PBS: “Rutherford County, Tennessee, has detained a record number of children, some as young as 7 years old, in past years. Some were arrested for playground fights, others for cursing.
In one 2016 case, four elementary school-age girls were detained for failing to intervene in a fight. A disproportionate number of the children involved and arrested were Black….
The focus is on this one county, Rutherford County. And an attorney there told you, at one point, some 500 kids, he thought, had been arrested by mistake and another 1, 500 detained over a point of time as part of a jailing system that seems like it was subjective.
Essentially, at points, police and judge were deciding on how the kid looked or how the kid was acting in a moment, whether they would be detained. At the center of your story is the arrest of 11 children surrounding that idea of a fight who intervened, who didn’t.”