Police drug search at school under guise of “bomb search”
Digg – Police drug search at school under guise of “bomb search”
“Well, with all the personal hate-threads and the Downie threads, I wanted to talk about something that happened today that I thought was pretty damn interesting.
I graduated from college in May, decided to take a year off before grad school. I’m currently spending the year substitute teaching at my old high school, it’s not a bad gig.
Anyway, today there was a bomb threat. Someone called in and said they were going to set off a bomb at 10 AM. This stuff happens like twice a year.
So, around 9:30, I march my students, along with all the other students in the building down to the football field. Police all over the place. They decide to send the kids home early.
Here is where it gets interesting. Any student that drove to school that day was required to walk to their car, under escort of an officer, and put their car keys on the hood of the car.
Then, they had to wait while the police searched every car in the parking lot.
At first the teachers were like “hell yeah! serves those brats right!” Then the police told the teachers to go stand beside their cars without opening any of the doors. Suddenly some of the teachers were like “oh this is silly.”
The buses got there, and took home all of the students who didn’t drive to school. Then the police had students stand by their car. They said over the loudspeakers that they would “Ask everyone in the parking lot to open up all their car doors and their trunks when an officer asked them to. If the person did not comply, then they would have to take appropriate measures.”
Anyway, a team of about 10 cops and what we figured were bomb-sniffing dogs went through each car. Searched it top and bottom. Trunks, underneath the hood, everything. Students’ cars and teachers’ cars.
Then, as I expected, they started handing out citations. A kids had tobacco products in their car. Some had drug paraphernalia. About 10 feet away from me they found what looked like about a tablespoonful of marijuana in a girl’s car. She was a student I would never describe as a trouble student, and she looked terrified. She took the blame for it and is going to have to go to court, even though she told the guidance counselor and myself that it was someone else’s who left it there over the weekend but she was so scared she took the blame (which might or might not be true, but I’ll say I wouldn’t be amazed if it was true).
We later found out that the dogs weren’t bomb sniffing at all. The bomb-sniffing dogs were en route from Pittsburgh. The dogs there were just normal drug dogs. The police used the bomb threat as an excuse to rake in some cash from fines.
Anyway, what do you all think of this? I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not one of those people who pretends to know the law on an internet message board to sound smart. I’d be pretty surprised if the police were stepping outside of their power with that stuff.
However, on a personal level, I was fairly uncomfortable with the whole thing. Background note, I spent some time in a former Communist country (and was appalled by the power of the police now and under the Iron Curtain), and I’m already a little bit libertarian to begin with. But yeah, I was uncomfortable.
The information they communicated was that they were searching cars for bomb-related materials. They’ve never done that at any of the many bomb-threats before, and let’s face it: they were searching them with county cops and the local staties who have about as much bomb-detection training as I do. They didn’t have bomb sniffing dogs. They weren’t using any devices (that I saw) that might have been able to detect that kind of stuff. It was pretty clear to me that the only thing they were doing is trying to get some kids into trouble.
Obviously I won’t defend a kid for bringing marijuana on to school property and stuff, because that is illegal. But still. I was troubled by the situation. So that’s my opinion. What do you guys think? Am I way off target?”