Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project
Kansas City, MO — The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a 7-year-old boy who was a victim of unnecessary and cruel punishment at the hands of a school cop. Kaylb Wiley Primm, who is now 9, was yanked out of class, forced into handcuffs and shoved down the hall — for crying.
Children cry, it is what they do and Kaylb is no different. After he’d been bullied, Kaylb started crying just as the officer was walking by the classroom. Instead of allowing the teacher to simply calm Kaylb down, this hero public servant yanked the child out into the hallway. He then handcuffed him and dragged him to the principal’s office where he’d sit for 15 minutes in handcuffs waiting on his mother.
According to the police officer’s account, which sounds like any number of justifications for police violence, the child had been “out of control in his classroom and refused to follow my directions.”
Apparently unable to calm down a 3′ 10″ 45 lb child, this officer violated Kaylb’s right to be free from unreasonable seizures and excessive force, according to the lawsuit.
“Our children need trained and concerned figures in schools that know how to intervene. It’s not okay to abuse your authority and handcuff kids as a means of discipline,” said Tomesha Primm, Kalyb’s mother. “As a parent, I want to make sure no other child – in Kansas City or anywhere else in the country – experiences what my son did.”
When she got to school, Primm was horrified, as any parent would be, when she saw her little boy in handcuffs after being assaulted by a police officer.
“I couldn’t believe it because I couldn’t imagine they were allowed to do anything like that, or I would never have put him in there,” said Primm. “He knew he didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t know if the man was going to take him to jail.”
“This child committed no crime, threatened no one, and posed no danger to anyone,” said ACLU of Missouri Legal Director Tony Rothert. “Gratuitously handcuffing children is cowardly and violates the constitution.”
After this incident, Kalyb was too scared to return to school, so Primm made the wise decision to pull him from the school as she was concerned for his safety. She homeschooled her son for the next two years.
According to the ACLU, this incident also violated state policy, which says that the use of restraints for elementary and secondary students should be used only in extreme circumstances or emergencies.
However, the police were quick to defend the actions of their officer and released a statement noting how the Kansas City Police Department can apparently assault children as part of their job.
“Contrary to reports that KCPS security officers violated certain [Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education] regulations, all KCPS officers are commissioned by the Kansas City Police Department in accordance with state law. This important distinction alters the parameters of their capacity to act in certain situations. Notwithstanding the expanded scope of their authority, the school system’s present administration is taking numerous steps to ensure that our security officers are focused on de-escalation, conflict resolution, trauma intervention and relationship building.”
“What happened to this child is simply wrong,” said ACLU of Missouri Executive Director Jeffrey Mittman. “This is a call to action for all of us to stop the unnecessary punishment that happens to young boys of color all across our nation – and particularly in Missouri.”
The lawsuit, filed last week in the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri, seeks to get better training for school police officers and asks for compensatory damages.
Handcuffs for 7-year-old child for crying shows that the mere act of being a child is now criminalized.
As the Free Thought Project previously reported, according to statistics released by the U.S. Department of Education and published by NBC News, in the 2011-2012 school year, teachers called the cops on students a total of 31,961 times in the state of California alone, leading to 6,341 arrests.
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