FALLOUT CONTINUES IN GOOSE CREEK, SOUTH CAROLINA, HIGH SCHOOL DRUG RAID

It just keeps getting worse for the perpetrators of the now notorious
drug raid at Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina,
last month.

A class action lawsuit was filed December 5, another lawsuit will be
filed Monday, and the county prosecutor has handed his investigation
of possible police misconduct in the case to state officials for
possible prosecution.

In that raid, whose impact was heightened this week by the release of
new police video of the assault, Goose Creek Police Department
officers invaded the school early on the morning of November 5,
yelling and screaming at students to get on the floor, waving guns
around, handcuffing students slow to comply, and searching the area
with drug dogs within inches of the terrified victims.

The cops had been called by Principal George McCrackin, who suspected
"drug activity" among his charges.

No drugs were found, nor were any weapons.

Stratford High School is a predominantly white high school, but 90 of
the 107 students involved in the raid were black.

Some parents and others have suggested the timing and targeting of the
raid was racially motivated.

In the lawsuit filed earlier this month in federal court in
Charleston, 17 Stratford students are suing the city of Goose Creek
and the Berkeley County School District, as well as four individuals,
for violating their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The former protects against unreasonable searches and seizures; the
latter bars states from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or
property without due process of law," and would be the basis for a
charge of racial discrimination. The 17 students are asking for an
unspecified amount of damages and an injunction to bar similar raids
in the future.

The individuals named in the suit are Principal McCrackin, Berkeley
County school superintendent Chester Floyd, Goose Creek police Chief
Harvey Becker, and Goose Creek police Lt. Dave Aarons, commander of
the raid. It's a tough break for Floyd, who had no advance warning of
the raid and who pronounced himself "appalled" that it had occurred.

But while Floyd might not be to blame, as head of the school board, he
is ultimately responsible for the behavior of his principals and other
school system employees. "We've had local, state, national and
international news coverage on this," Floyd told the Associated Press
upon hearing of the lawsuit. "It's a month old. I'm trying to get
everything back to normal.

I'm sorry it all happened. I'm sorry it's a lawsuit."

But wait, there's more. The American Civil Liberties Union's Drug
Policy Litigation Project
(http://www.aclu.org/DrugPolicy/DrugPolicy.cfm?ID=10972&c=19)
will hold a press conference Monday announcing that it will file a
lawsuit on behalf of 20 more students alleging Fourth Amendment
violations, the project's Anjuli Verma told DRCNet. "This is for the
students as individuals, not a class-action suit," she said,
differentiating the ACLU action from the one filed by local attorneys.
"And it is not alleging racial discrimination at this point, although
we think the facts speak for themselves. About three-quarters of that
school is white, while three-quarters of those caught in the raid were
black." The families of students in the second lawsuit specifically
requested the ACLU represent them, Verma said, but the group would
cooperate with attorneys in the other lawsuit. "We may well end up
being consolidated and heard as one case anyway," she said.

Meanwhile, the local prosecutor, Ninth Circuit Solicitor Ralph
Hoisington of Charleston, punted his investigation of police
misconduct up to State Attorney General Henry McMaster the day before
the first lawsuit was filed. While some parents criticized his
decision not to file charges, Hoisington's explanation suggested he
thought charges might be merited. "It's a no-win situation.

If I decide to prosecute, I've alienated the entire department," while
if he doesn't, he faces an angry community, he told the Charleston
Post & Courier. Still, he said, if he reviews a case of alleged
misconduct and thinks the police action was justified, he would see no
need to send it on for further analysis. "If it's clearly justified, I
don't think it's a good idea to send it off to meander through the
process when it's already clear to me they were correct in their
actions," he said.

Attorney General McMaster can now decide to file charges against the
police, decline to prosecute, or hand the case off to another
prosecutor unlikely to face a conflict of interest with the Goose
Creek Police Department.

For previous DRCNet reporting on the Stratford raid,
visit:

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/311/stratford.shtml
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/312/incident.shtml