Police criticized for trying to cuff young boy
KEY WEST, Fla. — Civil rights lawyers sued the police and school district in Key West on Tuesday over their treatment of an 8-year-old boy with special needs who was handcuffed, booked and briefly jailed on a felony battery charge after he was accused of punching a teacher who sought to discipline him for sitting improperly in the school cafeteria.
A police body-cam video of the child’s arrest shows officers frisking and putting metal handcuffs on the sobbing child before taking him to jail, where his mother said his mouth was swabbed for DNA, his mugshot and fingerprints were taken, and he was briefly locked in a cell.
The lawsuit filed by Tallahassee attorney Benjamin Crump accused city and school officials of bringing police into a school setting without training or specific policies governing the arrests of students - disabled children in particular. As a result, the officers showed “deliberate indifference” to what should have been handled as a behavioural issue, he said.
“Where is the decency? Where is the humanity? This is somebody’s child,” Crump said at an online news conference with the boy’s mother, Bianca N. Digennaro.
Key West Police Chief Sean T. Brandenburg said in a statement Monday that his officers did nothing wrong: “Based on the report, standard operating procedures were followed,” he said.
The Monroe County School District said it can’t comment because of the legal action.
The boy’s mother and lawyer said he suffers from ADHD, depression, anxiety and oppositional defiance disorder, and was taking two forms of medication that day in December 2018. Digennaro said it took eight months before prosecutors agreed to no longer prosecute. She had to go to court repeatedly and pay for an expensive forensic evaluation in defence of her son.
“I refused to have them make him a convicted felon at the age of 8,” said Digennaro, who was in the hospital on the day the incident happened. “I wasn’t there to protect my son from getting arrested, going to an adult jail, getting fingerprinted, having his mouth swabbed for DNA and getting a mug shot,” she said.