Sending a Very Clumsy Message : Drug searches aboard Orange school buses accomplish nothing

When school authorities in Orange received complaints during the fall about marijuana possession and use on school buses, they called in the police. The result in recent weeks was an unprecedented series of sweeps, where gaggles of children as young as 11 were offloaded while dogs sniffed around the bus compartments.

No drugs were found. No arrests were made. Many parents and community leaders were understandably outraged at the searches, and now are demanding to know why city officials and parents weren’t consulted first. So far there aren’t very many good answers to justify such a disruptive intrusion on the routine of ordinary students.

The big question is whether this was the right way to go about combatting the threat of drugs in the Orange schools, which may be real enough. The answer is that even though the youngsters weren’t physically searched, authorities didn’t need to go to the length they did.

In fact, Richard Donoghue, interim acting superintendent of the Orange Unified School District, acknowledges that the searches were really all about making a point. He says, “We’re not trying to arrest anybody, we’re just trying to stop drugs on our campuses.”

So the searches were a statement, not a response to suspicion that an individual student was carrying, smoking or selling drugs on a school bus. And of late some constitutional experts, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, have complained in other instances about this very sort of thing: the erosion of privacy rights in cases when authorities use searches to make a point.

“Sending a message” isn’t a good enough reason to put an entire school bus full of youngsters under suspicion. The Fourth Amendment extends to 11-year-olds.

And there is room enough elsewhere for symbolism in the war on drugs. Find better ways to send messages about the perils. In trying to educate youngsters about the damage that drugs can do to young bodies and minds, don’t give an unintended civics lesson on the important difference between a free society and a police state.