Newly surfaced video shows law enforcement arresting a 6-year-old child at school.
The footage shows Orlando, Florida, police officer Dennis Turner arresting a sobbing young girl in September 2019, restraining her arms with zip ties. Turner was fired after arresting two 6-year-old children in a one-week period without approval from a commanding officer.
“This will not stop,” Orlando police chief Orlando Rolon said in September about an investigation into the matter. “But at my level, I have the opportunity to be able to exercise that, and when I came in today I knew there was no choice here. He was going to be terminated.”
In the video, the girl asks, “What are those for?”
“They are for you,” Turner said before restraining her with zip ties.
The young girl pleaded with the officer, saying, “Don’t put handcuffs on.” She called on others to help her, saying, “Help me, help me, please help me,” she says.
“Please let me go,” the girl asked the officer. “I don’t want to go in the police car.” A police report of the incident reportedly shows the officer was responding to an incident where a child “battered” three staff members at the school, but charges were never pursued.
The girl’s grandmother told local media that the first-grader’s outbursts were a result of a sleeping disorder.
“She has a medical condition that we are working on getting resolved, so [Turner] says, ‘What medical condition?’, so I said, you know, ‘She has sleep disorder, sleep apnea,’ and he says, ‘Well I have sleep apnea and I don’t behave like that,'” she said of the incident involving her granddaughter. “No 6-year-old child should be able to tell somebody that they had handcuffs on them and they were riding in the back of a police car and taken to a juvenile detention center to be fingerprinted, mug shot.”
