The recent arrests of two 6-year-old students in Orlando, which prompted outrage and the firing of the officer who restrained one child's hands with flex cuffs, mirrors a persistent problem confronting law enforcement and schools with thousands of children arrested annually and treated like '
The recent arrests of two 6-year-old students in Orlando, which prompted outrage and the firing of the officer who restrained one child's hands with flex cuffs, mirrors a persistent problem confronting law enforcement and schools with thousands of children arrested annually and treated like"mini-adults," experts said.
And 24 states have no minimum age to transfer juvenile cases to adult criminal court according to the Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. A tantrum leads to a 6-year-old's arrestMeralyn Kirkland, the grandmother of one of the 6-year-olds arrested this month in Orlando by a school resource officer, told ABC affiliate station WFTV in Orlando that her granddaughter, who is black, was taken into custody on suspicion of battery when she allegedly had a meltdown at school and ended up kicking a staff member.
Orlando Police Chief Orlando Rolon announced last week that the school resource officer had been fired for allegedly violating department policy by failing to get a supervisor's approval for arresting a child under the age of 12. -- In July, a 10-year-old black boy was arrested on charges of aggravated assault after he threw a ball at another child's face during a dodgeball game on the playground of a suburban Detroit school, officials said. The charges were later dropped and prosecutors denied that race played a factor, as the boy's mom had charged.
Beyond these headline-grabbing incidents, there were hundreds more arrests for serious offenses, according to the FBI data. In 2017, 23 children under the age of 10 were arrested for rape, 13 for robbery, 52 for arson, and 362 for larceny and theft, including 9 for vehicle theft. Details of those cases were not immediately available.
"None of this is shocking. It's predictable when you don't equip sworn police officers to deal with children and adolescents, who require a different approach," Thurau told ABC News."You have to be developmentally appropriate, and trauma-informed, and racially equitable. We're not equipping officers to be that generally in the United States, much less when you place them in schools.
"Then you compound this with systems that don't put any attention to...in-service training for more experienced officers, and then you compound that with a lack of policies," Thurau said."Most police departments have no policies for how to deal with these youth and so the default assumption is you treat them like mini-adults."
He said the training his organization does with officers, who are oftentimes mandated by state or local jurisdictions to take the course, includes dealing with special needs students and understanding adolescent brain development. Karol Mason, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told ABC News that many programs have been developed in recent years to stem the numbers of arrests of children and give police and schools the tools needed to address the issue.
"It talked about how are we supporting the success of our children of color, particularly our young men and boys of color. And one of the issues that President Obama always talked about was that we don't give children the freedom to be children and to make mistakes and grow up," Mason said.
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