Police wrong to cuff 11-year-old, chief says
Grand Rapids police officers pointed guns at innocent Black children twice this year
The police officers swarmed the house in Grand Rapids, Mich., from the rear. They locked their flashlights on a person walking out the back door. Guns drawn, they handcuffed her as she screamed for them to stop.
But the person detained was not the 40-year-old woman whom the officers were searching for in a stabbing earlier that evening. She was an 11-year-old girl who was leaving her home to go to the store.
The episode, which took place Dec. 6, outraged residents in Grand Rapids, where the police were already under criticism for a similar encounter in March when officers held five innocent teenagers at gunpoint. On Thursday, the chief of the police department said the officers made a mistake in how they handled the girl.
“Listening to the 11-year-old’s response makes my stomach turn,” the chief, David M. Rahinsky, said at a news conference. “It makes me physically nauseous.”
He said he has opened an internal investigation into how the officers responded.
“We need to look at everything, from our hiring to our training to our supervision,” he said. “We do have a problem.” An officer’s body camera captured the encounter, and footage that the police released Thursday begins with the girl, Honestie Hodges, walking on a pathway outside the back door.
“Put your hands on top of your —,” an officer told her, before he was interrupted by a woman yelling from the door.
“She is 11 years old, sir,” the woman screamed.
“Stop yelling,” the officer replied, as he ordered Honestie to walk backward toward him with her hands up.
Another officer grabbed her arms, pulled them behind her back and handcuffed her. “No! No! No!,” Honestie screamed, the handcuffs making a clicking noise as they tightened around her wrists.
She was handcuffed for about two minutes, police said, and was placed without handcuffs in a police car for about 10 minutes. Then she was let go.
In an interview with a Grand Rapids news station, WOOD-TV, this week, Honestie said that when the police placed her in the back of a car, “It made feel scared and it made me feel like I did something wrong.” She added that she was now afraid to go near her back door.
As for the woman wanted in the stabbing, police found her later that evening at another house.
In March, officers received a call about a fight at a neighbourhood centre in which one of the suspects may have had a gun, according to the Grand Rapids Press.
About 10 minutes later, Officer Caleb Johnson spotted a group of five Black boys — ages12 to14 — including one who was dribbling a basketball.
The officer got out of the car, gun drawn, and demanded that the boys get on the ground.
As the officer held the boys at gunpoint, one wailed and cried, “I don’t want to die.” Before things were sorted out, at least eight officers responded to the scene.
“We can’t stop thinking of the fact that — what if one of our babies had made the wrong move?” said Shawndryka Moore, whose son is 14 and was involved. With files from the Washington Post