UPDATE 9/23/19, 9:32 p.m. ET: Officer Dennis Turner has been fired for arresting two 6-year-olds, BuzzFeed News reports.
“When I first learned about this, we were all appalled and we could not fathom the idea of a 6-year-old being put in the back of a police car,” Orlando Police Chief Orlando Rolón said. “It’s still shocking to us. [...] To have something like this happen was completely and totally a surprise to all of us.”
See original story below.
Orlando police officer Dennis Turner has been suspended pending an internal investigation after he arrested two children at a school on Thursday (Sept. 19), according to CBS' WKMG-TV.
Turner was working as a school resource officer when he took in the two students, two 6-year-olds, on misdemeanor charges in separate incidents. It is required by the Orlando Police Department for a watch commander to give approval to the arrest of any children under the age of 12.
"There will be an internal investigation regarding these incidents," Lt. Wanda Miglio explained to BuzzFeed News.
Meralyn Kirkland, the grandmother of the black 6-year-old girl who was arrested, was called on Thursday and told that her granddaughter was arrested on a battery charge for throwing a tantrum. "No 6-year-old child should be able to tell somebody that they had handcuffs on them, and they were riding in the back of a police car and taken to a juvenile center to be fingerprinted, mug shot," Kirkland said in an interview with WKMG News 6.
"As a grandparent of three children less than 11 years old this is very concerning to me," Chief Orlando Rolón said. "Our Department strives to deliver professional and courteous service. My staff and I are committed to exceeding those standards and expectations."
The 6-year-old was released from custody after she was handcuffed, fingerprinted, and had mug shots taken. The other child, a 6-year-old boy, was arrested in a separate incident, was processed through a Juvenile Assessment Center and released. The race of the second child is unknown, but as Time reports, the Richmond, Virginia sector of the NAACP officially filed a complaint to the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights in 2016 and said that black children with disabilities were disciplined more frequently and severely than other children.
Police are often deployed to help provide security at schools across the country, a practice that became more common following the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. As GQ notes, somewhere between 14,000 and 20,000 officers work at 45 percent of schools in the U.S., and as a result more children have been arrested for nonviolent infractions.
In 2016, almost 90 cases of police using tasers on students between the age of 12 and 19 were unearthed. Black students make up only 16 percent of the student body in the country, but they also make up 31 percent of school arrests.
