What you’re about to read is 100% true. Names and locations have been withheld to protect those involved.
If you already read this, scroll all the way down for the update. A reader gave me a lead on more corruption from this officer.
To say that I didn’t fit into the mold my high school wanted for its students was an understatement. It was a high school that valued sports above all else. It was in a very conservative, affluent, overtly religious, and sheltered area. If you played any of the school’s offered sports, you were raised above the other students and hailed as a god if you were good. If you bought into their white picket fence way of thinking and drank the school spirit Kool-Aid, you were passable.
I couldn’t hold a football properly, and school spirit flavored Kool-Aid gave me explosive diarrhea, so as you could imagine, I spent a lot of time in the office and got in trouble way more often than I should have. Plus, I slept in class and couldn’t get to school on time to save my life despite living a block away. It wasn’t a place I wanted to be and what they taught wasn’t challenging at all. Sleeping and being late didn’t make you a bad kid. Many people were late, but they liked to single me out due to my aversion to school spirit.
Being repeatedly five to ten minutes late, I’d get sent to the vice principal’s office, and they’d let me choose between suspension or work option. Work option was a way they got free labor from high school students they thought weren’t going anywhere in life. Might as well use them now before they get to prison. Better yet, the students could think of it as an internship to their future job as a custodian (not that being janitor was bad, it wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life). With work option, you had to stay two hours and clean or sweep whatever they wanted you to. I’d always choose work option because I wanted to be sure I graduated and didn’t have to spend more time at that place than I needed to.
One day during work option, I was sweeping outside the cafeteria, cleaning up after all the little angels who couldn’t be bothered to put their trash in a garbage can. I was sweeping by the tables close to the entrance, and something green and bushy caught my eye. It was a comically large pile of what looked like weed.
I swept around it and thought there’s no way anyone wouldn’t notice losing that much weed and that’s enough grass to get five years in prison, easy. Plus, there was the cost. Around 1999-2000, that had to have been around five-hundred dollars or more worth of pot. You’d get intent to sell in an instant. I was uneasy around this much sticky-green-stuff on school property. Something didn’t feel right. As with footballs, I wasn’t good at holding soap either, so I wasn’t keen on the thought of fumbling the soap in the shower where being caught with that much THC on school property would get me. I continued to sweep around the pile of Mary Jane. I didn’t touch it. There was no way I was going to come in contact with it and put it in the trash. Nope, I wasn’t going to be in possession of that. I left the area and completed my duties.
A few weeks later, the high school police officer said to a group of us students, “There was this guy pushing a broom around this big pile of weed. I don’t think he even knew what it was. He just swept around it. So, I waited until he left, picked it up, and disposed of it.” At first, when I heard that I didn’t think anything of it, but a day later, I thought of what he said. He was watching me. Not just casually watching but observing me for the entire time I was around the marijuana, almost as if he was expecting me to be there. As if it was planted there and I was going to be the victim of entrapment. Who would believe me? I was the bad kid who was always in trouble.
That wasn’t the only thing that troubled me about his crime voyeurism. He would have let me commit a crime and not protect me from the possibility of a criminal charge. I was a teenager, and teenagers don’t make great choices. Instead of protecting the students and helping the ones they deemed troubled, they wanted to ensure my future was exactly as they planned it to be. They pictured me going down a dead-end road with absolutely no future. So much for being a religious area that was all about Jesus Christ. I thought in his stories he hung around the criminals; you know, the people who needed him the most. The hypocrisy was staggering. I’m glad I didn’t touch the stuff. It would have sealed my fate, and my life would certainly have gone down a much different path than it did.
Photo by Alec Favale on Unsplash
Update 10/12/19: When I read the below comment, I knew I had to get in contact with her husband. I wasn’t the only one who had a negative experience with this officer.
Below is the story from a person who was the victim of this officer’s corruption. Names, pictures, and locations were redacted to protect everyone’s privacy.
In the next section the storyteller mentions an Alford Plea. An Alford Plea is a guilty plea where the defendant doesn’t admit to the charge and maintains their innocence. The defendant admits the evidence is likely to persuade the judge or jury to find the defendant guilty. Despite all of this, notice the storyteller’s reaction to being told to snitch! So awesome!
The storyteller tells me he had a 4.2 GPA during his last four semesters in high school, took honors courses, and got a scholarship. But, with the help of the vice principal, he joined the marines, and had his record expunged. All of this put him in place to meet his wife. The vice principal attended their wedding. The storyteller turned his negative experiences into a positive outcome.
