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A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH POLICE BRUTALITY
My Son Suffered Police Brutality When He Was Seven
A story of out-of-control power plays
As the mother of three children with special needs, I often got phone calls from the school, and so this one was no surprise. They told me that I was going to have to come to the school because they were suspending my son for three days, and that he had to have a psych evaluation before he could return to school.
This wasn’t my first merry-go-round, but when I got to the school, I was both shocked and angry. The principal was holding my son by his wrists, and the school cop was grasping his ankles.
I asked what had happened and they told me that he had broken some headphones and when he got punished he had a meltdown. That didn’t sound right to me as there had to be more to it to cause a meltdown, and so I asked some other, more pointed questions about what exactly triggered his meltdown.
“His meltdowns aren’t nice, but they always have a specific trigger, it says so on his IEP. Do you know what triggered him exactly?” I asked.
“Like I said, he got punished for breaking the headphones and then he started screaming,” Mr. Maynard, the principal, said.
