You may remember way back in April when a bunch of police officers down in Murfreesboro arrested a bunch of young children, four at school, and it was a giant clusterfuck. Well, anyway, it turns out that an internal police investigation found that the officers involved did indeed violate police department policy, which, whew, thank goodness, because it would have been pretty gross if that all were all allowed according to guidelines.
From Michelle Willard at the Daily News Journal:
The report found several issues leading to the arrests of the children, mostly stemming from a lack of communication between everyone involved. Communication failed between the officers making the arrests — Chris Williams, Albert Miles and Jeff Carroll — and the school staff; between Templeton, who investigated the allegations from her assigned schools, Black Fox and Bradley, and her supervisors; and between the supervisors themselves.
Because this story is otherwise sad and depressing, let’s take a moment to give some shout-outs to people who did the right thing. Detective Paul Mongold watched the video of the event and told officers not to press charges against the bystanding children.
One of the arresting officers, Chris Williams, was found to have raised concerns about the pending arrests with Major Clyde Adkinson, and “expressed strong misgivings about the timing of the arrests at the end of a school day to several of his commanding officers, as well as school staff.” Thank you, Officer Williams.
Officer Mark Todd called in sick the day of the arrests because “the stress from what was going to happen made him feel like he was having a heart attack.” Todd was found to have misused sick leave, but my God, if you can’t use sick leave because you’re sick to your soul at having to do something you know is wrong, then that’s a problem with the definition of sick leave, not a problem with you.
It is hard, very hard, to do what you think is right, especially when everyone around you is encouraging you to go with the flow and do the thing you think is wrong. We all like to think that, if we’re in a similar situation, we’ll know the right thing to do and do it. But in real life, most of us fail the moral tests life puts before us. These officers saw what was wrong and tried to do something about it. Obviously, there wouldn’t be a story if it had worked, but in this case, I think we should give them credit for trying.
