A US police officer has been suspended after arresting two six-year-olds at a school in Orlando, Florida.<\/p>\n
One of the two was handcuffed after throwing a tantrum and kicking a teacher, the girl’s grandmother told US media.<\/p>\n
The officer, Dennis Turner, was suspended as officials said he did not secure the necessary permissions to arrest the two.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors say they will try to erase the arrests from their records.<\/p>\n
Both children were charged with misdemeanour battery. Little about the other arrest – which was in a separate incident – has been made public.<\/p>\n
“The children will not be prosecuted, and just as importantly I am looking into options that may reverse the legal damage such as removing the arrest from the children’s records,” said State Attorney Aramis Ayala in a news conference.<\/p>\n
Police Chief Orlando Rol\u00f3n said in a statement: “As a grandparent of three children less than 11-years-old this is very concerning to me. Our department strives to deliver professional and courteous service.”<\/p>\n
Neither child has been identified by police, but the grandmother of one of the children said she suffered sleep apnoea which had contributed to her behaviour.<\/p>\n
Meralyn Kirkland told NBC that when she went to retrieve her granddaughter from jail,<\/a>\u00a0“they told us we had to wait a few minutes because [she] was being fingerprinted, and when she said fingerprinted it hit me like a tonne of bricks”.<\/p>\n “No six-year-old child should be able to tell somebody that they had handcuffs on them and they were riding in the back of a police car and taken to a juvenile centre to be fingerprinted, mug shot.”<\/p>\n According to Orlando Police, Mr Turner was retired from the police force but was working as security in the school as part of the local department’s reserve unit.<\/p>\n Schools have increasingly turned to hiring part-time officers since a series of deadly school shooting attacks, such as on Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.<\/p>\n According to AFP, 46% of US schools have an officer present on campus for at least one day of each week.<\/p>\n Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"