Video appeared Monday of police trying to arrest an 8-year-old boy at his elementary school in Florida during a 2018 arrest.
The newly released bodycam footage shows two Key West cops telling the crying boy that he is ‘going to jail’. One of the officers put the child’s hands up against a storage cabinet while he refreshed himself.
Another policeman, who has not been seen on camera, seems to say something about the cuffs that do not fit and the others agree. She then tells the boy to hold his hands in front of him as they walk him outside the school.
Police were called to the school, Gerald Adams Elementary, on Dec. 14. 2018, after the child allegedly hit a teacher in the chest, according to an arrest report obtained by the Miami Herald.
The teacher said the boy repeatedly refused to sit well on his couch, so she asked him to walk with her. That’s when he hit her after all and said, “My mother will hit you,” according to the report.
Officers arrested the boy, who was not mentioned in the report because of his age, and charged him with criminal battery. The status of the case is unclear.
The video was posted on social media by Civil Rights Attorney Benjamin Crump, who said he represents the boy’s mother in an upcoming federal lawsuit against officers, school officials, the city of Key West and the Monroe County School District.
It was not immediately clear how Crump got the recordings.
The lawyer said the child had special needs and was placed with a substitute teacher “who had no awareness or concern about his needs and who escalated the situation by using her hands to force him to move.”
When he appeared, the teacher called the police, Crump said, adding that this “was a heartbreaking example of how our education systems and police systems train children to be criminals by treating them like criminals.”
“If convicted, the child in this case would have been a convicted felon at the age of eight,” Crump said in a statement. “This little boy was failed by everyone who took part in this horrific incident.”
Sean T. Brandenburg, prime minister of Key West, told the Herald in a statement that the cops did nothing wrong and “standard administrative procedures were followed.”
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