[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and I want you to go back in time with me to May of 1963.

[lyrics]

If you want to be happy for the rest of your life

Never make a pretty woman your wife

So for my personal point of view

Get an ugly girl to marry you

If you want to be happy for the rest of your life--

Jimmy Soul was singing about happiness as he rose up the Billboard charts but it belied the mood of a nation in pain.

Reporter: These are the frontlines of the battle between Dr. Martin Luther King's negro disciples of nonviolence and the uniformed forces of Birmingham led by Commissioner Eugene Bull Connor, who says, "We were trying to be nice to them but they won't let us be."

[music]

Melissa: The movement to end racial segregation in Georgia had stalled after an unsuccessful effort in Albany. Dr. King was jailed in Birmingham and the SCLC was having trouble recruiting volunteers for its nonviolent direct action efforts. That was when strategist James Bevel introduced a stunning and difficult idea, put school-aged children on the frontlines of the protests to end Jim Crow.

Over 1,000 young people responded to the call for action. They gathered at 16th Street Baptist Church, and they begin marching peacefully in small groups, singing freedom songs. The Birmingham police under the direction of the infamous Bull Connor had no intention of allowing these children to assemble or march. Officers attack the young people with dogs, batons, and high-powered fire hoses. That night, Americans across the nation were forced to reckon with this racist state violence enacted against children.

Participant 1: Lo and behold, coming off of the steps into 16th Street Baptist Church, there were 25 to 40, 50 sheriffs across the road with these little batons in their hands at the ready.

Participant 2: First, we were faced with the dogs and the water hose--

Participant 3: Speaking through a megaphone said, "Get out of this line, or you're going to jail?" I was so intimidated by facing a white man. I'd never had that encounter.

Participant 1: We were put in a cell block, I understand, holds 650 people and this cell block had over 1,500 people in it. It was a ferocious thunderstorm that day. I can recall several of the girls said that God don't even want us.

Melissa: That sound is from the History Channel's special on the Children's Crusade of 1963 and those are the voices of actual participants. They're now adults, but you can still hear the fear, the distress, they must have felt facing those officers. When we think about police violence against Black children today, we tend to think of fatal encounters like 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant, who was fatally shot by Columbus, Ohio police officer Nicholas Reardon, a 12-year-old Tamir Rice gunned down by officers on a Cleveland playground in 2014 and, of course, 18-year-old Michael Brown, killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the only harms Black youth endure at the hands of police are fatal. A recent report by The Marshall Project shows that Black children who survived troubling encounters with police are disproportionately likely to be hurt, harmed, and traumatized by the officer's use of force. According to researchers at UC Berkeley, Black girls in California are four times more likely to experience excessive force by police than white girls no matter how young they are. Research shows that officers perceive Black girls to be more adult and less innocent, than white girls no matter how young they are. Now, here's an example you might remember. Listen, we're going to play some sound of children in pain. We're just warning you so it's not a shock, although maybe it needs to be.

[chaotic noise]

Melissa: In June of 2015, an officer was called to a disturbance at a pool party in McKinney, Texas. He pulled a gun on the Black teenagers at the pool and pushed the girl, still in her bikini bathing suit onto the sidewalk. He forced her head to the ground sat on her back.

[chaotic noise]

Melissa: It sounds like chaos, right? That's the context of a lot of these moments. It's tough to hear but the girl is begging the officer not to touch her. That same year, a school resource officer in Columbia, South Carolina, forcibly ripped a 14-year-old girl from her seat, flipped her desk, and dragged her across the room because she would not give him her cell phone.

Female speaker: I'll get your dad.

Brianna Stuart: No. You said that you're going to pepper spray me, no. Please, no. Stop. [screams]

Melissa: In February of this year-

Brianna: No, I'm not a [unintelligible 00:05:25]

Officer: Just spray her.

Brianna: No, I have [unintelligible 00:05:27]

Officer: Just spray her at this point.

Melissa: -a police officer in Rochester New York, handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a nine-year-old girl who was screaming for her father.

Officer: I got her.

Brianna: [screams] Please wipe my eyes, wipe my eyes.

Melissa: In 2016, a 15-year-old Black girl named Brianna Stuart was riding her bicycle in the predominantly white neighborhood, Hagerstown, Maryland.

Brianna: Well, I thought it was just a normal day. I was just going to go ride my bike.

Melissa: I spoke with Brianna and asked her about that day.

Brianna: I was just, spending time outside riding my bicycle. I was actually going to go meet up with a friend. He said he was going to be a little late so I continue to ride around by the area where we were supposed to meet at. It's called Fairground. We were going to play basketball. In that time that I was waiting on him, I got hit by a vehicle and everything just changed at that point on, in my life.

Melissa: After determining that she was okay, the driver who hit Brianna called 911 and Brianna wanted to go home. When the police arrived on the scene, they had no intention of letting her leave. Officers tried to question Brianna, but she was scared. She yelled. She cursed. She tried to get on a bike and ride home but the police proceeded to pull her off her bike, forced her into a police car, and pepper-spray her in the face before driving her down to the station and cuffing her to a bench. Remember, this is a 15-year-old child who'd just been hit by a car. Listen.

Officer 1: She [unintelligible 00:07:16] I'll spray her.

Officer 2: [unintelligible 00:07:19] for now.

Officer 3: Put your feet in or get sprayed.

Officer 1: Put your feet in or you getting sprayed.

Officer 3: Put your feet in.

Melissa: There's a lot of noise here but you can hear just how frightened and upset she is.

[screaming]

You never know from that sound that Brianna was the victim that police had been called to assist.

Brianna: I feel as though it should have never happened. Yes, I do feel as if they were treating me as if I did something wrong, as if I was a criminal.

Melissa: A few days after the incident, Brianna and the police department each spoke publicly about their encounter. Initially, she was not charged with any wrongdoing but then they changed the tune.

Brianna: The video that was taken on my cell phone was posted. From that point forward, they released me the same day and they told my mom that I wasn't charged with anything, that they just wanted to question me. After the video was posted, my lawyer and we, had a little conference meeting. I think it's that's what it's called, told my story. I said what happened and then right after that the police had their press conference and the police officers said that they were charging me with all these charges.

Melissa: Ultimately, Brianna wrote an apology to officers for cursing and kicking. All the charges were dropped. Here's what we want to draw attention to. Brianna suffered more harm at the hands of police officers called to help than from the driver who hit her with a car. Even more troubling is knowing that her experience is not an isolated one. Brianna says what happened to her was inevitable.

Brianna: From what my parents told me and what I've seen, I knew not to talk to the police for one because I'm a minor and two that it's bound to happen. It's just bound to happen because I'm of color.

Melissa: For more on the use of force against Black girls, I spoke with Abbie VanSickle, staff writer for The Marshall Project, a news organization that covers the criminal justice system. Abbie reported on Brianna and other Black girls facing harm at the hands of authorities.

Abbie: The trauma of these incidents last many years after the incident. One mother talked about how her daughter now sleeps with a weighted blanket to try to soothe her to sleep. Another mother whose daughter had a police officer sit on her back so that her daughter wakes up yelling out for people to get off of her back. Parents reported that their kids became less outgoing, stayed in the house more often. Even those who said that they had trusted police before said that they would no longer trust the police if they were in trouble. I thought all of those things were really important because they were such a pattern in the interviews that we did.

Melissa: It's always a bad idea to take journalistic stories personally as a host, as a journalist but this one really did hit me. My eldest niece was 16 years old when she was arrested on the south side of Chicago, for standing in the wrong line at McDonald's. She went to an all-black, large public high school. The Black franchise owner at the McDonald's had created, during the lunchtime hour when the high school kids would come in, basically a separate but equal line where the high school kids were forced to stand in one line and sit in one part of the restaurant. She stood in the wrong line, the adult line, and was arrested, handcuffed by Chicago police, and transported back to her school in a police wagon vehicle. She is 32 now and that trauma is still absolutely on the surface. I can't think of a Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday where she hasn't talked about it with us, 16 years later.

Abbie: A couple of things. One is that we found the experience, talking about something where you are in "the wrong line at a McDonald's." That many of the incidents where families and youths, some now adults, share their stories, started with things as minor as that. Some girls in Florida go into a condominium pool and some neighbors thinking that they shouldn't have been able to use the pool. In Brianna's case, a bike accident. Some kids at a trampoline park outside of St. Louis.

Many of the incidents started small and then quickly escalated into something that ended up sticking with those kids, in some cases, into adulthood. I also had reached out to some experts who train police officers in working with youth and in interacting with them. One of the things that came up in those interviews is the focus on brain development that teenagers, your niece's brain was still developing when that happened and that those experiences during our middle and high school years can be so formative and can really stick with us for years. That's something that really did come out in the reporting.

Melissa: Why does this happen? Let's start with why police typically use a force with anyone and then particularly why it is happening with minors and then with Black girls.

Abbie: We were able to get data. We were able to do a lot of interviews. The why of why it happens to Black girls is something that we really tried to get at in the journalism. What I can tell you from our reporting is that, from use-of-force experts, they talk about how police are many times taught to maintain control of an encounter.

They are taught often that maintaining control is paramount. Also that anyone can be a threat, whether it is a child or an older person. If there's a moment in an encounter where somebody talks back and doesn't immediately do what police are telling them to do, that can be seen as a threat to the control of the situation. Even from the videos of these incidents, you can see that moment when somebody talks back, pushes back against the police that that seems it's when these incidents really escalate into a use of force. There's no specific rules, no national rules around when and how police use force against kids and youths. It is one of the factors that they take into account when they're using force. It's just one of many factors.

Melissa: I know that we have research out of, multiple advocacy and academic institutions. Suggesting that Black children are typically seen as older, more adult than they actually are and the Black girls in particular are seen as adults when they're still very much children. Is that part of what's happening here?

Abbie: That's something that came up again, in the reporting process and Brianna's case. If you have seen any of the video of what happened or met Brianna she's quite petite. The idea that she could be perceived as older than she is, I found to be a little bit hard to imagine but that is something that, because of her race and of the way that adults see Black girls as older.

That's something that came up. Kristin Henning, who's a professor at Georgetown Law has studied this as have some other academics at the Georgetown Law center on poverty and inequality. They call it the adultification of Black youth that they are perceived as less innocent and older than they are. I thought that was really important to get that research into our piece.

Melissa: Talk to me about potential solutions. Is this something we just have to live with or are there ways that either training or awareness or holding people accountable, officers in particular can make a difference?

Abbie: Yes. On the training front, I spent a lot of time talking with people who trained police officers, specifically on interacting with youth. That, I thought was really important work to also get into the piece. Lisa Thurau is one of the leading experts on this. She has an organization that has trained officers and more than 20 states. In their trainings, they focus on not only understanding the teenage brain development, the typical behaviors that teenagers exhibit. We all know because we were all teenagers or we have teenagers.

Impulsivity, talking back, distrust of authority, that these are all totally normal. How do officers, figure out how they're going to respond so that they slow down encounters that they talk to kids in language that's appropriate for the kids' age and also to ask questions like how can I help you? How can we work through these ways that engage in a positive way or to try to deescalate something rather than, for example, seeing a kid who's clearly in some crisis and saying something, "Calm down, calm down," which every expert that I talked to said that that actually is the worst thing you can say because it just inflamed and blows up something rather than what is the goal. Which is to slow things down and actually have someone calm down to a point where they can really interact in a clear way.

Melissa: I guess I'm sitting here thinking about this training question. When you are an officer who has arrived on the scene after the EMTs and you are dealing with anyone who has just been in an accident. I'm a little surprised that official training would even be necessary. Isn't there, I don't know common sense about, you don't then at any point pepper-spray that person, particularly if they're a child.

Abbie: I talked with Shelly [unintelligible 00:18:53], she's police officer and a trainer in North Carolina. We talked for a long time about her experience training younger officers. She said, one of the things that comes up for her a lot are officers who are young, may not have families, don't have a ton of life experience yet. Also, she said she started to see people coming through who don't have a lot of experience or skillset in interacting person to person with somebody as opposed to texting with someone over a device. She actually spends a lot of time, she said, focusing on just practical common sense, ways of interacting with people before going out onto the streets as an officer.

Melissa: Abbie VanSickle, staff writer for The Marshall Project. It's a news organization covering the criminal justice system. We also heard from Brianna Stuart, a brave survivor of exactly this police conduct. Thank you both.

Brianna: You are welcome.

Abbie: Thank you so much for having us.

[00:20:09] [END OF AUDIO]

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