NY - How 'Stop and Frisk' Is Too Often a Sexual Assault by Cops on Teenagers in Targeted NYC Neighborhoods

Original Article

This is exactly what happens when you let politicians get away with stomping on someone else's rights.  Eventually your rights will also be stomped on.

01/21/2013

By Kristen Gwynne

Teenagers are harassed and violated in ways you can't imagine.

Imagine you're 17 years old. A man with a gun and a badge has stopped you on the street and jammed his hand inside your pants, touching your penis. The girl you have a crush on is watching from nearby. That's the reality for many young men of color in New York City.

Stop-and-frisk is the controversial policing tactic in which street cops looking for weapons stop and pat down young men. Discussions of this policy in the media most often consist of alarming stats, like what percent of men targeted are black and brown ( 87% in New York) or the breach of constitutional rights the searches entail. But the reality on the ground is far less abstract. The policy amounts to a constant disruption of the lives of hundreds of thousands of young black and brown men. It's a belittling experience that could be better described as sexual assault.

I've reported on stop and frisk for two years, and in that time I've talked to young men who have experienced stop-and-frisk, and the stories they tell are harrowing. A black teenager in Bedford-Stuyvesant described how embarrassed he was to have “old ladies” watch as his pants landed around his ankles while police searched him. A 17-year-old in the Bronx explained that police, “They go in my pants. You’re not supposed to go in my pants.” Being touched by a female police officer can be especially upsetting for adolescent males. “It’s annoying because it doesn’t matter what kind of cop it is, female or male, they’re gonna frisk you. If you say something to the female about it, the female says something to you like ‘What? I can do what I want.' And they still frisk you. You can’t say sexual harassment, nothing,” 18-year-old South Bronx resident Garnell told me last year, adding, “And they go hard, grabbing stuff they’re not supposed to.”

Read the entire article here

---

GA - Never strip search

View the article here

04/23/2009

By Kaffie Sledge

We don’t appear to be as serious about sex offenders as we like to claim we are. If we were, we’d find a way to outlaw strip searching in schools.

Regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court justices find regarding the Arizona case in which a 13-year-old girl suspected of drug possession was strip-searched, I am opposed to teachers and school administrators strip-searching students.

Teachers are trained to teach. If they suspect a certain student of drug possession or some other unlawful act, law enforcement should be called.

If all parties are doing what they have been trained to do, lines are less likely to become blurred.

There can be a seamless move from keeping the school safe for students to the Gestapo behavior of a frustrated teacher determined not to be outdone by some smart-aleck student. And lurking in there perhaps more often than we’d like to think is the teacher or administrator who has personal reasons for wanting to witness or participate in the strip searching of a child or adolescent.

A multitude of sins are committed against students by those who tell us they are trying to protect the students.

In 2002, an assistant principal at a San Diego, Calif., high school lifted girls’ skirts — in front of male students and other adults — to see whether they were wearing thong panties to a dance. (Ultimately demoted) Thong wearers were denied entry and told to go home and change, news services reported.

The assistant principal said she was concerned the combination of revealing clothing and suggestive dancing could lead to sexual assaults.

As it turned out, the assistant principal assaulted many of the girls before the boys had the chance.

Then there was the alleged strip-search of some of a class of seventh-graders at Russell County Middle School in 2004, when a teacher said about $12 was missing from her makeup bag.

The principal, assistant principal and a counselor allegedly took it upon themselves to conduct strip searches after the money was not found during searches of students’ pockets and purses. The students sued and reached a settlement in which the school system and the other plaintiffs denied the allegations, but agreed to pay $190,000.

The suit claims that the students were taken to the restrooms, where the searches took place. A female administrator accompanied the girls while the school’s principal accompanied the boys. In the restrooms, the students were asked to remove their shirts and drop their pants, according to the lawsuit. In some cases, they were told to move their underwear so that they were partially exposed, the suit states.

That would be a dehumanizing experiences. Stripping down to underwear; removing underwear or moving it to the side to reveal private body parts is inexcusable and should be unlawful — at least under the circumstances that seem to make the headlines.

It is never open season on students who have broken the law or are in violation of some school code.

---

AZ - Strip-Search of Girl Tests Limit of School Policy

View the article here

03/23/2009

By ADAM LIPTAK

SAFFORD - Savana Redding still remembers the clothes she had on — black stretch pants with butterfly patches and a pink T-shirt — the day school officials here forced her to strip six years ago. She was 13 and in eighth grade.

An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.

The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”

Ms. Redding, an honors student, had no pills. But she had a furious mother and a lawyer, and now her case has reached the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on April 21.

The case will require the justices to consider the thorny question of just how much leeway school officials should have in policing zero-tolerance policies for drugs and violence, and the court is likely to provide important guidance to schools around the nation.

In Ms. Redding’s case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that school officials had violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. Writing for the majority, Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw said, “It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights.”

“More than that,” Judge Wardlaw added, “it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity.”

Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, dissenting, said the case was in some ways “a close call,” given the “humiliation and degradation” involved. But, Judge Hawkins concluded, “I do not think it was unreasonable for school officials, acting in good faith, to conduct the search in an effort to obviate a potential threat to the health and safety of their students.”
- Are you kidding me?  This was flat out illegal!  If they wanted this done, they should've contacted the police!

Richard Arum, who teaches sociology and education at New York University, said he would have handled the incident differently. But Professor Arum said the Supreme Court should proceed cautiously.

“Do we really want to encourage cases,” Professor Arum asked, “where students and parents are seeking monetary damages against educators in such school-specific matters where reasonable people can disagree about what is appropriate under the circumstances?”
- Why is it so hard to contact the police?  If a teacher or principal strip searches anyone, they should be thrown in prison!

The Supreme Court’s last major decision on school searches based on individual suspicion — as opposed to systematic drug testing programs — was in 1985, when it allowed school officials to search a student’s purse without a warrant or probable cause as long their suspicions were reasonable. It did not address intimate searches.
- Even searching someone's purse should be illegal.  School officials are not cops, so why are they doing police jobs?  This country has gone completely mad!

In a friend-of-the-court brief in Ms. Redding’s case, the federal government said the search of her was unreasonable because officials had no reason to believe she was “carrying the pills inside her undergarments, attached to her nude body, or anywhere else that a strip search would reveal.”

The government added, though, that the scope of the 1985 case was not well established at the time of the 2003 search, so the assistant principal should not be subject to a lawsuit.

Sitting in her aunt’s house in this bedraggled mining town a two-hour drive northeast of Tucson, Ms. Redding, now 19, described the middle-school cliques and jealousies that she said had led to the search. “There are preppy kids, gothic kids, nerdy types,” she said. “I was in between nerdy and preppy.”

One of her friends since early childhood had moved in another direction. “She started acting weird and wearing black,” Ms. Redding said. “She started being embarrassed by me because I was nerdy.”

When the friend was found with ibuprofen pills, she blamed Ms. Redding, according to court papers.
- It's friggin' aspirin for God's sake!

Kerry Wilson, the assistant principal, ordered the two school employees to search both students. The searches turned up no more pills.

Mr. Wilson declined a request for an interview and referred a reporter to the superintendent of schools, Mark R. Tregaskes. Mr. Tregaskes did not respond to a message left with his assistant.

Lawyers for the school district said in a brief that it was “on the front lines of a decades-long struggle against drug abuse among students.” Abuse of prescription and over-the-counter medications is on the rise among 12- and 13-year-olds, the brief said, citing data from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Given that, the school district said, the search was “not excessively intrusive in light of Redding’s age and sex and the nature of her suspected infraction.”
- How would you like someone strip searching your child?

Adam B. Wolf, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Ms. Redding, said her experience was “the worst nightmare for any parent.”

“When you send your child off to school every day, you expect them to be in math class or in the choir,” Mr. Wolf said. “You never imagine their being forced to strip naked and expose their genitalia and breasts to their school officials.”

In a sworn statement submitted in the case, Safford Unified School District v. Redding, No. 08-479, Mr. Wilson said he had good reason to suspect Ms. Redding. She and other students had been unusually rowdy at a school dance a couple of months before, and members of the school staff thought they had smelled alcohol. A student also accused Ms. Redding of having served alcohol at a party before the dance, Mr. Wilson said.
- Yeah, all accusations, and like I said, school officials are not the police!  This is what you get when you have zero tolerance, which equals NO COMMON SENSE!

Ms. Redding said she had served only soda at the party, adding that her accuser was not there. At the dance, she said, school administrators had confused adolescent rambunctiousness with inebriation. “We’re kids,” she said. “We’re goofy.”

The search was conducted by Peggy Schwallier, the school nurse, and Helen Romero, a secretary. Ms. Redding “never appeared apprehensive or embarrassed,” Ms. Schwallier said in a sworn statement. Ms. Redding said she had kept her head down so the women could not see that she was about to cry.

Ms. Redding said she was never asked if she had pills with her before she was searched. Mr. Wolf, her lawyer, said that was unsurprising.

“They strip-search first and ask questions later,” Mr. Wolf said of school officials here.

Ms. Redding did not return to school for months after the search, studying at home. “I never wanted to see the secretary or the nurse ever again,” she said.

In the end, she transferred to another school. The experience left her wary, nervous and distrustful, she said, and she developed stomach ulcers. She is now studying psychology at Eastern Arizona College and hopes to become a counselor.

Ms. Redding said school officials should have taken her background into account before searching her.
- Who cares about her background, school officials should not be doing police work, period, and especially strip searches!

“They didn’t even look at my records,” she said. “They didn’t even know I was a good kid.”

The school district does not contest that Ms. Redding had no disciplinary record, but says that is irrelevant.

“Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules,” the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, “only that she was never caught.”
- Give me a break!  I am sick and tired of this guilty until proven innocent crap!  You should not have been doing strip searches.

Ms. Redding grew emotional as she reflected on what she would have done if she had been told as an adult to strip-search a student. Dabbing her eyes with a tissue, she said she would have refused.

“Why would I want to do that to a little girl and ruin her life like that?” Ms. Redding asked.

---

Court ponders: Do schools have right to strip search kids?

View the article here
U.S. Supreme Court will hear strip-search appeal

I think strip searching a child for something like aspirin, is wrong! This is what zero tolerance does!

01/16/2009

The Supreme Court has decided to take on that question. The justices accepted on Friday a case involving a 13-year-old Arizona girl suspected of hiding Ibuprofen pills in her underwear.

Arguments in the case will be heard in April, CNN reported. A federal appeals court had ruled that the search was illegal, but the school system decided to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. The girl’s school has a zero-tolerance policy on all drugs, prescription or otherwise, unless a student has prior written permission.

In 2003, Savana Redding was an eighth-grade honor student at Safford Middle School near Tucson, Ariz. The incident began when the vice principal found prescription-strength pain reliever pills in another girl’s possession. The student said that Savana had given the Ibuprofen to her.

Savana, who had never been in trouble before, denied the allegations. Her bookbag was searched and then, with two female employees watching, she was ordered to strip down to her underwear. Her bra was pulled out, and her panties were shaken. No drugs were found. She and her family sued the school district with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, saying the search had violated her 4th Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure.

In ruling in favor of Savana, the federals appeal court wrote that “common sense informs us that directing a 13-year-old girl to remove her clothes, partially revealing her breasts and pelvic area for allegedly possessing ibuprofen … was excessively intrusive.”

The school district argues that it has the right to conduct student searches and shouldn’t have to wait until parents are notified. Its reasoning: Such responses are “often needed to protect the very safety of students, particularly from the threats posed by drugs and weapons.”

---

AZ - Court rules strip-search of 13-year old for ibuprofen unconstitutional

View the article here
U.S. Supreme Court will hear strip-search appeal

07/12/2008

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that schools may not strip-search students for drugs based on an unverified tip, overturning two previous rulings.

The lawsuit was brought by the parents of Savana Redding, an eighth grade honor roll student at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who was pulled from class on October 8, 2003 by the school's vice principal, Kerry Wilson to investigate whether she had violated a school policy prohibiting bringing medication -- even over-the-counter medication -- to school.

Wilson had discovered another student earlier with prescription-strength ibuprofen -- 400 milligram pills equivalent to two over-the-counter ibuprofen pills, such as Advil -- in the possession of Redding's classmate. Under questioning and faced with punishment, the classmate claimed that Redding, who had no history of disciplinary problems or substance abuse, had given her the pills.

After escorting Redding to his office, Wilson presented Redding with the ibuprofen pills and informed her of her classmate's accusations. Redding said she had never seen the pills before and agreed to a search of her possessions, wanting to prove she had nothing to hide. Joined by a female school administrative assistant, Wilson searched Redding's backpack and found nothing. Instructed by Wilson, the administrative assistant then took Redding to the school nurse's office in order to perform a strip search.

In the school nurse's office, Redding was ordered to strip to her underwear. She was then commanded to pull her bra out and to the side, exposing her breasts, and to pull her underwear out at the crotch, exposing her pelvic area. The strip search failed to uncover any ibuprofen pills.

"The strip search was the most humiliating experience I have ever had," said Redding in a sworn affidavit following the incident. "I held my head down so that they could not see that I was about to cry."

"Common sense informs us that directing a 13-year-old girl to remove her clothes, partially revealing her breasts and pelvic area, for allegedly possessing ibuprofen, an infraction that poses an imminent danger to no one, and which could have been handled by keeping her in the principal's office until a parent arrived or simply sending her home, was excessively intrusive," Wardlaw wrote, joined by Judges Harry Pregerson, Raymond C. Fisher, Richard A. Paez, Milan D. Smith Jr. and N. Randy Smith.

The court cited arguments by the National Assn. of Social Workers that strip searches of children "can result in serious emotional damage, including the development of, or increase in, oppositional behavior."

"And all this to find prescription-strength ibuprofen," Wardlaw wrote, noting that one pill has the strength of two over-the-counter Advil and might be commonly used by young women to treat menstrual cramps.

The ruling said that Assistant Principal Wilson was liable for monetary damages but that his aide and the school nurse were not because they were acting under his orders.

The ruling was applauded in a statement from the ACLU:

"Students and parents nationwide can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that adolescents cannot be strip searched based on the unsubstantiated accusation of a classmate trying to get out of trouble," said Adam Wolf, an attorney with the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project and co-counsel in the case with the law firms Humphrey & Petersen and McNamara, Goldsmith, Jackson & Macdonald. "This ruling is a victory for our fundamental right to privacy, sending a clear signal that such traumatizing searches have no place in America's schools."

---

AZ - Was School Strip-Search Legal?

View the article here
U.S. Supreme Court will hear strip-search appeal

03/28/2008

Case Pits Students' Privacy Rights vs. Need to Keep Drugs, Weapons Out of Schools

A student strip-searched for drugs when she was in eighth grade took her case to a federal appeals court on Wednesday, arguing through a lawyer that school officials had violated her constitutional rights by overzealously enforcing a strict policy against alcohol, narcotics – and, in her case, Ibuprofen.

Savana Redding says she was "confused" and "ashamed" after the officials in Safford, Ariz., suspected her in 2003 of giving other students prescription Ibuprofen pills and ordered her to expose her breasts and pelvic area during a search in the school nurse's office. She denied having any pills, and none were found. Her mother later filed on her behalf a federal lawsuit claiming the search was unreasonable and therefore illegal.

"A strip search, particularly of an adolescent, is a grave invasion of privacy and should be reserved for emergency situations," Andrew Petersen, one of Redding's lawyers, said in a written statement. "The misguided actions of these school officials must not become the status quo in our nation's schools."

But a lawyer for the school district insisted that there were ample grounds for the search.

"When it comes to drugs and weapons," Matthew Wright said, "school districts just can't take the chance of not going forward and being sure."

The case is one of dozens that have recently challenged public schools on where to draw the line between the privacy rights of students and the need to keep drugs and violence out of the classroom. Courts have generally upheld school strip searches only when they were necessary to avoid a severe health or safety threat. But laws banning or strictly limiting such searches exist in seven states: California, Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Virginia and Wisconsin, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Wednesday's argument was the third round in a legal fight that has been going on since 2004. On March 15, 2005, a U.S. district judge ruled in favor of the school district without a trial. Last year, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld that ruling by a vote of 2-1. In January, the full court of appeals agreed to review the case, and it heard oral arguments Wednesday. A decision is not expected for at least several months.

According to court documents, the dispute started in October 2003, when a student at Safford Middle School in Safford, Ariz., told the vice principal that Redding, then 13, and her friends were bringing drugs to school. A week later, the student showed the vice principal a pill that he said was from Redding's friend. The pill turned out to be prescription-strength Ibuprofen.

A recently adopted school policy prohibited all drugs on school grounds, including any "prescription or over-the-counter drug" like Ibuprofen, except when specifically permitted by the school. The vice principal asked Redding's friend about the pill, and she said Redding had given it to her.

The vice principal then hauled Redding out of class for questioning. After she denied knowing anything about the pills, he asked if she would agree to be searched, and she said she would. The vice principal looked in her backpack, found nothing and then sent her to the nurse's office.

"I was just like, did I do something wrong?" Redding recalls. "I was thinking, if I don't do this [go to the nurse's office], they're going to think that I did do something wrong, and I'll get into more trouble."

While the nurse watched, a female secretary had Redding strip to her underwear, pull her bra to the side and her panties out at the crotch and expose her breasts and pelvic area. After no pills appeared, Redding got dressed.

Redding says she didn't return to class but sat in the vice principal's office and called her mother to pick her up. She was afraid to tell her mom on the phone what had happened, she recalls, because "the secretary was listening" and "I was like really ashamed, like it was my fault." A friend later spilled the beans about the search, and Redding says her mom "was more mad than I was. I felt really stupid."

The incident was so humiliating that Redding says she couldn't return to school for months. "Everyone knew what had happened, and they were talking about me," she recalls. "I got really nervous, developed ulcers and started puking."

Eventually, Redding transferred to another school, and today, at age 17, she is still trying to make up for lost time at what she describes as an alternative high school.

"I remember how much I enjoyed school," she says. "I won all kinds of certificates, I was on the honor roll, I was doing pretty good. And I had never been in trouble before."

"I would have felt better if they had called my mom" before doing the strip search, she says.

Wright, the lawyer for the school district, says the school's strict drug policy is still in effect. He is not aware of any specific rules on strip searches but stresses the duty of schools "to closely supervise students and provide a safe environment." As for the strip search of Redding, he says it was based on "reasonable grounds."

"Remember," he says, "this was prescription strength Ibuprofen."

---