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Friend, Five years ago last month, people across the country were shocked by a video showing the arrest of Kaia Rolle in her Orlando, Florida, school. She was just 6 years old, not even 4 feet tall and weighing about 50 pounds. Her wrists – too small for metal handcuffs – had been zip-tied behind her back by a police officer who arrested her for misdemeanor battery. He walked her to a police car, lifted her into the back seat, and drove her to a nearby juvenile assessment center (JAC). The video captured Kaia sobbing and pleading: “Help me. Don’t put handcuffs on me. Please let me go. I don’t want to go into the police car. Please give me a second chance.” At the JAC, she was fingerprinted standing on a table and detained – without her custodial grandmother’s knowledge. Kaia had thrown a tantrum earlier that morning after a teacher confiscated her sunglasses. The severity of the tantrum, however, was caused by a physiological sleep condition that school administrators and teachers already knew about. By the time the officer arrived, Kaia was sitting calmly on the floor with a coloring book. Still, he arrested her “without probable cause that a crime had been committed,” according to a lawsuit filed on Kaia’s behalf. The officer can be heard on the video telling Kaia he arrested her because she “didn’t listen to him.” Later the same day, the same officer arrested an 8-year-old student at the same school, also for misdemeanor battery – also a Black child like Kaia and also without probable cause. Kaia was possibly the youngest child ever arrested in Florida, and her story is included in a new Southern Poverty Law Center report that documents the state’s harshly punitive approach to school discipline and the consequences faced by many children – disproportionately Black – who commit what often amounts to little more than childish misbehavior. The report – Only Young Once: The Systemic Harm of Florida’s School-to-Prison Pipeline and Youth Legal System – is part of a series examining the criminalization of children in each of the SPLC’s five focus states. Together, the reports paint a grim picture of youth criminalization in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and now Florida. A report on Georgia will be published this winter.
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