Sheriffs showed up to a 12-year-old Black boy’s home after a toy gun appeared on his webcam for school. What happened next? (an election aftermath break until next week)
The school to prison pipeline has long been established across the country, Colorado is no different. But this year, online classes have brought school discipline into children’s homes. This story explores how that could impact Black children. First written by me for the Colorado Springs Indy (Oct. 14, 2020)
On the third day of online school in August, Dani Elliott called her 12-year-old son. She was terrified. She told him to lock every door, turn off the lights and go to the basement until his father returned from a quick errand down the street.
Widefield School District 3’s two school resource officers (SROs), who are El Paso County Sheriff’s Office (EPSO) deputies, were on their way to her home for a welfare check. A teacher had reported Elliott’s son and his friend, another student taking classes at her home, for displaying what the teacher thought, but was not sure, was a toy gun during an online class.
Elliott’s first thought, she says, was of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy like her son who was killed by police in 2014 when an officer shot him because he thought his toy gun was real.
“It seems like almost every week there’s a new story, and I did not want my son to be the next headline of something that happened tragically at the hands of law enforcement because of a misunderstanding,” she says.
The SROs gave Isaiah a stern lecture with his father present and told him he could have been criminally charged with “interference with an educational institution.” He was not charged, but he was suspended by the school for five days for behavior which was “detrimental to the welfare, safety or morals of other pupils or school personnel” and violating district policies.
Experts say implicit bias and racism result in higher rates of punishment of minority students, which contributes to the “school-to-prison” pipeline where students of color are more likely to end up incarcerated and less likely to graduate than white students. Elliott believes her son was a victim of that same bias, only in a new online setting. And there are other cases like Isaiah’s. In September a 9-year-old Black student was suspended in Louisiana when a teacher saw a BB gun in his room during an online class.
Locally, Elliott says the school handled the situation poorly. “Not only did [they] fail to protect his safety, but [they] endangered his life, potentially, by calling the police,” she says.
But the district says it acted with Isaiah’s well-being in mind, though it is not policy to send SROs to the home.
Isaiah’s parents pulled him out of D-3’s Grand Mountain school after the incident due to, they say, fears for his safety. But Elliott says Isaiah’s interaction with the EPSO deputies took away a piece of his innocence. She says he was in tears after the visit and thought he was going to jail. All of a sudden, an already difficult school year became even harder. [Read the full story]
New data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows the number of people sentenced to more than one year in prison increased in 35 states
The Marion Barry Summer job program in D.C. was a ground breaking program mimicked across the country to stop youth gun violence, but results are mixed.
The Sentencing Project held a webinar to discuss the problems of youth incarceration In the face of increased pretrial detention in The District of Columbia,
Journalists Alex Coma and Mitch Ryals published an investigative story uncovering a criminal investigation of 19 D.C. police officers for misconduct while serving in a crime suppression unit. Originally an internal MPD inquiry, the investigation has since been upgraded to a criminal inquiry, with allegations including taking firearms without making arrests and filing false reports.
My name is Bernard Jemison and I will briefly explain my story. I’ve been incarcerated since May 13, 1998, over 25 years now for felony murder that should have been self-defense. I was sentenced to serve life with the possibility of parole in the Alabama department of corrections.
Founder of The Des and freelance criminal justice reporter based in Washington, D.C.