How Young Is Too Young to Face Arrest?

In the United States, many states don't put a lower age limit on arrests, and children as young as six years of age have been arrested by police. Learn why, and how some lawyers and lawmakers are trying to change that, in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey
brain Stuff Lauren Vocal bamb Here. Criminals come in all
shapes and sizes, though it may strain definition that we
can count as six year old throwing a temper tantrum
and an elementary school among them, yet welcome to America.
In late September nineteen, a Florida cop arrested two grade schoolers,

(00:24):
slapped a pair of handcuffs on at least one of them,
and sent them off to be booked, fingerprinted, and have
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

(00:46):
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

(01:07):
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,

(01:29):
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,

(01:51):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:36):
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

(02:59):
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

(03:21):
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

(03:43):
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

(04:04):
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

(04:25):
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

(04:46):
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.

(05:07):
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

(05:29):
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
Radio's Has Stuff Works. For more in this and lots
of other topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works

(05:51):
dot com and for more podcasts from my heart Radio,
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