Yes, there is a possibility that somebody there was carrying. Potheads, however, are not known as a dangerous bunch – if someone was carrying, it was likely not the kids who might’ve been arrested on the drug charges, it was probably the kids who were sick of being bullied by the wrestling team.
However, any possibility of weapons in the school could’ve been confirmed or eliminated with a proper police investigation, something that by all evidence never happened. The possibility could’ve also been eliminated if this school had instituted random weapons checks or metal detectors before sending police into the hallways with guns drawn. Metal detectors in schools suck, but they are a hell of a lot less traumatizing than having a gun stuck in your face.
Where there are drugs, there are weapons. It’s a good basis for police operations when the presence of drugs is confirmed, but the problem is that there was no concrete evidence that there were any drugs to begin with! It was all pretense. And you know what they say – an ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure.
“Our primary concern was the safety of the students” sounds all fine and good, but it is belied by what happened. If Joe’s primary concern is Sally’s safety, Joe does not point a loaded gun at Sally’s head. Joe does not get in Sally’s face, screaming at her and ordering her to lay prone on the floor under threat of that loaded gun. Joe does not treat Sally, a stranger to him, as if she was a threat based on little more than stupid surveillance camera tricks that he had no evidence that Sally was even a part of.
Whenever you hear police start justifying their very obviously unsafe behavior under the rubric of some generalized “safety” be very aware that this language stems from one place and one place only – the very real and present need to engage in high-level asscovering when it becomes clear that someone screwed up in a big, public way.
The purpose of a raid is to surprise suspects in order to take them into custody, especially when it’s necessary to prevent them from fleeing or destroying evidence. You don’t raid to investigate, you don’t raid to scare, shock or awe, you don’t raid to make a public show. You do it because there is no other good way to apprehend the criminals who are sought. In this case, the cops didn’t even know who the suspects were, or even if there were any suspects at all. How they were ever able to get a warrant for this action boggles my mind.
It also boggles my mind that anyone would believe that there aren’t students from this school who are now completely devoid of any respect they may have ever held for the school administrators, for the police or anyone who tells them that school is a safe place for them to be.
