Anonymous Rex’s Weblog

On Thursday my students were subjected to a massive drug raid. From what information I have been able to glean, the raid was planned for weeks and involved collaboration between the police, the principal, school security, and local business owners. They even came up with a special code name. (The actual code name would further compromise the anonymity of this blog. We’ll call it “Operation X.”)

Operation X went something like this: On Monday two narcotics officers posing as students began hanging around the local convenience store. One of the narcs, according to my students was “very, very, very, very attractive.” Her job was to sweetly approach teenage boys and ask if they had any weed. If they did not, she asked them if they were interested in purchasing some. When she had gathered enough information and evidence to make the raid profitable, a date was set. The raid occurred at lunch time when the maximum number of our students would be at the convenience store.

According to the students, school security was actually encouraging students to visit the convenience store prior to the raid, telling them that they were giving away free sodas. I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine a lot of pesky entrapment laws can be avoided if you have civilians assisting you in a sting.

When the target of the raid was present—along with as many other students as possible—the trap was sprung. The two narcotics officers pulled guns on our students. Two paddy wagons arrived and around twenty police rushed out with their weapons drawn. These were gang division police in black uniforms. My students, who know a respectable amount about guns, said they thought their handguns were .38 caliber or higher.

All of the students were ordered to get down on the ground. One student from my afternoon class reported being told, “Get on the fucking ground or I’m going to shoot you in your fucking face.” The next morning, a different student in a different class described an officer telling him, “Don’t talk or I’m going to kick your teeth down your throat.”

The students were searched for contraband and their sleeves were rolled up to look for gang tattoos. A sizable pile of contraband was assembled on the hood of a police car. (It seems to me that putting everything in a pile would make very difficult to determine what was taken from whom.) At any rate, the pile seemed to mostly contain pot taken from the one drug dealer who was the target of the raid and at least one knife taken from a student.

If students cooperated they were released. If they offered any resistance they were taken to jail and given a $100 fine for loitering. These tickets seemed to have been a form of selective enforcement. Students complained that immigrant construction workers typically spend their entire lunch break sitting in the front of the convenient store––an act that could be construed as loitering. Apparently the female students were allowed to leave after a light pat-down and were not taken to jail. One of my three white students complained the next day, “I’m offended that I WASN’T arrested.”

When the area had been secured our principal appeared. He shook hands with the police, told them they were doing a fine job, and that each of the students arrested would be expelled from school.

I did not witness any of this. I have tried to piece together what happened by talking with about ten different students who were there. After the fact, the principal gave a debriefing of “Operation X” to the department chairs. I was not privy to this report but managed to catch a glimpse at it on the sly. It is possible that my students exaggerated, but I believe that for the most part they did not. People exaggerate police brutality when they expect someone will care, which my students did not.

I spoke with colleagues about the raid. Some supported it while others seemed to regard it as an unfortunate event–like a hail storm. I seemed to be the only one who thought our students had been subjected to police brutality.

My students and I spent about an hour of our afternoon class discussing the raid. One of my students was absent––he had spent the afternoon in jail for telling the police they had no right to do this and for refusing to sign a loitering ticket. The first thirty minutes were needed simply to get the students to calm down and tell their story one at a time. When they had finished I asked them, “Why exactly are you upset? Why do you feel this was unfair?” They came up with several answers. I helped to define what they were describing and we made a list on the black board: excessive force, selective enforcement, etc. When we were done, I gave the students a hint.

“Most people are going to hear this story, hear that a drug-dealer was caught, and say ‘Well, that’s good.’ You have to come up with a an argument that outweighs the arrest of a drug-dealer.”

Then I asked them, “Do you think something like this would happen at a white high school?”

This was met with guffaws. Of course, it was unthinkable that this would happen at a white high school.

“I’m going to be honest with you,” I said, “I went to a very rich, white high school and we had drug-dealers too. And they weren’t selling pot, they were selling cocaine and heroin. But the police were never involved.”

I turned to one of my students who had been raising the Black Power fist in the initial excitement of describing the raid. I had also noticed him doing this during lunch in the immediate aftermath.

“You’ve been raising the Black Power fist all day. Are you actually going to do something about this or not?”

The students initial response was typical, “No one cares what we think.”

“It’s probably not even legal for us to go to the media.” said one.

Interestingly, this is more or less the same response I got from teachers who did not want to organize to get a working copier. No one cares and there’s nothing we can do. It feels a lot better to think of your oppressors as omnipotent then to think of yourself as cowardly and lazy. The students are different though––they are not as cowardly as the teachers because they have nowhere near as much to lose.

“America is a democracy.” I said, “But it won’t be one if you don’t fight for it.”

“Yeah, today was to-tal-uh-tarianism.” Said one student.

(I taught the students that no government ever admits to being totalitarian. As long as they know that, I’m not too concerned with their pronunciation.”

“Persecution by the state always starts with minorities.” I continued. “If police in black uniforms are allowed point guns at African-American teenagers and get away with it, I will be next.”

“Yeah, but to help those kids who went to jail today we’d have to call all kinds of people and spend all kinds of money and by then they’d probably already be locked up.”

“That’s why its called ‘fighting’ for freedom.” I said, “It’s not like paying the electric bill. We may not be able to help the people who went to jail today, but we can make it so that they think twice before doing another raid like this.”

From here we made a list of actions the students could take. It looked something like this:

-contact the local news
-write a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution
-contact the county board of education
-contact the NAACP
-contact the ACLU

As I explained what the ACLU is, and what a “letter to the editor is”, I could not help but feel little like Paul Atreides from Dune, preaching to the Fremen. This was handing the arsenal of Democracy to some very angry teenagers.

When the students saw this list (next to the list of their grievances against the police) they got excited. We were scheduled to go to the library on Thursday so that students could do independent research. Instead, some of them got on the internet and began gathering phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

This was big. Very big. One of the reasons I became a teacher––and the reasons I have not yet quit being a teacher, is because it gives me a change to do something like this. In 1984, Orson Wells wrote that “If the Proles ever woke up, they could shake off Big Brother like so many flies.” If every impoverished black teenager in America had the ability to correctly identify the enemy, believed they could fight that enemy, and knew how to fight that enemy, the neo-cons would melt away overnight. But despite their excitement in the immediate aftermath of the raid, I was still skeptical.

The next day, the class clown made a dramatic entrance into the doublewide trailer that serves as my classroom. The class-clown was kicked out of the 9th grade for throwing Skittles at his teacher. Despite being intelligent and having at least a passing interest in history, he is failing the class.

“Let me tell you about my phone call with these niggahs at the Board of Education!”

(The class-clown refers to everyone as a niggah. Famous niggahs throughout world history have included “this niggah Napolean,” “that niggah Issac Newton,” “Grigori Rasputin the creepy fucking niggah”, and of course myself.)

“You called the Board of Education?” I asked.

He produced the call log from his cell phone.

“I’m gonna fax in a full mutha-fucking REPORT to those niggahs.”

Hopefully he refrained from using the n-word in that report . . .

“I’m very proud of you.” I said.

Another student drafted a letter to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, which I am now editing.

“You know,” said a student, “When they find out who taught us how to do all this stuff, you’re probably gonna get fired.”

I smiled.

“I know.”