Shackling video ignites debate on school discipline

Associated Press

LOUISVILLE, KY.

The boy sat in a chair, the sound of his whimpering interrupted briefly by the clank of metal handcuffs closing around his arms.

“You don’t get to swing at me like that,” a deputy says to the 8-year-old child, the interaction caught by a video camera. “You can do what we asked you to, or you can suffer the consequences.”

The video – entered as Exhibit A in a lawsuit the ACLU filed against the school, the sheriff and the officer – rocketed across the Internet on Tuesday and was shown again and again on cable news, reigniting a fierce debate over aggressive policing in public schools.

The sheriff defended his deputy while experts insisted that children shouldn’t be treated like adult criminals and bemoaned the lack of standardized regulations for restraining children.

“It was hard to breathe,” David Shapiro, who leads the National Juvenile Defender Center’s campaign against child shackling, said of his reaction when he first saw the video.

The lawsuit filed by two mothers alleges that school resource officer Kevin Sumner, a Kenton County deputy sheriff, handcuffed two children, the 8-year-old boy in the video and another 9-year-old girl in schools the Covington Independent Public Schools district. Both children have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and are identified in court records only by their initials. It’s also not clear who took the video, which was filmed in August.