The New Narc on the Block
By Rebecca Ogle
Police Lt. Shari Shovlin, as quoted in the Seattle Times, hopes that she has scared you. Her terrifying tactics resulted in the arrest of five students at Redmond High School in Washington in 2003. Responding to parents’ concerns, she devised a plot to place undercover officer Matt Perringer in the student body with only the principal knowing his true identity. Four years later, students at the high school still fear that their peers are secretly monitoring them.
What’s scary is the climate of distrust deemed by administrators to be a necessary condition of protecting students from themselves. Parents send their children to school believing they will be in a safe and comfortable environment that is conducive to learning. Yet the tense atmosphere after Perringer’s role-play as a sullen skater undoubtedly alienates those students whose mannerisms he imitated and deters students not from selling drugs, but from welcoming newcomers.
It is doubtful that the arrested students even posed any significant danger to their peers. Research from the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has been employing such operations since the 1970s, revealed that “many of the students arrested were in special education, and the amount of drugs seized was usually small.”
These findings did not stop administrators from staging a repeat performance in three Federal Way high schools over four months this year. By May 31st, twelve students and two adults had been arrested. The district, also in Washington, sought to “infiltrate an area of increasing drug use.”
According to the 2006 Monitoring the Future report, overall illicit drug use decreased nationwide among students in all grades surveyed. Of the drugs targeted by detectives, OxyContin, ecstasy, and cocaine use increased in some age brackets and decreased in others, while marijuana use decreased universally. Yet seven of the twelve students and one of the adults were arrested for selling marijuana only.
With half of high school seniors reporting use of an illegal drug at some point in their lives, police presence in schools targets a rather large and mostly harmless group. Additionally, it reduces neither access to nor demand for drugs among youth. It fails to address the potential harms of drugs and to assist any students experiencing those harms. Nonetheless, the spokeswoman for the Federal Way school district shares Lt. Shovlin’s enthusiasm for instigating a reign of terror.
“The decision, given the activity in the community, wasn’t difficult,” Turner said. “The commitment is safe schools.”
So making examples out of the jeopardized futures of a handful of students comes easily to these adults. Now don’t you feel safer, or does the feeling more closely resemble something you might experience in the Twilight Zone? Halloween’s over, guys. Put away the costumes and stop trying to scare us.
Rebecca Ogle is a member of the University of Maryland SSDP chapter and regularly blogs on SSDP’s DARE Generation Diary. You can read her other work at:http://www.DAREgeneration.com
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