Arrest of Nine-Year-Old in Portland Illustrates Public Safety Threat Police Unions Can Pose

Last May police in Portland, Oregon,

arrested a nine-year-old girl for getting into a fight with
another girl after the other girl’s mother called police later that
day. A few days later cops came to question the nine-year-old on
suspicion of fourth-degree assault, and then arrested her and took
her downtown for fingerprinting. The girl was never charged with
any crime. At The Washington Post, Radley Balko has a
great
point-by-point breakdown of the whole series events, and how
the girl is only nine years old and common sense should dictate a
cop knows better.

Cops often don’t know better, of course, and hide behind what
the policies say to avoid having to think critically on the job or
use their better judgment. The Portland arrest wasn’t originally
reported widely by the press. A police review found cops did
nothing wrong during the arrest: procedures were followed. The
story got more publicity last month, when the girl’s mother told
the story to the Citizen Review Committee. And unlike in many other
outrageous police cases, this time it may lead to substantive
policy changes.
Via The Oregonian:

[Executive director of a legal non-profit focusing on
children Mark] McKechnie and Joseph Hagedorn, chief
supervising attorney for the Metropolitan Public Defender’s
juvenile unit, said they’ve talked in the last week about two
potential changes to city ordinances and police directives that
would:

— Prevent police from taking a child under 10 years old into
custody without an order from a juvenile court judge.

— Allow police to take children ages 10 and 11 into custody only on
Class A or B felonies. For less serious offenses, a court order
would be needed.

Both said they were concerned about why police made the arrest
almost a week after the fight, and particularly, when the girl was
at home with a parent.

“It was way over the top for them to do that,” Hagedorn
said.

If the policy actually passes, this is good news. On another
level, it’s pretty bad news, insofar as it means you can’t trust
police to be appropriate with young children unless there’s a
fucking policy to tell them to do so. It increasingly makes the
police appear to be a serious public safety threat. We should
expect those people the government arms to be able to act
appropriately and above reproach because of their qualifications
and the high standards that should be applied to a duty like that.
Instead, the proliferation of police unions and deals with police
unions have dumbed down the requirements of being a police officer
while creating more protections for a class of employee that ought
to be held to stricter standards than your typical private sector
employee, not looser ones.

So great, now in Portland cops have a policy that governs how
they arrest nine year olds. They shouldn’t need one. And if the
police unions have helped to create this kind of a dangerous
situation, perhaps it’s time for local governments to deal with the
public safety threat they represent. Those governments can start by
reclaiming the power to fire cops not just when they’ve been
convicted of crimes in a court of law or condemned by some
administrative judge but when the police chief or other city
bureaucrats have made the decision to fire someone. Cops should
serve at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around.