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Police handcuff Ga. kindergartner
Photo
In this image made from video Monday and provided by WMAZ-13 TV, kindergartner Salecia Johnson, 6, is shown at her home near Milledgeville, Ga. Police handcuff ed the girl after she threw a tantrum.
Associated Press
ATLANTA
A kindergartner who threw a tantrum at her small-town Georgia school was taken away in handcuffs, her arms behind her back, in an episode that is firing up the debate over whether teachers and police around the country are overreacting all too often when dealing with disruptive students.
The family of 6-year-old Salecia Johnson lashed out Tuesday over her treatment and said she was badly shaken, while the school system and the police defended their handling of the episode.
Across the country, civil- rights advocates and criminal-justice experts say, frustrated teachers and principals are calling in the police to deal with even relatively minor disruptions.
Some juvenile authorities say they believe it is happening more often, driven by zero-tolerance policies and an increased police presence on school grounds over the past two decades because of tragedies such as the Columbine High massacre. But hard numbers to back up the assertion are hard to come by.
“Kids are being arrested for being kids,” said Shannon Kennedy, a civil-rights attorney who is suing the Albuquerque, N.M., school district, where hundreds of kids have been arrested in the past few years for minor offenses including such things as having cellphones in class, burping, refusing to switch seats and destroying a history book. In 2010, a 14-year-old boy was arrested for inflating a condom in class.
Salecia was accused of tearing items off the walls and throwing books and toys in an outburst Friday at Creekside Elementary in Milledgeville, a city of about 18,000, some 90 miles from Atlanta, police said. Police said she also threw a small shelf that struck the principal in the leg and jumped on a paper shredder and tried to break a glass frame.
The school called police, and when an officer tried to calm the child in the principal’s office, she resisted, authorities said. She was handcuffed and taken away in a patrol car.
Baldwin County schools Superintendent Geneva Braziel called the student’s behavior “violent and disruptive.”
“I have had some concern for a while that the schools have relied a little too heavily on police officers to handle disciplinary problems,” said Darrel Stephens, a former Charlotte, N.C., police chief and executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association.