Seven years after a Pawtucket School Resource Officer (SRO) unlawfully handcuffed and arrested an African American and Native American middle school honors student, the case has been settled with an award of $5,000 in damages to the student and in consideration of additional undertakings by the City to revise its incident reporting system to make it easier to track police interactions in the city’s schools. The lawsuit against the school was filed by ACLU of Rhode Island cooperating attorney Shannah Kurland on behalf of the student in the case, T.J. v. Rose, et al.
In June 2019, the ACLU’s client (cited as “T.J.” in the lawsuit) and another student got into a scuffle in the Goff Middle School schoolyard before the school day started. It was quickly broken up by other students, and neither student was hurt. However, the SRO, who was not present for the incident but watched a video of it, decided to arrest the students for “disorderly conduct” over the objections of the client’s mother, who had come to the school immediately after receiving a call about the incident. According to the plaintiff, the SRO, Darren Rose, had earlier in the year told students at the school that he was “itching” to “get [his] handcuffs on someone.”
T.J., who was an honor roll student, was handcuffed, taken to the police station, and kept in a cell for close to an hour before being released to her mother. The charge was disposed of when the matter went before the city’s juvenile hearing board, and despite the arrest both girls involved were only required to complete a two-day school suspension.
The ACLU of RI has been raising concerns for years about how SROs often escalate minor disciplinary incidents into major ones and turn routine school infractions into criminal matters, unnecessarily introducing children to the criminal justice system at an early age and scarring them in the process. SROs are police officers who, though assigned to schools, are accountable to the police department, not school officials.
Earlier in the litigation, a federal judge refused the City’s request to dismiss her Equal Protection claim alleging systemic racial discrimination in school-based arrests. That ruling was an important victory in defeating the city’s effort to derail examination of racial disparities as outside the court’s review.
ACLU of Rhode Island cooperating attorney Shannah Kurland said today, “At the age of thirteen, our client stood up for her own right and the right of other school children to receive an education instead of being criminalized by the public school system. Going forward, the City has committed to updating its tracking and analysis of school arrest and discipline information by race so that other Black and brown children will not have to endure what she did. I am proud of her resilience and courage.”
Steven Brown, ACLU of RI executive director, added, “As this case makes clear, and as we see time and time again, police should not be in schools to police everyday student interactions. Exposing kids to carceral punishment for minor misconduct at the same place they’re supposed to be going to learn every day is not only deeply harmful but, as shown in this case, unjustifiable. We’re glad this case has come to a favorable close, even if nothing can truly remedy what our client had to endure as a 13-year-old.”
Additional information about the case can be found here.
