A school resource officer in Orlando, Florida, arrested a six-year-old girl on ‘battery charges’ after she had a tantrum at Lucious And Emma Nixon Academy Charter School and ended up kicking her teacher. The teacher had allegedly grabbed the young girl’s wrists to try and calm her down.
The school resource officer put the six-year-old in handcuffs and took her to a juvenile detention centre, where she was made to pose for a mugshot. Officer Dennis Turner was on duty as a school resource officer and arrested another child, an eight-year-old, in a separate incident on Thursday.
Meralyn Kirkland, the six-year-old’s grandmother, tearfully spoke to NBC affiliate WLFA, saying: “No 6-year-old child should be able to tell somebody that they had handcuffs on them, and they were riding in the back of a police car and taken to a juvenile center to be fingerprinted, mug shot.”
Kirkland’s granddaughter was released from custody and returned to the school before being processed. Officer Turner, who belongs to the Orlando Police Department’s reserve programme, has been suspended from duty pending an internal investigation. Allegedly, Turner failed to follow department protocol which requires approval from the watch commander in arrests of children under the age of twelve.
