Maybe they’re just smart enough to know not to bring it to school. With all of the bag searches and whatnot, they’d be idiots to actually bring it into the school building.
My husband works with drug dogs. They often signal a “false-positive” because of drug residue. If one of the kids had had marijuana in his backpack earlier, or had smoked it near the backpack, the dog could still smell it.
That’s it. I’m starting a “Just say no” scrapbook.
Nice Thomas Paine quote, BTW.
Well, I was kind of wondering why this police force and school district felt it was necessary to attack in force rather than use drug dogs.
Reeder DOES have ONE point, though. I cannot cite ANY incidents in which police drew their weapons in a school and assaulted students…
…and then didn’t arrest anyone. Every incident with which I am familiar resulted in at least one arrest.
The Ashcroft Connection evades me as well. Durned if I can figure out how he engineered this.
Right. Which I why I tried to make peace a while back in another thread and you called me a “Brownshirt”. Or did you forget that you had done so before you made such an asinine comment?
::quietly hands Moe an invitation to the “liberal but not a fucking lunatic” party ::
this was an absolutely deplorable incident, quite worthy of a pit rant on it’s own merits, and would allow also a logical extension to the WAD as well.
Ashcroft (in general) is worthy of a pit rant on his own merits, and allow a logical extension to the Administration.
The two combined do not seem to have anything in common except that many who hate one also hate the other. But that’s not enough to even get near combining the two.
Instead, you allowed yourself to again be easily shot down.
Instead of saying “Ashcroft caused this incident to happen”, would it be more reasonable to say “A society that is becoming more concerned with law and order at any cost than personal freedom allowed this to happen, and also allowed someone like Ashcroft to get appointed”?
I don’t think Reeder is so far off making an association, I just think he got it in the wrong order.
Rather than insulting tdn’s political associations, ancestry, and so on, I think I will respectfully beg to differ.
While it could be said that policemen with drawn guns abusing the dignity of teenagers in a public high school is a sign of the times – i.e., a society more concerned with law and order than with personal freedom – I would also go so far as to say that the freedoms of teenagers have, traditionally, not been considered especially important by us, as a society.
Admittedly, high schools are public buildings. But when was the last time you saw police searches in other public buildings, just in case the county clerk or the people at the driver’s license office were huffin’ the muggles on their lunch break or something?
If some of his students are dealin’ dope, plainly a school administrator has a right and responsibility to do something about it. Drugs are illegal.
…but there are a zillion other options I would have chosen before I sealed a hallway so the kids couldn’t leave, and then had the police enter the hallway and order the children to kneel before them (and physically restrain those who refused.)
This, I think, is a very bad way to foster respect for police, law, and society in our young people.
Drug dogs are among these “soft options.” I understand they’re effective as hell, both as “probable cause” and a deterrent. I sure wouldn’t deal dope on a campus if I thought the dope dogs were going to be in and out on a regular basis.
I would be very interested in finding out why the administrators and the city felt that behaving like Nazis was in the best interest of all concerned.
Hilarious.
Anecdote time. In May of 2002, a Dutch politician was shot and killed by a guy who can only be described as an ultra-left loonie. The politician’s party, a decidedly right wing one with an arguably racist agenda, went out of their way stating that “left wing politicians” had “created an environment where this horrible thing could happen”.
It was a fucking lie, and I suspect Reeder’s assertion that this police action was somehow directly influenced by Ashcroft, is a lie as well.
So, in short: bad cops, Reeder still an idiot. Film at 11.
I thank thou.
Respectful disagreement right back atcha. Actually, I fully agree that teens have not traditionally enjoyed the same civil rights as adults. But when I was in HS, an incident of this nature – indeed, even random dog sniffing – would have been unthinkable. One had a reasonable expectation that one’s locker was inviolate territory. I suppose the school admins could have searched them if they really wanted to, but I doubt it would have crossed their minds without strong probable cause.
Maybe that was just my school. Perhaps it was more liberal than most. (In fact, there was a head shop right around the corner, and no one raised a stink about it AFAIK.) And perhaps the country was going through a particularly tolerant phase – it was during the Carter administration, afer all.
But somehow, the Gestapo tactics mentioned in the OP seem far less out of place in today’s world, don’t you think? Doesn’t it seem like such action is less in conflict with an administration in which Ashcroft holds so much sway?
I agree with lno it wasn’t Ashcroft’s fault, it was his parent’s.
I’m sorry to say that I’m not surprised. Horrified and disgusted, but not surprised.
The atmosphere in today’s high school is of uneasy truce. The students vs. the teachers vs. the administration. The administration at our high school is nervous, stupid and heavy-handed.
They recently gave a 17-yr old student one day’s suspension for coming to school “under the influence.”.
Because he smoked a cigarette on the way to school. Not a marijuana cigarette. Plain ol’ tobacco.
Now, I’m not saying the child should be smoking cigarettes. But he’s in his own car, driving down a public road. That has ZERO to do with the school. Somehow they think it’s their business. Sure, the campus should be tobacco free. But the kid should have civil rights outside the school property.
I pulled my child out of that school. I wouldn’t send my dog up there.
:mad:
It’s important to train the youth to accept total governement oppression as normal.
Jesus, when I was in high school, the cops would just search your locker, than haul you (and your bookbag) down to be searched. No need to Rambo up the whole fucking place.
vs. the parents. Without their attitudes of “Won’t someone please think of the chiiiiildruuuun?!?” and expecting the teachers to play mommy, and threats of lawsuits, things might be a lot better.
Judas, not to get too personal, but when was that? I can’t help but think that such things began around a certain time frame. Coincidentally, I’m thinking it was around 1984ish.
[old man] The year was nineteen ninety and one… [/old man] So yes, most of my high school time was during the 80’s. Pretty wild place- 1000+ students, and during my senior year, we had 3 gang related stabbings in the same day.
Now that’s education.
As I thought. I don’t want to sound like one of those “Back in my day, things were better” kind of codgers. But I graduated in 80 from the school I described. In 83 or 84 I went to visit a school I’d never seen before, and it looked like a police state. Seriously, there were cops all over, the teachers looked shell shocked and very guarded, and the principal regarded me as some sort of drug-dealing, child-murdering psychopath. I was shocked at how much schools had declined in those few short years.
Then again, it was a city school. The one I attended was deep in farm country. That might account for the difference.
Looks to me like the cops ran out of their own junk and were feeling a bit testy …
At Columbine, the cops knew there were actual gunmen in the school, no evidence of hostages, injured students, yet they waited hours to go in with guns.
Pot: blitzkrieg.
???
Yes, I remember four of eighty… It was a cold winter day in Florida of January 7 that year (no shit)… I walked a mile uphill to the driving range…
Thankfully, I was no longer in HS. Changes: dress code, no off campus lunch, more credits to graduate, the beginnings of “zero tolerance.”
Think about that for one second: a school with a Stalinist approach to discipline. Bragging about it. ??? Scaring kids with guns: OK. Pot: bad. That’s a bizarre object lesson for those poor kids. No level of law enforcement is too much for any bad conduct. P.S. You live in a free country, when you hit 18. Sucker.
Yeah, the students’ 4th Amendment rights pretty much went down the crapper. :rolleyes:
Ironic, when your OP contains the misnomer “Asscroft”.
Blame the “War on Drugs”, not Ashcroft. Learn the proper Evil Republican Administration to demonize. Maybe someone can make a chart or Powerpoint for you to help you remember. I think they also covered this on Blue’s Clues one day…there was this little rhyme called “Reeder’s Tune”:
"There once was President Richard Nixon
Who thought the election needed fixin’
His friends broke in a hotel room -
When he was caught, it spelled his doom
Then Ronald Reagan, who was an actor
Was elected on the malaise factor
He fought drugs and commies for no good reason
And in Iran-Contra, committed treason
Then came George Bush - what a wimp!
Who made the economy weak and limp
Went to Iraq to save our oil
And bled our boys on foreign soil!
Now we have another Bush
Whose policies come from out his tush
Hitler, Stalin - Bush is worse!
'Til 2004, he’s America’s curse."
Or words to that effect…