The DARE Snitches

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/dare-history-police-surveillance-schools.html

When 11-year-old Crystal Grendell was called into the counselor’s office at her Searsport, Maine, elementary school in April 1991, she likely did not expect to be asked if her parents used drugs. After thinking it through—and likely following some pressure—Crystal reported that her parents smoked marijuana “once in a while.” The counselor, after pulling Crystal out of class multiple times over the next few days to inquire how she was doing, suggested Crystal go to the police station to tell Sgt. James Gillway, the school’s DARE officer, about her parents’ drug use. Crystal complied, but Gillway was too busy to see her.

The following day, Gillway, along with two other DARE officers, came to the school to interrogate Crystal about her parents’ drug habits. Playing on the trust that DARE officers had worked to facilitate with students through their role as teachers of the DARE curriculum—Crystal later recalled, “For an officer, I thought he was pretty cool”—Gillway told her that if she “cooperated” by informing him about her parents’ drug habits, there would be no consequences. Gillway, Crystal recalled, continued with a hardly veiled threat, telling Crystal that if she did not “cooperate” by snitching on her parents’ use of marijuana, both Crystal and her parents “would be ‘in a lot of trouble.’ ” Gillway concluded with a warning. He told Crystal not to tell her parents about their meeting because “often parents beat their children after the children talk to police.”

After Crystal complied, the officers pushed Crystal for information about her parents’ schedules and the layout of the house, and told her that police would go to her house to look for drugs. That afternoon, the police raided her home, arrested her parents, and took Crystal and her younger sister to a distant relative’s house—having neglected to make plans for the girls following the raid. The incident led to a civil suit against the officers. The court found in favor of Crystal, and the judge admonished the police, stating, “The officer’s coercive extraction of indicting information from an 11-year-old girl about her parents was shocking to the conscience and unworthy of constitutional protection.”

Most Americans have at least a passing awareness of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program. DARE is often ridiculed and parodied as a joke, and described as something that “didn’t work.” Oftentimes, people will laughingly remember smoking pot while wearing their DARE T-shirt. While these parodies are an important form of political critique, I found while researching my forthcoming book on the history of DARE that their lightheartedness obscures an important history of the DARE program that was much more insidious: The program turned unwitting kids like Crystal Grendell into the eyes and ears of the police.

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