TheAgitator.com
Drug Raid at Wethersfield High
Saturday, March 28th, 2009Nothing like a little preventative police state.
Officers from numerous police departments charged into Wethersfield High School Thursday to hunt for drugs.
Armed with police dogs, officers from Wethersfield, Rocky Hill, Manchester and New Britain raided the high school at 411 Wolcott Hill Road.
Locker by locker and room by room, police and their dogs sniffed around to send the school district’s message that drugs will not be taken lightly.
Police also searched more than 100 cars in the school’s parking lot, which led to the arrest of one student for drug paraphernalia.
Police ended up not finding any drugs, and that lone arrest is something School Superintendent Michael Kohlhagen is proud of…
Kohlhagen said Thursday’s raid proves that Wethersfield High School is safe and drug free.
That’s not all it proves.
I think everyone should welcome the opportunity to have their property and persons searched so that they can proudly prove to the state their fitness to be loyal subjects. To resist can only mean you’re hiding something. Schools are a particularly appropriate venue for this forceful style of governing because it helps instill in students at a young age what their place is in society as mere civilians, while reinforcing their patriotism, respect for the primacy of government, and their subservience to the national will. This is indeed a powerful tool to squelch the rebellious and independent attitudes that have characterized past generations of young people.
One thing that they sometimes report in these stories is how many false indications the dogs made. When they do it is always a much higher number than the correct indications.
Can you FOIA false dog indication data for the raid?
Thomas Jefferson would be proud. No, wait. He’d be mega-pissed.
I was first thinking of Bizzaro Jefferson.
They were doing this exact same thing when I was in high school 12 years ago. Sad, but nothing new. When one of the cops lined us up and made us turn out our pockets, I threw down at his feet the pocket copy of the constitution I used to carry. Somehow, I think the symbolism was lost on him.
Wow, we has these about once a year when I went to High School in Noblesville, IN about a decade ago. At some point during the day, we were informed that for the next 15 minutes, no one was allowed to leave the classrooms while the dogs roamed the hallways and parking lot. I never heard of them finding anything.
These must be more prevalent than reported.
Bizzaro Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Dependence.
Ok, someone help me out here. How can this not be an auto lawsuit? Searching cars??? on what basis?
And after it was all over, the students went back to learning how lucky they were to be born in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
I suspect that if we searched the lockers and parking lots of the Wethersfield, Rocky Hill, Manchester and New Britain police departments we’d find a whole lot more illegal contraband.
In fact, I’d bet on it.
At the cop bar that night, before driving home drunk the officers complaned in dismay
@Craig #7
The kids probably have to sign a waiver allowing vehicle searches in order to be allowed to drive to school. I had to sign something like that back in the day at my high school in Fort Wayne.
Continuing Craig’s point @ #7.
On what friggin’ basis can they search the persons and property of hundreds of students?
Did they have an informant who claimed to have bought drugs from the entire student body?
“That’s not all it proves.”
To me it proves that sending one’s children to government schools is foolish.
To me it proves that sending one’s children to government schools is foolish.
It depends on the school, really, and the parents. I homeschool my son, but I know several fantastic parents with great kids who send their kids to public school. No matter how parents educate their kids, I think it all boils down to the relationship they have with each other. And knowing that the school is one tool that’s useless without active participation from parents.
Les,
I’m referring at this point to the access to people’s kids that government schools give to government goons like the police and CPS. I could also make some comments about the nature of the “socialization” which occurs even in academically “good” schools. But, in light of Radley’s post, I was referring to the fact that the school participated in allowing uniformed thugs to encounter other peoples children.
I think of government involvement is education is like government involvement in the free market. They can do very little to improve it, but a lot to fuck it up.
I also don’t see how this is legit. Granted, my legal knowledge is from wikipedia school of law, but from that esteemed institution:
This can’t possibly meet the ‘reasonable suspicion’ standard, can it?
#4 Chance. Great idea. My kids are too young right now to even read, but I am giving them a copy to take to school. Cato Inst hands them out free (or used to).
Heck, the search doesn’t even seem to meet these pro drug war government guidelines (but which are a decade old)
reading my link in #17 again, the Wethersfield High actions do seem to meet that links drug dog standards, “Trained narcotics dogs to sniff objects may be used at any time and without any particular suspicion by the school official, ” i.e. no pretty much no standard whatsoever
Jerri,
I see what you mean and I agree 100%.
It also proves that most people are sheep who will do anything the state tells them to, especially if it is couched in terms of what is “normal” or “patriotic” and especially if refusal would lead to discomfort or hardship: good lessons to teach to future guardians of a democracy built on a revolution and a civil war.
#4 chance, I have a feeling that if you did something like that at your high school today, at the very least you’d be suspended at the most dead.
Where was this? This is the latest in a string of news articles posted from this site that give no clue as where they are. I could spend awhile googling to try to figure it out, but how about mentioning the state in the future? Thanks!
This is a valuable step in the indoctrination process. It teaches kids that when it comes to the drug war you have no 4th amendment rights and you have to prove your innocence. It may help them later in life to accept the fact that occasionally they may have to pee in a bottle at work. Or that the cops breaking down their door and shooting their dog is for their own good.
And, I cannot stress this enough: they must understand that if they are not a cop or an elected official they MUST be guilty of something.
“And, I cannot stress this enough: they must understand that if they are not a cop or an elected official they MUST be guilty of something.”
Or unless they are a corporate crony like an executive of Goldman Sachs. Glenn Greenwald wrote this recently:
“The key dynamic underlying all of this — the linchpin that allows it all to happen and, historically, the primary hallmark of a deeply broken nation — is the total elimination of the rule of law for the ruling class, with a simultaneous intensification of the law as a weapon against the citizenry.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/26/comparisions/index.html
Kolohe: Thanks for your info at @16, 18 & 19.
You’ve depressed the hell out of me.
But thanks for the info anyways.
;(
They pulled that in my town’s high school maybe a dozen years ago. My children were toddlers at the time, so I had no dog in the fight. I wrote to the principal that I didn’t think it was right to treat students like criminals. Their position is there is no expectation of privacy in the lockers, and that parents are glad for the added safety. Sigh.
these kids need to be spraying the staff cars with squirt guns loaded with marijuana water. get the dogs going nuts over staff vehicles. keep embarrassing items in their locker- opened condom wrappers, love notes with the principal’s name, shit that spills when the locker’s opened etc. make it painful for assholes to implement a search.
Fishwood: the principal is correct that there is no expectation of privacy of students lockers. The Supreme Court has held that students have lower privacy rights in schools (juveniles, educational mission, etc).
However (1) I believe that there is higher standard for searches of students or their cars than there are lockers and (2) even if there is not for the police, as a matter of EDUCATIONAL policy, the schools should not allow students to be treated like prisoners in the county jail.
If there was a shooting, or rampant evidence of drug problems, maybe. But in this case, the most they got was “drug paraphernalia”. These days, that could be a small plastic bag. I’d flip out if that happened at my school.
Don’t we wish.
They should teach the US constitution in schools. No one should be a teacher or a politician or a cop unless they know and actually understand the constitution. This kind of thing can only happen to a people that are unaware of the constitution and what it means.
anarch (#29) – most people just aren’t cornered yet.
SusanK, I fear most people would concur.
#29 what if the sheep don’t know that they are cornered? They have the grass, the water, their significant other. So what if they have no other prospects? At least they have comforts.
When I was in high school, our county was getting a lot of bomb threats. I never used my locker, but our principal claimed that during the hours we were standing outside away from the building during an evacuation, a team of teachers were opening every locker in every building. I gently taped a piece of paper to the inside of my locker, with the door open, filled the locker with ping pong balls, closed the door, and carefully tore away the paper. Alas, at the end of the year my locker had still never been opened. But really, if enough students did this, what could possibly go wrong?
I am curious what the drug paraphernalia was, maybe it was just an alligator clip for kinky sex which the cops wanted to call a roach clip.
If I were the parent of a child at that school, I would stand up at the next PTA meeting and state that the the fact that the Principal of the School accepted the raid as necessary when it had so little result proves that he should undergo psychological evaluation for paranoid tendencies.
The same sort of thing happened in the high school I was in way way back in 1980 in Houston Tx.
The cops brought in the drug dogs and did a locker by locker, classroom by classroom search.
I was sitting in art class, and one of the guys at our table started sweating when the announcement came over the speaker. As the class went on, he casually stood up, strolled over to the wastebasket, and dropped something into it. Then he came back to our table.
Ten minutes later, they brought a German Shepard and his handler into our class. Beautiful dog. Dog and handler went around the classroom until he alerted on a girls purse!
“Open the bag, miss.”
“But I don’t have anything! I swear!”
The dog was pretty excited, and as she opened her bag he made a fast lunge and came out with a candy bar and a couple of pads in his mouth. He started to wolf down the candy bar, wrapper and all.
The handler was embarrassed, called the dog off, apologized, and dragged the dog out of the classroom. 20 minutes later, the search was over.
When the bell rang and we were all leaving, the nervous kid went over to the trash can and recovered his stash.
I remember back when I was in high school our Dean of Students was a Chicago Public Schools career man who was angling for a district-level position. We had probably half a dozen of these kinds of raids in four years, and each time it was a little badge of honor for him because the school always came up drug free. It was a testament to how tight a ship he ran, and to his ability to keep his students away from drugs, and I’m sure it did more than a little to help him get that promotion a couple of years after I graduated. Funny thing about these searches though: somehow news that they were going to happen ALWAYS leaked to the drug culture in the school with enough advance notice for everyone to leave their goodies at home. Also, shockingly enough, I can remember at least one instance of a dog alerting on the bag of someone I knew was holding, and the cop mysteriously not finding anything when he searched it.
It’s coming to the UK as well….