Get The Kiddie-Cuffs, or Police State Pedagogy

From The Pro Libertate Blog

“Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we've arrested?”

This comment by Avon Park, Florida Police Chief Frank Mercurio to New York Times columnist Bob Herbert easily qualifies as the pull-quote of the day, perhaps of the month. Chief Mercurio was justifying the arrest -- complete with handcuffing, fingerprinting, and a mug-shot – of Desre'e Watson, who was eventually charged with a felony (as well as a few misdemeanors) after disturbing her kindergarten class.

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Hm. So they arrested a six-year-old and charged her with a felony for "yelling, screaming - just being uncontrollable. Defiant." No six-year-old is safe. Do you know why? BECAUSE THEY ALL DO THAT! My god! You're going to charge a kindergartener with a felony for yelling in class? Yes, she should not be throwing temper tantrums in class. So send her to the principal's office. Send a note home or give Mommy a phone call. You alert the parents when a six-year-old is acting up, not the police.

Then we move onto the case of Chelsea Fraser. Okay. You know what you do when you catch a thirteen-year-old girl writing on her desk? You give her detention and make her clean all the desks during that detention. That's all you have to do. There's no need to call the police, there's no need to press charges over two letters written on a freaking desk. She wasn't writing obscenities. She wasn't drawing crude pictures of genitals. She wasn't stashing a gun in the desk. She wrote "OK". Oh my god, call the cops. We have two letters written on a desk. And just for the record, handcuffing a child to a pole for three hours does not constitute an acceptable substitute for detention.

And finally we get to Gerard Mungo, Jr., which is, in my opinion, the worst of the three. The little boy is on his dirt bike, on the sidewalk, but the motor is turned off. That means he's not breaking the law, which states that you can't OPERATE a dirt bike on the sidewalk. That is not justification for a police officer to arrest him at all, much less grab him by the throat and lift him off the ground, choking him. A seven-year-old little boy! My god! And then you leave him handcuffed to a bench. For two hours. Great. These cops are just doing wonders for this first-grader's emotional health, aren't they? Jackasses. And then it gets worse. What the police did then in the Mungo drama is just horrible and sickening, but the point I wanted to address here was the one with the children, and the rest of that story involves that boy's mother (as if she wasn't in bad enough shape as it was, with the treatment her little boy received). I do encourage you guys to read it, though.

Since when is this all right? Why is it all of a sudden acceptable for the police to grab a seven-year-old little boy by the throat and lift him up off the ground, choking him? I don't care what he did. And wouldn't it count as child abuse to fasten a child to a pole and then leave her there for three hours? And what kind of a country do we live in when teachers are calling the police offices as a way to discipline their students? It's one thing when you have children who are threatening your and the other students' safety, but if that's not an issue, then don't have a child from your class arrested. Good god. And... is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that all three of these children are minorities? I wonder a white child has ever been arrested for the same things? I doubt it. I really hate that this stuff has happened, and I hate even more the fact that it wasn't front-page, national news. This should have been alarming. People should have been enraged. People should have called for the officers to resign. People should care about this sort of thing.