ACLU sues Kansas City school district for handcuffing a crying 7-year-old
The ACLU of Missouri has sued the Kansas City Public Schools over a handcuffing incident involving an African-American 7-year-old boy.
According to the Kansas City Star, the second-grader was handcuffed by a school police officer in 2014 after he started crying uncontrollably in class at George Melcher Elementary School. The newspaper says the boy was being bullied at the time, sometimes about his hearing impairment. School resource officer Brandon Craddick heard the incident from the hallway and decided to take the child to the principal’s office, the newspaper says.
The ACLU’s complaint (PDF) says the boy stopped crying when Craddock arrived, and obeyed Craddock’s second request to leave the classroom. Craddock then tried to take the child with him on another errand, but the boy began crying again and tried to walk away, at which point Craddock grabbed his wrist and began forcibly pushing him down the hallway. The ACLU says Craddock’s report on the incident says he gave the child warnings; the complaint says these were actually statements like “stop that crying” and “what are you hollering about?”
When the 7-year-old grabbed a handrail or flailed his arm as he was being forced down the hallway, Craddock pulled his arms behind his back, handcuffed him and led him to the principal’s office. Principal Anne Wallace, a named defendant like Craddock, finished some paperwork before handling the situation. The boy’s father, who had been called because of the bullying incident, arrived about 15 minutes later to discover his son in handcuffs.
It was then that Craddock removed the handcuffs and released the child to his father. He explained to the father that handcuffs are a last resort when students refuse to cooperate. The ACLU’s complaint notes that the 7-year-old had not been in a physical fight; had not threatened anyone; and, at the time, weighed less than 50 pounds and stood less than 4 feet tall. Nonetheless, a spokesperson for Kansas City Public Schools said publicly that Craddock had followed protocol.
The incident upset the child so much that he no longer felt safe at school, the complaint says. His mother, Tomesha Primm, home-schooled him for the next two years; he is now a fifth-grader at a different school.
In a video accompanying the Kansas City Star’s story, Tomesha Primm says she was in disbelief when she heard about the incident. She was a volunteer at the school, she said, and should have been easy to contact if officials felt they couldn’t handle her son.
ACLU attorney Tony Rothert told the newspaper that it’s illegal for governments to use restraints when there’s no evidence that a crime has been committed. The lawsuit says defendants violated the child’s Fourth and 14th Amendment protections against unreasonable seizures and excessive force.
“No reasonable person would have believed the use of handcuffs on a 7-year-old weighing less than 50 pounds who posed no danger to anyone and who committed no crime was a lawful seizure or an appropriate amount of force,” the complaint says.
A spokesperson for the school district declined to comment to the newspaper.
The ACLU notes that Missouri has the nation’s highest disparity in how black and white elementary school kids are punished, according to the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies (PDF). A preliminary report (PDF) by the ABA’s School-to-Prison Pipeline Task Force, published in February, says African-American kids were 16 percent of the school population in 2011-2012, but 31 percent of kids arrested at school and 27 percent of those referred to law enforcement.
