How Young Is Too Young to Face Arrest?

their mugshots taken. Both children, again six year olds who misbehaved at school, were charged with misdemeanor battery. A bad day for harried police officer, Well, yeah, maybe a bad day for schools and the juvenile justice system. Absolutely. We spoke with Marcia Levic, the chief legal officer for the Juvenile Law Center, which bills itself as the country's first nonprofit public interest law firm for children. She said, does it get more ridiculous? It's absurd. It's a ridiculous abuse

of law enforcement power and authority. But it's also a really unnecessary but all too common abdication on the part of schools and school districts. And teachers to just defer their management of school misconduct to police. The pure legality of charging a juvenile as young as six with a crime varies across the United States. To be clear, a juvenile in forty five states plus the District of Columbia is anyone younger than seventeen. In Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Texas,

and Wisconsin, it's anyone younger than sixteen. A juvenile offender normally doesn't move through the criminal courts, but through the juvenile justice system, which is guided, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention quote by the concept of rehabilitation through individualized justice for more serious offenses, though juveniles may be tried in criminal court, where if found guilty,

the court focuses on punishment, not rehab. Of fifty one jurisdictions that's the fifty states plus the District of Columbia, the pready three have no lower level limit on holding a young person criminally accountable. Levic says that includes Florida. In effect, that means that an over zealous cop legally can arrest even an unruly two year old. Of those eighteen other jurisdictions, most put the lower level that a kid can be charged with a crime at ten years old.

In those locations, a six year old like the two in Florida simply could not be arrested or charged with a crime. Levic said, Obviously, it begs the question, how can that be? How can we possibly have created a juvenile court system that allows for the possibility that six and seven year olds can be arrested. I think they never envisioned a six or seven year old would be hauled into court. I think that's a fair assumption. That's not who they designed the system for. So what happened

in Florida. A police officer with Orlando's Reserve Unit arrested the two six year olds on separate misdemeanor battery charges on September nineteen. One was a girl who lashed out in a in term that was brought on by a sleep disorder, the girl's family told The New York Times. On Monday, September twenty three, the Orlando Police Department fired the officer who made the arrests for not following protocol that required he get approval from his supervisor to arrest

any minor younger than aged twelve. No charges were filed against the two children. Cops in schools, of course, are not new. Florida is one of many states that has bumped up its police presence in schools over the years. The Florida legislature mandated it after the shooting at Marjorie Stone when Douglas High School in Parkland, the claimed seventeen lives in February of The build up of police in

schools is understandable in some ways. It's been more than twenty years since two students killed thirteen people and injured twenty one others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Since Columbine up until April of this year, America has been through two hundred and thirty eight other school shootings, according to a year long investigation by The Washington Post. This increased show of force, though, does come with problems.

For one, as The Orlando Sentinel points out, citing a report by the Education Week Resource Center, black students are arrested at school at a disproportionately high rate. At least one of the children arrested in Orlando was black, and as the recent news out of Orlando shows, police and school kids, even elementary school kids, just sometimes don't mix,

Levic said, we know where this is coming from. This fear of what happens when a child acts out in school, that there's going to be some catastrophic consequence emanates from Columbine. For twenty years, we've been overreacting. I'm not aiming to trivialize schools being so quick to call law enforcement. There are obviously many situations in which that's appropriate, but this is one that defies common sense. Most would agree that slapping cuffs on first graders probably is crossing a line.

Zero tolerance certainly has its costs, Levic said. Initially, the thought was that there would be some rationality, some reasonableness injected into the school environment that would curb those extreme and absurd responses. But it may be that trusting and waiting for common sense to kick in isn't going to work. It may be that it does require a legislative response. Some movements across the nation aimed to raise the minimum age that a child can be charged with a crime

to twelve years old. In some of those thirty three jurisdictions where no minimum age is set, there are calls to set something until then. Though school police officers may have to lean on something much less complicated than legislative action when faced with a prepubescent troublemaker, a deep breath, maybe a countdown from ten, and a little common sense. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart

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