No articulated charges.
Police kidnapped the disruptive black ADHD girl because the school asked them to, and because they’re assholes. Purely spite and yellow-bellied servitude of white power. If cops were good or smart this wouldn’t happen.
Nobody asked you to be a cop apologist and it turns out you are speaking on behalf of people who don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt because they’ve proven over and over that they are malicious.
Maybe consider that this isn’t about you and how you “come off.”
Regardless to what excuses eventually get made up, the reality is that everyone involved in handcuffing and taking a 10 year old child into police custody is dead fucking wrong, and the systems in place that allowed it to happen are inherently corrupt.
The only thing that comes to mind is something like this:
… but I have a feeling it wasn’t much to do with a drawing.
I’m going to assume you are responding in good faith. As I posted above, the ACLU said that there was a pretense for the arrest. It sounds like you don’t consider the pretense that the police somehow conveyed to the ACLU to be an articulation. Or maybe you are saying that if an articulation is false then it’s not an articulation.
Articulable suspicion is what a cop can say happened before they acted that caused them to act.
Post-hoc rationalizations are not articulable cause. For instance the cops interrogating her isn’t a legal reason to arrest her and take her to the station in cuffs. Neither is “she doesn’t take us seriously” or “she asked us annoying questions”.
Articulable cause/suspicion is a legal term. It means the cops can describe the evidence for their belief a crime was likely to be committed. The cops have yet to do so.
This entire situation is consistent with racial prejudice and the cops acting on behalf of white power to threaten and intimidate.
Excellent response. Thanks for clarifying. You are right that is an important distinction.
ETA: And knowing your legal context makes your assertion of “No articulated charges” more clear. In the legal world things effectively don’t exist if the evidence has not been presented.
I’d like to see the artwork.
You don’t need to see the artwork: she’s ten. It doesn’t matter what’s on the artwork, it’s not probable cause for anything except possibly a referral to a qualified therapist.
When a 10 year old draws violent imagery, it’s because they’re traumatised, or because they’ve been watching things they’re not old enough for yet.
If a sixteen year old is drawing violent imagery, it might mean they’re disturbed and planning something. Or it might mean they’re traumatised and working through some stuff on paper so it doesn’t come out in real life (like, say, by screaming at a teacher, or sobbing in a bathroom all day). Or it might mean they’re just really into those movies they shouldn’t have been allowed to watch when they were 10.
But a ten year old? No. It doesn’t matter if the drawings were of a pile of severed heads with her dancing on top like Kali, naked, blue, and grinning. That’s not cause to arrest a child. Have a word to her parents, sure. But that’s definitely not what happened here.
No, hell no!
I don’t need to see her art to see if a child should be handcuffed and jailed for expressing its rage through art.
Or a grownup.
It appears to me that American cops often are less about enforcing laws as they are about circumventing them to do their thing.
I don’t feel children are safe in police custody at all. Adults aren’t even if they don’t match the type. Even then. I know this.
A while ago I came across a trove of my own childhood drawings and paintings. In almost half of them I had depicted people in the act of dying violently in an abundant imaginative variety of ways.
Decades before it happened I drew passenger airplanes crashing into skyscrapers, where my art teachers remarks are positive about the vanishing point in the perspective. While missing the point, the use of bodies to show speed, trajectories, momentum and impact.
I used to have lots of violent phantasies once.
I think most are expressions of fear.
I would like to see her artwork to see if I could understand what made it so impact-full.
Did it cause that much insanity?
I would be less curious if I got to see it. Maybe.
It is cops doing something that isn’t protecting, serving or enforcing laws. That school! It isn’t safe for children in so many ways.
I’d like to see the artwork.
It’s controversial.
It WAS a pretense.
The parent of the bully made some pretense that the kid who did the drawing needed the police calling on them
The school made some pretense that the police needed to be called.
The police falsely made some pretense that there was grounds for formal police questioning of the kid.
Did you mean pretext?
The thing here that has the potential to get the police in the most trouble, which hasn’t been talked about very much in this thread because people are understandably and correctly most upset about what the police did to the child, is that the police pretty clearly detained the mother, and they had absolutely zero legally enforceable reason to do that. From reading the ACLU letter, on at least two occasions an officer physically blocked the door when the mother tried to leave the room they had her waiting in. If an officer with a firearm puts themselves between you and the only exit in a room and refuses to move when you try to leave, any reasonable person would assume they are being detained, and I don’t see any way for the police here to argue otherwise. I think it’s abhorrent that the police questioned a 10 year old without a parent present, but that’s apparently legal (we need to change that). But it is not legal for the police to detain someone who they have no reason to believe has committed any crime (which should apply to the girl as well, obviously, but the police will make up some shit about the drawing constituting a threat of violence and the courts will probably accept that bullshit). But they have no way of arguing that the mother committed a crime. No way at all, and that’s the thing that probably has the best chance of getting the police in real trouble here.
And to be clear: None of this should have happened. All of it is clearly motivated by racism. Every police officer and school employee involved in this incident should lose their job, but probably won’t.
Yes, you do lose your parental rights when you send your child to a government school.
That’s not true at all. But cops never respect anyone’s rights regardless of where they are.
Only because some adults decided to abuse a child over it though. She didn’t draw it hoping to get our attention after all.
No, you don’t actually. Don’t make shit up.
Having gone to Catholic school - you have no idea.
Public school too after being so severely assaulted by a nun that I couldn’t walk for a few days. Because my thermos leaked.
Seriously… I’d hope that no one would be able to get away with that shit now a days, public or private school.
Catholic school as vicious as Roman Rule / I got my knuckles bruised / by a lady in black /
And I held my tongue / as she told me “son, / Fear is the heart of love” / so I never went back…
There are further updates, including the office of professional standards not finding grounds for a charge.
This is entirely consistent with a pattern of police behavior that we would have to be willfully blind to miss. The police had access to the parent and chose not to have her present as they questioned a particularly young minor. To achieve that end they detained a woman without legal cause.
Why? If the artwork constituted a clear actionable threat, the police would have had actual charges. Anything shy of that can really only serve to shift the discussion away from an unacceptable action by the state onto the perfectly reasonable actions of a child.
No you don’t, and students don’t lose theirs either. Tinker V Des Moines comes to mind.
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