A Stitch in Haste

Back in the early days of this blog, I had two twin features that have withered on the vine over the years. “Lost Enforcement” chronicled incidents where law enforcement officials showed either negligent ignorance of, or reckless disregard for, unambiguous principles of criminal due process, the Fourth or Sixth Amendments or other transgressions.

A special subset of this phenomenon is what I call “Kids in Cuffs,” the unconscionable notion that mundane unruliness by small children in a school setting can ever require police intervention — let alone arrest, handcuffing or especially tasering.

It’s time to revive that category:

The mother of an 8-year-old autistic girl who was arrested after a scuffle with her teachers said it was horrifying to watch her daughter be led away in handcuffs from her northern Idaho elementary school.

Police in Bonner County, Idaho, charged the girl, Evelyn Towry, with battery after the arrest Friday at Kootenai Elementary School.
…
Spring Towry said she got to the school Friday just in time to see 54-pound Evelyn — who was diagnosed at age 5 with Asperger’s Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism — being walked to a police car with two officers at her side.

“She started screaming ‘Mommy, I don’t want to go! What are batteries? What are batteries?’” Towry said. “She didn’t even know what she was arrested for.”

The battery charge was promptly dropped. That leaves unanswered the precedent question of how teachers could demand, and police carry out, the arrest of any child (with Asperger’s or otherwise) too young to have any culpability for any criminal act. No child that young can form the criminal intent necessary to be found guilty of battery.

If — and it’s a big “if” — police intervention is necessary in a school setting to restore order, then so be it: let the police “restore order” — until the parent can arrive to take the disruptive student home. Let the school mete out disciplinary or other corrective action as appropriate.

But for (sometimes literally) crying out loud, leave the cuffs in the holster and keep 8-year old kids, especially those with a little-understood and less-accommodated social disorder, out of Central Booking.

Via Popehat. More thoughts at Simple Justice, Arbitrary and Capricious, Asperger Square 8,

Filed under: Fourth Amendment, Law Enforcement Abuses, Student Rights