Melissa Harris-Perry: April 2016, police arrive at Hobgood Elementary School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. They're there to arrest children. In the assistant principal's office, police demand that four girls be brought to them. A sixth-grader, two fourth graders, and a third-grader. When an officer handcuffed the sixth-grade girl, she fell to her knees in fear. When they pulled a fourth-grader from her bus and put her under arrest, she begged for her mother and threw up on the floor.
The officers put a pig-tailed eight-year-old in the back of a police cruiser and took her to juvenile detention. The crime for which these children were arrested when older boys had a fight on the school playground in the previous week, these girls failed to stop the fight. If you're enraged, then you are like many of us who first read the story in a shocking new investigation by ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio. For more on this, we're joined now by the reporter behind that story. Meribah Knight, Senior Reporter with Nashville Public Radio. Meribah, thank you for being here.
Meribah Knight: Thanks so much for having me.
Melissa: What is going on in Rutherford County, Tennessee?
Meribah: You describe what happened on April 15th, 2016. These arrests took place in Rutherford County. Eventually, 11 children, all Black would be arrested for watching this fight and not stepping in to stop it. Our story outlines that this county had been illegally arresting and jailing kids for years all under the watch of Judge Donna Scott Davenport. She is the county's only elected juvenile court judge and she oversees the jail, she oversees the courts. Up until this incident, she actually directed police on what she called our process, which basically every child arrested even for a very minor crime like truancy would be taken to juvenile detention and processed. This is a pattern in practice that this county has been doing for years. Like I said, all under the watch of its one and only juvenile court judge. She has been there since the inception of the juvenile court.
Melissa: I have to say I was absolutely stunned by this reporting and in part, you're very clear in the piece that the police officers themselves, at least some of them are deeply troubled even by their own practices in these moments. I'm wondering how it is that the judge is empowered to behave in this way.
Meribah: Yes. That's one of the things that's so interesting about this story, is that you have people who are part of this and they're going, "Wait, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? This doesn't feel right." Then you have other people saying, "Well, I'm following orders." It's a really amazing example of gut check. What is feeling right? What isn't?
How she's done this is that power has been consolidated. She, like I said, oversees the court. She oversees the jail. She appointed the jailer who runs the detention facility. This is pretty rare that one person can oversee an entire juvenile justice system in a county. She really answers to no one except the voters and she's been reelected time after time since 2000.
Melissa: What does she give as a reason for arresting third and fourth graders, not for participating in a fight even, which would already be outrageous, but for simply observing a fight?
Meribah: Well, the breakdown comes along the chain of command. We learned in this story that it's a single school resource officer who says we need to arrest all of these children and her belief was they need help and we need to get them in front of Judge Donna Davenport so that they can get help. In one sense, it's not absolutely the call of the judge to arrest these children, but the policies and procedures and the attitude that she's put in place in her juvenile court ultimately led to this day.
Her ethics and her directives to law enforcement, which is incredibly odd that she can direct law enforcement. Judges don't usually direct law enforcement, but she did and we have memos of her directing law enforcement to arrest children and bring them to the jail. In that sense, her power is really consolidated, like I said, but also because she is the architect of this juvenile court, she has set the stage for how most people behave in it. This incident in 2016 was what broke through the surface, but this has been going on for decades.
Melissa: Are all children in this county equally vulnerable or are there racial or economic differences between those who get arrested and those who do not?
Meribah: That's a really great question. I just want to say, first of all, that many children got sucked into this. Absolutely. One of the things that a federal judge found was illegal about this county's behavior was how they detained children through something they called the filter system. Essentially, when they got to the detention center, the detention center staff could decide, we will keep you if we think you are a true threat. Now, what a true threat was was never outlined in the manual. It never said what that meant, so it was up to individual people in the detention center to decide, is this child a true threat?
You can see how that could be really problematic. It caught all different kinds of children in its dragnet, but the fact is is that anecdotally, lawyers say overwhelmingly children of color were overly represented. The other aspect of this that is really important to know is that juvenile court is sealed. The records are sealed. You can't get access to them because we want to protect children, but what happened in this county when that arrest of those 11 children was that a number of lawsuits were filed in federal court. A flurry of lawsuits, seven in total, that all touched this incident in one way or another. What that did was crack the door open into this secretive court and it allowed us to see what was going on. When you look at those lawsuits, overwhelmingly Black and brown children.
Melissa: Very little time, but is anyone being held accountable?
Meribah: Not really. The judge is still in power. The jailer is still in power. She is up for reelection next year. It is very hard to remove a judge in Tennessee. Really, the only way to remove a judge is to vote them out, so it's up to the electorate. Are they going to vote for Judge Donna Scott Davenport or not?
Melissa: What led you all to this story?
Meribah: This was a story that was coming in dribs and drabs. I first moved to Nashville just a month before these arrests at Hobgood Elementary and then I covered some of the lawsuits that were filed in the wake of these arrests. Like I said earlier, what is really remarkable is how many lawsuits were filed, seven in total, and so really I just started following the breadcrumbs of those lawsuits and talking to the lawyers who were representing the children and that's where you could really see this pattern in practice emerging. I knew it was a massive story. I came to ProPublica to say, "I need a year to do this. Can you give it to me?" They said, "Yes." Really, it was the lawsuits that, like I said, cracked the door open into this usually very secretive court system.
Melissa: I'm wondering, especially given the secretive nature of it, if you know anything about the long term effects of these arrests, even for children who may not have had long-term juvenile detention incarceration, if it's either in the lawsuits or if in speaking with the families, you've learned anything about the health effects, the psychological effects, the cultural effects, the educational effects?
Meribah: Yes. We have talked to a number of families who have been subjected to this draconian system. It ranges from, in the case of E.J, the little girl who vomited on the floor, she was so scared to go to school. She had bad dreams, really worried that she might get picked up at any time by the police. That's something we heard over and over again. Like, "Am I going to get up today?" In many of the lawsuits of the children that were arrested that day, there was money earmarked for counseling, which was really good. We also talked to another young man, Dylan Geerts, who was detained for four days illegally. He didn't get his lithium. He had been diagnosed as bipolar.
When he was in detention, he didn't get any medicine. After he was released, he was put on house arrest and the following year, he tried to commit suicide three times. I talked to another young man, Quintarrius Frazier, who was held in solitary confinement for weeks upon weeks. I sat there with him and his mother. His mom says he has a really hard time focusing. He needs stimulation at all times. Even just sitting with him for a couple of hours, you could see he was restless, he was pulling his hair, he was pacing. He talks to himself. He told me, I still talk to myself because I did that for so long. It runs the gamut, but it is absolutely ever-present in these children.
Melissa: Thank you so much for this reporting, especially as you point out that accountability here must come from the public, and so this is journalism at its best to let the public know so that the public can decide. I really appreciate you staying.
Meribah: Thank you so much for having me.
Melissa: Meribah Knight is a reporter with Nashville Public Radio. Meribah, thank you for joining us.
[00:10:21] [END OF AUDIO]
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