A couple of months ago, the police raided (‘inspected’) my daughter’s high school. Fifteen canine units, cops in riot gear, armed with pistols and boltcutters, looking for drugs. One arrest. The rationale was to quell persistent rumors of rampant drug use there.
I was appalled. I thought it grossly disproportionate and inappropriate to the stated purpose, that it’d alienate the kids. I wrote to the local paper, which published the letter.
Since, there’s been no outcry; there’s been no second thoughts. The town (affluent, suburban Andover, Mass.) accepted the raid as appropriate, as if it’s standard procedure to raid a high school with dogs. Business as usual, with very few objections, much less vociferous ones such as mine.
I’m more perturbed by that than I was by the raid itself. We’ve become all too accustomed to things that we should fight tooth and nail. We accept egregious abuses of power as fallback positions, as the first rather than last resort, as the reasonable prerogative of those holding it. That’s horrible.
Profwombat, is your school a zero-tolerance zone?
We take for granted here in Texas that to visit our children on public school campuses we must go through the office (and usually walk thru a metal detector), sign in and out, and be subject to whatever search procedures the local tinpot ISD dictators wish to institute.
And we wonder why kids hate school, when they’re treated, with the connivance of the USSC, as inmates who have no rights.
TO Sarah: they introduced remote door locks, with video cameras, to schools here last year. But the students don’t pass through metal detectors, sign in etc. Andover’s an affluent suburb, largely rich white with some Asians and few, if any, black or Hispanic folk. Crime in schools isn’t much of an issue. The high school students are largely college-bound; vandalism and such isn’t much of an issue.
All the more surprising, therefore, that the police ‘inspection’ was so widely accepted. That it was thought a reasonable response to rumors of rampant drug use, rather than, say, talking to the kids, parents and kids talking, teachers and parents talking, and, maybe, just maybe, everybody also listening a little bit, appalls me. And I just don’t see how the ‘inspection’ will do anything at all about drug use, if it is a problem. Fifteen canine units, and police in riot gear with boltcutters searching lockers, would, were I a student, have irrevocably changed my view of the school, and the people who brought such a thing about. I can’t imagine a worse thing, politically, ethically, or with respect to adolescents finding their identities as adults and citizens, than a declaration of an utter lack of trust, a use of disproportionate force as a default option, and an unspoken, but very real, risk that such things will be a part of everyday life. And if this all happened in Andover, which is quite safe and bucolic and wealthy and not without a sense of entitlement, I can only imagine what’s happening elsewhere.
The things we take for granted i don’t understand.