Accounts of Police Violating Civil Rights of Students in Watsonville on 3/27

by students

Tue, Mar 28, 2006 5:34PM

On Monday, March 27th, 2006, high school students went on strike to protest against HR 4437. In Watsonville, police responded by violating the civil rights of students, including detaining students at 2:00pm for "walking out of school" even though their school, Renaissance High School, had gotten out at 1:15pm. Another student at Renaissance was arrested after refusing to get on a bus. She was already out of school and did not walkout. (Audio is 18 minutes and 30 seconds)

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Officer Mike Ridgway is the High School Outreach Officer for the Watsonville Police Department. This means that Officer Ridgway is the cop in Watsonville that is paid to enter classrooms and speak to students about the police and staying safe in the community.

After Officer Ridgway learned that the students he was detaining for walking out of school had actually been dismissed from school 45 minutes earlier, he responded by saying that most of the students were probably on probation and that, "these kids are fucking assholes."

Here's a photo of Officer Mike Ridgway
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/ridgway_3-25-06.jpg

Listen to the whole audio for much more information!!!

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§KION

by .c

Tue, Mar 28, 2006 8:02PM

Just watching the version of this that local channel 5 showed, it was fairly impressive.

The one school administrator and a couple of the police almost looked like actors playing a role of an angry authority figure. They were sort of ranting about how video has been taken and perpetrators will be found and punished. Off camera, there might have been some bottle throwing, but mainly what the TV station showed was several hundred students crossing a wide street, and then starting to run and jump over a chainlink fence when motorcycles started trying to herd them, and they also showed closeups of sort of small boys being tackled and arrested.
The thing is, I have a number of friends who are teachers in west Sacramento and so forth, and they describe all sorts of bad behavior, especially when they are subbing, even among elementary students. Most people see people in their early 20s acting up in public too. These Watsonville students didn't look so bad, and many of them had signs, or at least had some sort of soundbite for the reporter. They came across as fairly genuine.
I remember when there was a gulf war related walkout when I was a freshman, I got angry when I saw the clique of rodeo kids who were very pro-war skipping class.

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§video links

by KION

Tue, Mar 28, 2006 8:55PM

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§Police violate civil rights at state universities, too!!!

by John Stegeman (steggie2001 [at] hotmail.com)

Thu, May 4, 2006 8:47PM

It is a travesty that the police think they can do whatever they want without regard to anyone's civil rights these days. This was absolutely disgusting!!! In my brother's case, he was being stalked by his accuser, in 2004 the Assistant Director of Graduate Studies, and appealed to the court to dissolve the restraining order she had placed on him based on bogus charges. Part of this process involved his having to mail a copy of the restraining order to his accuser, a legally sanctioned process. She claimed this was contact, and went to University of Central Florida police officer Eric Morales, who violated my brother's civil right to petition the court by arresting him for "contact", and then having him stay in prison the night without bail. This led to my brother being tried by the Office of Student Conduct, which violated several other of my brother's civil rights, gave him a biased trial based on nonsense, and found him guilty on nothing but his accuser's words and accusations. In the end a judge in the court system called the whole thing "a bunch of overblown baloney," and the thing never made it to trial. But it cost my brother and our family $50,000 in legal and medical bills, since my brother eventually ended up in a diabetic coma and nearly died due to this harrassment and trampling of his student and civil rights. So, yes, police at the University of Central Florida do violate students' civil rights and don't seem to care a thing about them. It's a shame it has come to this.

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