On Feb. 1, 2021, police body camera footage surfaced online of a nine-year-old Black girl being dragged through snow to a police car, handcuffed, and pepper sprayed. The officers responding to a report of “family trouble” acted in this aggressive manner after the girl expressed that she wanted to kill herself and her mother. While the girl refused to sit inside the police car and said that she wanted her father, an officer dismissively told her that she’s “acting like a child,” to which the nine-year-old replied, “I am a child”–– then they pepper sprayed her.
The girl’s statement throws the absurdity of her treatment into stark relief–– why are police officers handcuffing, mocking, and pepper spraying a fearful, suicidal child? Beyond this outrageous handling of someone who is mentally distressed, macing a handcuffed child is in and of itself outrageously illogical; why would pepper spray ever be the logical and humane solution for a girl who doesn’t want to put her feet inside a car and is crying for her dad? Instead of making any attempt at calming the fearful child down with understanding and compassionate words, these cops decided that she must be treated as a dangerous threat to society.
I can say confidently that this child’s Blackness contributed to police officers’ violently unjust treatment of her.
According to a new study by researchers at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., Black children in the United States are six times more likely to be shot to death by police than white children. Black communities don’t need such data to know that their children are in danger around the world; the collective grief that is felt from the many infamous police killings of Black children is more than enough of a credible way to understand the racially unjust nature of the world around them.
What Black children have in common is that they are all victims of a historical narrative that often stereotypes Black people as guilty troublemakers–– a stereotype that consistently overrules the assumed innocence of youth. Unlike white children, Black children do not typically have that barrier to protect them from the horrors of the world. Because of their Blackness, these children are adultified and denied gentle treatment, consequently suffering far more violence than white children.
This reality is well exemplified by police killings such as the well-known deadly shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot by then-Cleveland police Officer Timothy Loehmann in 2014; Rice was shot after Loehmann mistook the boy’s toy pistol for a real firearm.
Or, the South African case of Nathaniel Julius, a 16-year-old boy with Down’s syndrome who was shot dead by police in 2020 after not answering officers’ questions. Not only did officers completely mishandle a harmless child, but they also failed to take the prospect of disability into account, leaving Julius––who was non-verbal–– no choice but to face the punishment of his execution. Julius was eating a biscuit when cops shot him.
This is not to say that police violence directed towards adults is any more acceptable. Rather, my point is that police treat Black children in a manner that particularly disregards the fragility of youth.
In this fashion, a Black kid’s skin color serves as a sort of negation of their youth; to be both Black and a child is to be born innocent and made guilty; to be both Black and a child is to trust people who wouldn’t mind your death; to be both Black and a child is to be seen as a disgrace to children everywhere; to be both Black and a child is to be punished; to be both Black and child is to be buried prematurely; to be both Black and a child is rare.
Cops treat Black kids with more aggression than other kids because cops treat Black people with more violence than non-Black people. So, the question is not merely why cops brutalize Black children more than other children; the question is why cops tend to brutalize Black people more than they do non-Black people.
As Mariame Kaba, an organizer against criminalization, asserts, “there is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against Black people.” American police forces have always used a disparate amount of force against Black people and have frequently enforced the subjugation of Black people–– so is it really a surprise that they are continuing to do just that today?
One would typically turn to the solution of police reform, hoping that racial-bias and child-specific training would correct officers’ bad behavior. But the reality is that forces across the nation have frequently completed such training just to end up with an evident lack of improvement in their brutality levels. Training implies that American police forces’ unjust tendencies are rectifiable and that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with their existences and supposed functions. I don’t believe that.
I believe that American police forces are intrinsically inept at protecting communities in a just manner. I believe that the solution for the high rate of police violence directed towards Black American children is the dissolution of the country’s police forces. Abolish the police.
Many people have conceptualized possible alternatives that could replace the police, often working through a framework of ‘community care’ to introduce specialized mental health workers and unarmed mediation teams that could prevent crime altogether and intervene in dangerous situations. These programs also stress the necessary decriminalization of most nonviolent crimes to reconceptualize what ‘crime’ even means in the U.S. The first step towards police abolition is defunding the police, transferring money that would typically be used to support violent police forces to social services that could more effectively prevent social disorder.
Black children will not be safe until American police forces are defunded and abolished. If Black children are to ever be treated with the particular gentleness that other children are treated with, then police forces need to be dismantled. Without such violent organizations that disguise themselves as protectors for all, the nine-year-old girl from this year’s incident would not need to utter her sadly necessary assertion: “I am a child.” Echoing her statement, I, too, declare that she, and other Black kids, are children. These are children who entered the world mere years before their unfortunate encounters with police. These are children whose lives are precious and deserve to be treated as such. These are children.
(Photo by Maria Oswalt via Unsplash)
