Parents in Murfreesboro, Tenn. are rightfully furious with their police department after officers felt it necessary to arrest several elementary school students between the ages of 6 and 11. Why? Apparently, these students were cuffed and dragged away in front of their peers because of their failure to break up a fight that occurred near their homes… off school property.
You really can’t make this up, can you?
The arrests occurred at Hobgood Elementary School several days after the students failed to break up a fight that occurred off campus. They were later released from a juvenile detention facility, meaning they have been processed and are now part of the criminal justice system… for not breaking up a fight. Three of the children arrested at Hobgood Elementary School are those of Zacchaeus Crawford, who called the arrests “nonsense in the fullest definition.”
Local church leaders are also antagonized by the arrests. Pastor James McCarroll of First Baptist Church Murfreesboro spread word of the arrests on Facebook, posting a video expressing his concerns that Murfreesboro Police arrested these elementary school children for no good reason.
“… this is absolutely unacceptable, this is absolutely unjust, and this is scary because this means the police have the ability to go into the schools without alerting the parents upfront and literally arrest young children and take them to jail… We cannot sit by and allow this to happen to our kids and ultimately put ourselves in a position where our kids can be at the whim of someone who chooses to arrest them because they feel like they want to arrest them.”
The actual number of kids arrested is unclear and media attempts to find out have been denied by the Murfreesboro Police Department. Tennessee state law actually prohibits the public release of juvenile law enforcement records. Murfreesboro police have also refused to state which law the children actually broke to warrant their arrest, but parents of several of the arrested kids have said the children were charged “criminal responsibility for conduct of another.”
According to Tennessee law firm Horner-Jackson, “criminal responsibility for conduct of another” is a statute that “makes a person who promotes or assists with the offense or benefits in the proceeds of the crime just as guilty as the one who committed it.” The practical application of this statute would be holding culpable a man who let his friend borrow his car to go pick up drugs or convincing his unhinged followers to kill Sharon Tate.
Since the statute states that those charged under it are “just as guilty as the one who committed [the crime],” the statute, in this case, translates to “even though none of these kids were actually involved, none of them stopped it, so they actually are involved, even though they’re not.”
Confounding, isn’t it?
“Zugzwang” is a term in chess and other games where a player is put in a disadvantageous position because they have to move when they would rather not. It’s a state where whatever move they make will worsen their position. These children were apparently “in zugzwang” when the fight that ultimately led to their arrest broke out. It’s no secret that intervening in physical altercations penalizes all parties, even if they were trying to break it up. Now, not acting is also an offense.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Police misconduct is not restricted to killing unarmed people, antagonizing protesters, or disproportionately fining a certain demographic to make your city’s budget. It’s also in miscarriages of both the application and spirit of a law. These kids aren’t criminals, but now they actually are. Their only “transgression” in this whole incident is choosing to stay out of someone else’s conflict — a decision that almost every person makes more than once during each stage of their lives.
Featured image by Aislinn Ritchie, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
[H/T Raw Story]
