A Mississippi police officer is no longer employed after an investigation into an incident in which a Black child was taken into custody for public urination.
Mississippi
Mississippi officer out of job after arresting child for public urination
“The officer’s decisions violated our written policy and went against our prior training on how to deal with these situations,” the statement said. The police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a previous statement describing “the arrest of a 10-year-old child,” the department said a juvenile who had been caught Aug. 10 committing an act that would have been illegal for an adult was taken to the police station by officers, even though an officer had located his mother nearby shortly after initial contact with the boy. The statement said the boy was not handcuffed, but it acknowledged an “error in judgement” in taking him to the police station.
The incident evoked a swift backlash, once again highlighting misconduct within law enforcement especially when policing Black communities. The department did not share the race of the officers involved.
“His apology is not good enough for me,” Latonya Eason, the boy’s mother, told local CBS outlet WREG in response to the statement from Chandler, the Senatobia police chief, adding that she was going to seek legal action.
Eason did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night, but she told FOX13 Memphis last week that her son had urinated behind her car in the absence of a public restroom while she visited an attorney’s office.
Her son told the channel he felt scared and cried, unsure of what would happen to him.
The boy received a referral for youth court before being released to his mother, police said. The Youth Court Act, Chandler said in his statement, allows officers to file a citation against children as young as 7 in need of supervision or against 10-year-olds for delinquent acts — acts that are illegal for adults.
On her Facebook page, Eason shared a photograph of her son, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, sitting in the back of a police car. She urged the public to share the news.
“No 10-year-old should go through this,” she said in another post.
The family was in need of housing and food, according to a GoFundMe page organized by a local nonprofit. Eason was seeking legal advice at the time of the incident because she was unable to enroll her children in school due to housing displacement, the page said.