Family’s Lawsuit Against School District Highlights Cruelty and Ineffectiveness of Undercover Narcotics Operations in Schools
TEMECULA, CA—(ENEWSPF)—June 4, 2014. Jesse Snodgrass, the teenage special needs student arrested in an undercover police operation will receive his high school diploma at the Chaparral High School graduation ceremony on Thursday, June 5, at 6:30 p.m.
The February 2014 Rolling Stone article, “The Entrapment of Jesse Snodgrass” details how Jesse, who suffers from a range of disabilities, was falsely befriended by a police officer who repeatedly asked the boy to provide him drugs. After more than three weeks, 60 text messages and repeated hounding by the officer, Jesse was able to buy half a joint from a homeless man he then gave to his new – and only – “friend,” who had given him twenty dollars weeks before. He did it once again before refusing to accommodate the officer, at which point the officer broke off all ties with the child. Shortly thereafter, Jesse was arrested at Chaparral High School in front of his classmates as part of a sting that nabbed 22 students in all, many of them children with special needs.
Even though a criminal judge dismissed the charges against Jesse, the Temecula Valley Unified School District still attempted to expel him. Jesse’s family went to court to fight the expulsion attempt, and in March 2013, an administrative law judge halted the expulsion attempt, issuing a scathing ruling against the school district and ordering Jesse’s immediate return to Chaparral High School. In October 2013, Jesse filed a lawsuit against the Temecula Valley Unified School District, Director of Child Welfare and Attendance Michael Hubbard and Director of Special Education Kimberly Velez for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and other charges.
“We are so proud of Jesse and have only recognized his endless possibilities, never his limitations”, commented Catherine and Doug Snodgrass, Jesse’s parents, who hope that Jesse’s suit will send a message to schools around the country that these raids will not be tolerated.
“What we have witnessed here is the polar opposite of good policing and an example of how the drug war skews the priorities of law enforcement officers. There was no crime here until the police coerced a special needs student into committing one. They didn’t lessen the amount of drugs available and they didn’t provide help to any students who may have had a legitimate problem. Instead, they diminished the life prospects of everyone they came into contact with. As a parent, as a retired police officer, as a human being, this outrages me,” remarked LAPD Deputy Chief Stephen Downing (Ret.), who now speaks on behalf of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of law enforcement officials opposed to the drug war.
The LAPD stopped using undercover stings in schools in 2005 after a review suggested police were targeting special needs children and that operations were ineffective at reducing the availability of drugs in schools. A Department of Justice study would later confirm the finding that such operations do little to affect the supply of drugs.
“Sending police and informants to entrap high-school students is sick,” said Tony Newman, director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance. “We see cops seducing 18-year-olds to fall in love with them or befriending lonely kids and then tricking them into getting them small amounts of marijuana so they can stick them with felonies. We often hear that we need to fight the drug war to protect the kids. As these despicable examples show, more often the drug war is ruining young people’s lives and doing way more harm than good.”
Building on the efforts of Jesse’s family, the Drug Policy Alliance has been working to call attention to the problem in Riverside County through community education. DPA also recently sent a letter to the superintendents of 20 Riverside County school districts urging them not to allow undercover law enforcement operations on their campuses. The letter noted that operations of this kind are not only ineffective in combating drug availability on campus, they also can inflict irreparable harm on young people struggling with the challenges of adolescence or special needs.
Related Material:
Los Angeles Times Op-ed
Drug enforcement gone wrong, Should we allow cops posing as students to trick kids into breaking laws? By Theshia Naidoo and Lynne Lyman: Drug Policy Alliance, April 6, 2014 http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lyman-school-undercover-bust-20140406,0,5571737.story#axzz2y0u099AX
Jesse Snodgrass had recently transferred to Chaparral High School in Temecula and was feeling out of place and alone in 2012 when a boy named Dan, another newcomer, befriended him. Jesse, a 17-year-old autistic student, wasn’t good at making friends and he was pleased by the overture. But there was something he didn’t know about Dan: He was an undercover narcotics officer attending class at Chaparral hoping to bust student drug dealers.
Dan quickly began exerting pressure on Jesse to sneak a pill from his parent’s medicine cabinet or buy him some marijuana. Jesse, whose demeanor and speech clearly signal his autism, was at first at a loss for how to meet his friend’s request. But he finally sought out a homeless man near a dispensary and traded a $20 bill Dan had given him for a plastic bag containing less than a gram of marijuana leaves. A few months after the two young men met, Jesse was arrested and found himself alone and bewildered in juvenile detention.
Jesse was lucky to have parents who stood by him and helped him navigate the court system. A judge has now purged his record of the drug charge, and an administrative law judge issued a scathing ruling that the school could not expel him, saying that the evidence was overwhelming that his disability had influenced his actions.
But we as a society still have some soul-searching to do. Should we really allow adults to dress up as kids, embed themselves in school classrooms and trick children into breaking the law?
The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department regularly targets high school students, sometimes, as in this case, inspiring crime where it otherwise would not have existed. In the last four years, the department has staged four undercover sting operations in which adult officers, masquerading as high school students, repeatedly pressured students to obtain illegal substances for them. Over the last four years, nearly 100 students, a number of whom were special-needs students, have been arrested.
It is unclear why the Riverside sheriff continues to use this ill-advised strategy, and why area school districts continue to allow it. Such stings have been abandoned by many law enforcement agencies and banned by school districts across the country. The Los Angeles Unified School District hasn’t allowed undercover stings in its schools since 2004, when it concluded that they had the potential to harm students but had not reduced the availability of drugs on campus. The National Assn. of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officials has concluded that undercover high school operations have a high potential for bad outcomes for kids without evidence of corresponding good results for communities.
Building on the efforts of Jesse’s family, the Drug Policy Alliance has been working to call attention to the problem in Riverside County through community education. We also recently sent a letter to the superintendents of 20 Riverside County school districts urging them not to allow undercover law enforcement operations on their campuses.
The letter noted that operations of this kind are not only ineffective in combating drug availability on campus, they also can inflict irreparable harm on young people struggling with the challenges of adolescence or special needs.
Children should receive honest drug education from their schools, not face deception and betrayal by people they think are their peers. Inevitably, as in the case of Jesse Snodgrass, high school drug stings will ensnare some students who would never have been involved in obtaining or selling drugs without being manipulated by undercover officers. Is pushing students into illicit activities really the best use of scant law enforcement resources?
Educators, parents, students and the community at large should call on law enforcement agencies to do real police work rather than targeting children in schools. Simply adding to arrest statistics, regardless of the consequences, does not protect schools or communities.
Theshia Naidoo is a senior staff attorney at the Drug Policy Alliance. Lynne Lyman is the California state director for the Drug Policy Alliance.
Rolling Stone
The Entrapment of Jesse Snodgrass, He was a friendless high school loner struggling with autism. So why did an undercover cop target him as a drug dealer? By Sabrina Rubin Erdely, FEBRUARY 26, 2014 http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-entrapment-of-jesse-snodgrass-20140226
Reason TV
Riverside Cop Tricks Autistic Teen into Buying Pot Amanda Winkler, Oct. 9, 2013
Source: www.drugpolicy.org
