They deserve the presumption of childhood
As the father of zero children
If you missed the most recent Hell World you can find it here.
You will likely have heard of the two six year olds in Florida who were cuffed and put into the back of a police car and taken in by a school police officer by now because even in this failed country where you see some new type of horrifying shit every single day that is something you don’t see too often and so people were real red-assed off it. Students and children are arrested all the time to be sure but not ones that young. Cops are constantly pissing and shitting into their own diapers but they’re usually the only ones wearing them in any given arrest situation. In fact in this particular part of Florida where Disney World is they have a policy that you’re not supposed to arrest a child under twelve without special permission from your boss. You have to call up your sergeant or whoever and go sarge I got a baby playing Legos suspiciously here and the sarge will have to go alright bring em in.
One of the bad guys they arrested this time was a child named Kaia and she was fingerprinted and had her mugshot taken as her grandmother told WFLA. Kaia who likely hasn’t lost her first baby tooth yet reportedly had a tantrum at school and when a baby has a tantrum what other choice does an educational professional have but to call in the brave boys in blue?
“When I first learned about this, we were all appalled and we could not fathom the idea of a six year old being put in the back of a police car,” Orlando Police Chief Orlando Rolón said after the fact and that’s a pretty funny name not going to lie it would be like being called Boston Police Chief Boston Jones.
“To have something like this happen was completely and totally a surprise to all of us,” he said and he also said “As a grandfather of three children less than 11 years old, I can only imagine how traumatic this was for everyone involved,” he said and that is nice of him to acknowledge. I don’t have any grandkids or kids of any kind of my own and I can still somehow manage to imagine the trauma very easily so I don’t know why people always feel the need to say things like that that center themselves as a human being with standard family relations as if it makes a difference. As a father of two daughters… they say.
The officer in question Dennis Turner has been fired but it’s hard to understand what he was doing there in the first place. In 1998 he was arrested and charged with aggravated child abuse after bruises and welts were found on his own seven year old son. As a father of a child under eleven he might have said at some point in his life.
After he was arrested for that he said “Don’t let this stop you from disciplining your children,” according to the Orlando Sentinel and I guess he meant that sincerely.
In 2003 he was investigated for threatening the husband of a woman he was dating and in 2016 he was reprimanded for excessive force for tasering a man five times including twice when he was on the ground and no longer moving.
Last year Turner retired from the force but was then hired as a school resource officer at the school in question where the violent babies he arrested went on their crime spree. School resource officer is what they call it when there is a cop at the school and the resource they provide is fucking with the students of color so the teachers and administrators don’t have to and the have more time to focus on the white kids.
A lot of times people like the president for example or some shitty Republican you know will say we should have more retired police and troops in schools to protect the kids from shooters but what happens when you have police in schools is that they end up criminalizing the type of behavior that has traditionally been handled by the schools themselves.
In a Hell World from last year I wrote about the issue of police in schools:
People tend to think about the presence of police officers in school as offering a measure of safety in the case of a school shooting which may or may not be true but they don’t tend to think about what the police are supposed to be doing during all the downtime when schools aren’t under assault. It may not seem like it but schools in America aren’t actually being shot up all day every day year round. So cops, given nothing else to do, will always revert to being cops. If they’re stationed at an otherwise relatively peaceful school they’ll often go looking for people to harass or for exciting crimes to solve to make themselves feel like they’re not wasting their time.
And it’s no surprise what types of students end up being the recipient of their attention.