Royal Smart, left, poses with his siblings and mother in a Chicago park. Smart still has nightmares about being handcuffed for nearly 30 minutes two years ago, alongside his mother and other adults. Neither he nor anyone else was arrested when police wielding a warrant came looking for illegal weapons and found none in the family’s home on Chicago’s South Side. From left are Royal, Roy and Royalty, and their mother, Domonique Wilson. | AP Photo/Teresa Crawford
An AP investigation has found that children as young as 6 have been treated harshly — even brutally — by officers of the law. Chicago police as well as departments nationwide have few safeguards to prevent such incidents.
Royal Smart remembers every detail: the feeling of the handcuffs on his wrists. The panic as he was led outside into the cold March darkness, arms raised, to face a wall of police officers pointing their guns.
He was 8 years old.
Neither he nor anyone else at his family’s home on the South Side was arrested on that night two years ago, and police wielding a warrant to look for illegal weapons found none. But even now, in nightmares and in waking moments, he is tormented by visions of officers bursting through houses and tearing rooms apart, ordering people to lie down on the floor.
“I can’t go to sleep,” he said. “I keep thinking about the police coming.”
Children like Royal were not the focus after George Floyd died at the hands of police in 2020, prompting a raging debate on the disproportionate use of force by law enforcement, especially on adults of color. Kids are still an afterthought in reforms championed by lawmakers and pushed by police departments. But in case after case, an Associated Press investigation has found that children as young as 6 have been treated harshly — even brutally — by officers of the law.
They’ve been handcuffed, felled by stun guns, taken down and pinned to the ground by officers often far larger than they were. Departments nationwide have few or no guardrails to prevent such incidents.
The AP analyzed data on approximately 3,000 instances of police use of force against children under 16 over the past 11 years. The data, provided to the AP by Accountable Now, a project of The Leadership Conference Education Fund aiming to create a comprehensive use-of-force database, includes incidents from 25 police departments in 17 states.
It’s a small representation of the 18,000 overall police agencies nationwide and the millions of daily encounters police have with the public.
But the information gleaned is troubling.
Black children made up more than 50% of those who were handled forcibly, though they are only 15% of the U.S. child population. They and other minority kids are often perceived by police as being older than they are. The most common types of force were takedowns, strikes and muscling, followed by firearms pointed at or used on children. Less often, children faced other tactics, like the use of pepper spray or police K-9s.
In Minneapolis, officers pinned children with their bodyweight at least 190 times. In Indianapolis, more than 160 kids were handcuffed; in Wichita, Kansas, police officers drew or used their Tasers on kids at least 45 times. Most children in the dataset are teenagers, but the data included dozens of cases of children ages 10 or younger who were also subject to police force.
Force is occasionally necessary to subdue children, some of whom are accused of serious crimes.
Police reports obtained for a sample of incidents show that some kids who were stunned or restrained were armed; others were undergoing mental health crises and were at risk of harming themselves. Still other reports showed police force escalating after kids fled from police questioning. In St. Petersburg, Florida, for instance, officers chased a Black boy on suspicion of attempted car theft after he pulled the handle of a car door. He was 13 years old and 80 pounds, and his flight ended with his thigh caught in a police K-9?s jaw.
The AP contacted every police department detailed in this story. Some did not respond; others said they could not comment because of pending litigation. Those responding defended the conduct of their officers or noted changes to the departments after the incidents took place.
There are no laws that specifically prohibit police force against children. Some departments have policies that govern how old a child must be to be handcuffed, but very few mention age in their use-of-force policies. While some offer guidance on how to manage juveniles accused of crime or how to handle people in mental distress, the AP could find no policy that addresses these issues together.
AP/Nam Y. Huh
Roy, left, and Royal react as they listen to their mother, Domonique Wilson talking during an interview with the Associated Press in Chicago.
That’s by design, policing experts said, in part so that officers can make critical decisions in the moment. But that means police don’t receive the training they need to deal with kids.
“Adolescents are just so fundamentally different in so many respects, and the techniques that officers are accustomed to using … it just doesn’t lend itself to the interaction going well with youth,” said Dylan Jackson, a criminologist at Johns Hopkins University, who is working with the Baltimore Police Department on juvenile encounters.
The trauma lasts. Kids can’t sleep. They withdraw, act out. Their brains are still developing, and the encounters can have long-term impact, psychologists said.
“When officers understand the basic core components of development and youth development — their social, emotional, physical, psychological development — it can really help them understand why they might need to take a different approach,” Jackson said.
Training offered by the National Association of School Resource Officers — which has held sessions with Chicago police in recent years — includes sessions on the adolescent brain to help officers understand why kids react and respond the way they do, executive director Mo Canady said. But not every department makes use of the training.
Canady and other policing experts cautioned against blanket policies that would bar force against younger children.
“You can’t say just because a student is 12 that we’re not going to use force,” Canady said. “Most 12-year-olds you wouldn’t. But you don’t know the circumstances of everything. You could have a 12-year-old who is bigger, stronger and assaulting a teacher, and you may very well have to use some level of force.”
Treated like adults
Royal, the boy in Chicago, was handcuffed for nearly 30 minutes in the cold, alongside his mother and other adults in the house. Then a police sergeant released him, and an aunt came to look after the children.
Royal’s brother Roy, older by one year, stood by watching, not knowing what to say or do. According to a lawsuit filed by the family, police didn’t handcuff him because “officers simply ran out of handcuffs.” Roy thought his brother was cuffed first because he looked “intimidating”: He was wearing a blue hoodie.
That spring, in another pocket of the South Side, Krystal Archie’s three children were there when police — on two occasions just 11 weeks apart — kicked open her front door and tore apart the cabinets and dressers searching for drug suspects. She’d never heard of the people they were hunting.
Her oldest child, Savannah, was 14, Telia was 11 and her youngest, Jhaimarion, was 7. They were ordered to get down on the floor. Telia said the scariest moment was seeing an officer press his foot into Savannah’s back.
Archie said her children “were told, demanded, to get down on the ground as if they were criminals.”
“They were questioned as if they were adults,” she said.
Now Savannah’s hands shake when she sees a police car coming. “I get stuck. I get scared,” she said.
Both families have sued Chicago police, alleging false arrest, wanton conduct and emotional distress. Chicago police did not comment on their specific cases but said revised policies passed in May require extra planning for vulnerable people like children before search warrants are served.
But the attorney for the two families, Al Hofeld Jr., said the incidents are part of a pattern and represent a specific brand of force that falls disproportionately on poor families of color.
“The number of cases that we have is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
AP/Nam Y. Huh
Jhaimarion, 10, reacts as he listens to his mother, Krystal Archie talking with an Associated Press reporter in Chicago. Archie’s three children were present when police, on two occasions, just 11 weeks apart, kicked open her front door and tore through their home searching for drug suspects. She’d never heard of the people they were hunting. Her oldest child, Savannah was 14 at the time; her youngest, Jhaimarion, was seven. They were ordered to get down on the floor.
Handcuffed for biking in the wrong place
About 165 miles south of the city, in rural Paris, Ill., 15-year-old Skyler Davis was riding his bike near his house when he ran afoul of a local ordinance that prohibited biking and skateboarding in the business district — a law that was rarely enforced, if ever.
But on that day, according to Skyler’s father, Aaron Davis, police officers followed his mentally disabled son in their squad car and chased his bike up over a curb and across the grass.
Officers pursued Skyler into his house and threw him to the floor, handcuffing him and slamming him against a wall, his father said. Davis arrived to see police pulling Skyler — 5 feet tall and barely 80 pounds, with a “pure look of terror” on his face — toward the squad car.
“He’s just a happy kid, riding his bike down the road,” Davis said, “And 30 to 45 seconds later, you see him basically pedaling for his life.”
The family has filed a federal lawsuit against the police officers. Two officers received written warnings, according to attorney Jude Redwood. The Paris Police Department declined to comment.
“What they done to him was brutal,” Davis said.
Experts say police officers are more likely to use force against minorities than against white children.
A 2014 study published by the American Psychological Association found that Black boys as young as 10 may not be viewed with the same “childhood innocence” as their white peers and are more likely to be perceived as guilty and face police violence.
Dr. Richard Dudley, a child psychiatrist in New York, said many officers have implicit bias that would prompt them to see Black children as older, and therefore more threatening, than they are.
It all becomes a vicious cycle, Dudley said. Police react badly to these kids, and to the people they know, so kids react badly to police, leading them to react badly to kids.
Experts: Training must be integrated into daily work
To Dudley and to Jackson, the Johns Hopkins criminologist, de-escalation training for police isn’t enough. It must include elements of implicit bias and of mental health, and it must be integrated into an officer’s everyday work.
Some of the cases have prompted changes. In the District of Columbia, for example, police officers now do not handcuff children under 13, except when the children are a danger to themselves or others.
Age-specific force policies are rare, according to Lisa Thurau, who founded the group Strategies for Youth to train police departments to more safely interact with kids. She said at least 20 states have no policies setting the minimum age of arrest.
Without explicit policies, “the default assumption of an officer is, quite reasonably, that they should treat all youth like adults,” Thurau said.
This report by the Associated Press was produced by Helen Wieffering, Colleen Long and Camille Fassett. Wieffering is a Roy W. Howard Investigative Fellow. Camille Fassett is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Data Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
AP/Teresa Crawford
Telia, 13, was 11 years old when on two occasions, just 11 weeks apart, police kicked open the front door of her home on Chicago’s South Side and ordered Telia and her siblings to get down on the floor. Read More
