets and stairwells until he gave the signal that the first students had arrived. Then the police burst out, with a drug-sniffing dog.

Pam Bailey, the spokeswoman for the Berkeley County School District, which includes Stratford High, said black students were not singled out.

"This was not racial profiling," Ms. Bailey said. "When you have reports that some students are selling drugs at a certain time in a certain place, whether they're black, white or Asian, that's when and where you go."

But many students saw the raid as an example of racial bias.

"If they were willing to get anybody, they would have come at a different time and searched the whole school, not just 107 kids out of 2,700," said De'Nea Dykes, a black 11th grader.

Ms. Dykes said she thought the school's principal, George C. McCrackin, "was right to try to do something about the drug problem, but this wasn't the way."

Ms. Dykes said she was leaving the restroom when she saw officers coming toward her with guns drawn and yelling at students to get down.

"I assumed that they were trying to protect us, that it was like Columbine, that somebody got in the school that was crazy or dangerous," she said. "But then a police officer pointed a gun at me. It was really scary."

Jessica Chinners, a white 10th grader, said that when she saw which students were being searched, her first thought was that the police were racist.

"I looked down the long hall and saw the police lining up all these black students," Ms. Chinners said.

Ms. Dykes, Ms. Chinners and most other students interviewed, black and white, said the incident opened a racial chasm in the school.

While some black teachers and parents say the raid was appropriate, and some white ones say it was excessive, many of the reactions break down along race lines.

The week after the incident, the school's teachers, most of them white, held a demonstration along with some community members to express support for Mr. McCrackin.

Some black parents, meanwhile, have called for the firing of Mr. McCrackin. Last Thursday, hundreds of people, almost all black, turned out for a rally at which the Rev. Jesse Jackson denounced the incident along with the fatal shooting of a mentally ill black man in North Charleston last month.

Mr. McCrackin declined to be interviewed. But in a Nov. 11 letter to parents, he said: "I was surprised and extremely concerned when I observed the guns drawn. However, once police are on campus, they are in charge."

There has been no formal decision on whether the police acted improperly. On Friday, the local prosecutor, Ralph Hoisington, said he was asking the state attorney general to decide whether charges should be filed in connection with the raid. Mr. Hoisington said he was convinced that the police goals were appropriate but that some officers' methods had been "ill-advised at best." He said he was asking the State Law Enforcement Division to share its report on the incident with the United States attorney's office and the F.B.I. to decide whether there were any federal violations.

The students' legal claims are getting under way, as well. On Friday, Ronald L. Motley, a prominent local lawyer, filed a class-action lawsuit against Mr. McCrackin; the schools superintendent, Dr. J. Chester Floyd; the Goose Creek police chief, Harvey Becker; and others, accusing them of violating the students' constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure, as well as assault, battery and false arrest. The American Civil Liberties Union said it would soon file a similar suit, in which the racial issues would be explicitly raised.

"It is completely illegal for police to go into a school with their guns drawn, dogs and handcuffs to find students who might have drugs," said Graham Boyd of the Drug Policy Litigation Project at the A.C.L.U. "The right way to do this, if they have reason to believe a student has drugs, is to call that student in to the principal's office and search the bag there."

For many of the students in the sweep, the raid is a humiliating memory. Rodney Goodwin, a 10th grader who came to Stratford this year, said he was in the cafeteria when the principal pointed him out, along with other students at his table, to three police officers, who told him he was under arrest and put plastic handcuffs on his wrists. Mr. Goodwin was taken to the main hallway, where, he said, a police officer pointed a gun at him as the principal patted him down and reached inside his pockets.

"I really don't know why they did what they did to me," he said. "I didn't do anything wrong, but they arrested me."

(c) 2003 The New York Times Company