Dennis Turner Orlando school resources police officer fired after arresting two six year old children on misdemeanor charges. Kids had mugshots taken and fingerprinted.
A Florida police officer has been fired amid outrage for arresting two 6-year-old elementary school children last week, authorities said Monday.
Orlando Police Chief Orlando Rolón announced that school resource officer Dennis Turner was axed amid a probe into his bust of two youngsters last Thursday, NBC News reported.
‘This will not stop,’ Rolón said of the investigation. ‘But at my level, I have the opportunity to be able to exercise that and when I came in today, I knew there was no choice here. He was going to be terminated.’
The Orlando Police Chief in a press release said he was ‘sick to my stomach‘ after learning about what happened to the children and said the department has taken steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
Of disconcert, Rolon said Turner had a previous incident on his record involving him and his own child.
The Orlando Sentinel reported Turner having been arrested & charged with aggravated child abuse for beating his own 7-year-old-son and investigated for assaulting his ex-wife’s boyfriend in 1998.
In 2016, Officer Turner was reprimanded for using excessive force after stunning a man five times with a Taser during an arrest, the newspaper reported.
Officer Turner served on the police force for 23 years and retired in June 2018, according to the department before taking on the role as school resources officer.
### Watch: 6 year old black girl arrested at Orlando school, ‘please let me go’
Dennis Turner, the Orlando cop who arrested a six-year-old girl, has previous complaints for use of excessive force.
He was also once arrested & charged with aggravated child abuse for beating his own 7-year-old-son and investigated for assaulting his ex-wife’s boyfriend. pic.twitter.com/76BDvXctio
— Rebecca J. Kavanagh (@DrRJKavanagh) September 23, 2019
‘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…’
Department policy dictates that officers must obtain the approval of their commanding officer before initiating an arrest of a child under 12.
Turner neglected to abide by that policy when he arrested 6-year-old girl, Kaia Rolle for throwing a tantrum and kicking someone at the Lucious and Emma Nixon Academy elementary school, her grandmother, Meralyn Kirkland, said.
‘She was charged with battery!’ Kirkland told via WFLA-TV.
The girl was booked and fingerprinted and even had her mugshot taken – despite Kaia suffering from sleep apnea, a condition her grandmother said her granddaughter is managing through medication, and had been acting out as a result of sleep deprivation.
It was after a supervisor discovered the six year old being charged with battery, that the little girl’s arrest was halted and she was returned to school.
‘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 center to be fingerprinted, mug shot,’ Kirkland said.
But there’s more.
BREAKING: State’s Attorney Aramis Ayala just announced she will not prosecute either of the children arrested by Orlando police officer Dennis Turner on misdemeanor battery charges. https://t.co/oIY1Su6waG
— Rebecca J. Kavanagh (@DrRJKavanagh) September 23, 2019
‘This is not a reflection of the children, but more of a reflection of a broken system that needs reform …’
The same day Turner also arrested a 6-year-old boy, who was processed at the Juvenile Detention Center and later released to a relative Click Orlando reported.
All charges against the children have since been dropped.
‘I refuse to knowingly play any role in the school-to-prison pipeline at any age,’ said Aramis Ayala, Orange County state attorney during a Monday press meeting. ‘These very young children are to be protected, nurtured and disciplined in a manner that does not rely on the criminal justice system to do it.’
‘This is not a reflection of the children, but more of a reflection of a broken system that needs reform,’ Ayala added.
Walter Gilliam, a professor of child psychiatry and psychology at the Yale University Child Study Center, said the idea of arresting any child at 6 years old was ludicrous.
‘In this case, someone made the decision to contact the officer instead of a guidance counselor, social worker or school psychologist,’ Dr. Gilliam told via the nytimes. ‘The children were seen as an offense instead of clearly needing support.’
Dr. Gilliam studied implicit bias in preschool programs across the country and found that teachers expected more challenging behavior from black children than white children. Black preschoolers were more than three times as likely to get suspended, he concluded.
‘The whole purpose of schools are to help children,’ he added, ‘and if we kick out the children who need the help, why are we here in the first place?’
Welcome to a brave new America….
