Arresting Young Black Children In Tennessee

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that improve the lives of abused and neglected children.

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ARRESTING eight year old’s IN TENNESSEE

(for no legal reason)

At Rutherford County’s Hobgood elementary school,

An 8 year old, two 9 year old’s and an 11 year old walk into a principal’s office…

And are arrested and handcuffed

(“out of habit” said officer Jeff Carroll).

Arrested because they watched 5 and 6 year old’s fighting.

“When (officer) Carroll walked in (the police station) with the first two girls, Templeton, the investigating officer, pointed to the 8-year-old and asked what she was doing there. The police had no petition for her, Templeton said.

The 8-year-old’s mother soon arrived and took her child home.”

These children were crying, handcuffed, forced into squad cars and delivered to the police station, humiliated and treated like felons for a non-existent crime of watching five – year old’s fight.

You or me, as an adult would never be jailed for this non-crime.

90% of Hogood elementary school students are poor and black. Ironically, the school has a very successful academic record.

(quotations are from the article); “What happened on that Friday and in the days after, when police rounded up even more kids, would expose an ugly and unsettling culture in Rutherford County, one spanning decades. In the wake of these mass arrests, lawyers would see inside a secretive legal system that’s supposed to protect kids, but in this county did the opposite. “

It appears that this Law Enforcement institution is creating exactly what it was designed to stop.

Taxpayers are supporting counterproductive, racist policies that are detrimental to children, families, public education and public safety.

Could the arrest and handcuffing of eight year old’s have happened at the nearby private Blake elementary school?

It’s hard being poor and harder being Black.

“Officials flouted the law by wrongfully arresting and jailing children”. One of their worst practices was stopped following the events at Hobgood, but the conditions that allowed the lawlessness remain. “The adults in charge failed. Yet they’re still in charge. Tennessee’s systems for protecting children failed. Yet they haven’t been fixed.”

Was officer Carroll disciplined for arresting and handcuffing a sobbing eight-year old girl?

Were the other officers disciplined for committing the exact same crime these very young children were arrested and brought (handcuffed) to jail for (not stopping a stupid thing from happening)?

The uproar around America’s racist punishment models and over the top policing are growing in many communities, urban and rural.

In 2001 Minneapolis police arrested 44% of the adult male population. There were no duplicate arrests and 58% of those arrested were rearrested for a second crime within two year.

To outside observers, it appeared that almost half of Minneapolis black men and juveniles are criminals.

Pervasive police shooting of Black men and juveniles re enforces this thought.

A reasonable observer might ask, “is it bad cops or is it bad hiring practices, training and policies arresting making life dangerous and miserable in our communities?”

What institutions do mirrors (the voting) public’s awareness and understanding of what  institutions are doing.

For a deeper dive, let’s compare a private company with similar motivation, oversight and regulation in Rutherford County Law Enforcement and see if there are similarities in motivation and outcomes.

Corporate leaders at CFG (Corporate Safety Guards INC.) know that many of their hires are substandard applicants.

Substandard hires are regularly harassing minority children in the community.

They’ve also been shooting and killing a significant number of the community’s minority population – without good reason.

CFG board members see that the demand for guards is off the charts and there are not enough applicants to fill the open positions.

They have quietly lowered and occasionally ignored standards and let the unions defend egregious guard behaviors (almost no one gets fired – even when they kill innocent people).

They argue that these guards are necessary to protect corporate grounds and inventory.

Yes, they are shooting more of a certain group of people than the public would like and there are far more children from the same certain group in jail than there should be – but the alternative is stolen inventory and broken windows.

Besides, CFG’s regulatory agency forbids any meaningful prosecution of its employees, there’s no real transparency in the reporting the firm does, and the consequences so far have not cost the firm significant money. There are almost no serious disincentives to current policies, training or hiring models.

Why change? CFG is secure in workload, jobs, and profit projections.

Shareholders are happy and relationships with our private sector providers (jails, detention centers and prisons and their suppliers) are very positive.

By the board’s own research, clients with huge revenues would disappear and jobs would vanish if the punishment models were altered.

Internal CFG data demonstrates that a very large percentage of shootings and incarceration are of people with mental health issues.

The board has floated the idea that adding a professional division within the firm to address those mental health incidents could reduce the number of shootings and child incarcerations.

Corporate clients have shown little interest as it could add to their overall costs and shareholders have not been supportive.

The supreme court recently decided that children and juveniles will spend entire lifetimes in prison for things done in their youth.

Only recently has the U.S. quit executing them.

American law enforcement is arguably the harshest in the world.

And so it goes.

Share this with those you think might want to know (and all your friends in Tennessee).  READ MORE about arresting students;

Loud Behavior Arrests

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#policing

#childabuse

#education

#kara

#kidsatrisk