Aguirre,the wrath of god.

[Matthew X]

   Houston Police Arrest 278 People Outside Kmart (MLP)

By thebabelfish
Tue Aug 20th, 2002 at 10:02:32 PM EST
On Sunday, "scores of Houston police officers swarmed onto the Kmart 
parking lot in the 8400 block of Westheimer about 12:30 a.m. Sunday and 
arrested about 425 people for criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor." In a 
follow-up, the number of people arrested is reported as 278, lower, but 
still quite a few.
Apparently, the reason behind the raid was to arrest illegal drag racers. 
Upon getting there though and finding no drag race or racers, the captain 
in charge, Mark Aguirre, gave the "utterly, utterly senseless" (in the 
words of an officer at the scene) order to round up everyone...
  The arrests were indiscriminate; everyone in the parking lot at the time 
of the raid was arrested without question. When asked, police said that 
everybody was "receiving equal treatment from the Houston Police 
Department"; whatever people were doing at the time didn't matter, they 
were simply handcuffed and arrested.
One 18-year old teen said:
We went to use the restroom at Kmart and to buy a Scrunchi, and when we 
came back to our car, cops were coming in [the parking lot] and they tied 
our hands.
Another who was arrested said all she "was doing was eating ice cream" from 
a restaurant that adjoined the parking lot.
Even a 10-year old girl who was having dinner with her father was seperated 
from her father, arrested, and sent to a juvenile detention facility.
Many parents whose children had been arrested didn't know about the arrests 
until Monday morning and were forced to spend the whole night worrying 
about their children who didn't come home that night.
"I didn't sleep all night waiting for my son to come home" said a sobbing 
[Soneary] Sy, a Cambodian immigrant who moved to Houston 22 years ago. "He 
tried to go to Kmart and as soon as he got to Kmart he was arrested."
Reading about this raid shocked me. The police came to arrest drag racers, 
but ended up arresting everyone at the scene. Of the 278 arrested, only 42 
were cited as violating the Houston curfew of midnight-6:00 am, so why did 
Mark Aguirre feel the need to round up everyone there and charge them with 
criminal trespass? Officers involved in the arrests are also questioning 
Aguirre's decision:
"I couldn't believe we were being told to arrest all those kids. It was 
just utterly, utterly senseless," said one officer involved, who violated 
department policy by discussing the arrests and spoke on condition of 
anonymity.
"Captain Aguirre was put in charge, and it went to hell in a handbasket," 
said a police supervisor who was at the scene, also violating department 
policy and requesting anonymity.
Apparently though, Aguirre has a history of making bad judgements in regard 
to department policy during his 20 years with the Houston Police Department.
The most recent was "an allegation that Aguirre used foul and threatening 
language to his subordinates" This "garnered the captain a written 
reprimand from Bradford, which was overturned by an arbitrator."
  http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/8/20/17504/9831
Police like this make my job too easy.