Florida Police Respond To Tripped Alarm By Holding Black Child Who Lives In The Home At Gunpoint

police car lightsThe job of the police is to protect and serve. So when a Florida family‘s burglar alarm went off and two officers arrived to investigate, naturally, their first instinct was to protect the 11-year-old girl they found in that house. Wait, did I say ‘protect’? I meant, ‘shove her on the floor and point a gun at her’.

The girl clearly posed an imminent threat, as she was lying in bed watching television. She probably had a stuffed animal, too, so technically she was armed! (If you hadn’t guessed yet that the little girl was black while both officers were white, you may not have been paying enough attention.) A teddy bear in the hands of an 11-year-old certainly has to count as a deadly weapon. Protecting and serving two dudebros’ testosterone-fueled fantasies of being on a SWAT or Navy Seal team!

Via Raw Story, we learn that the officers had let themselves in through a garage door. So maybe the break-in alarm was just psychic and predicting the future when it originally went off? According to the little girl, the two officers entered her bedroom; one officer pushed her down and put his knee on her back, while the other one kept his gun pointed at her. They then asked this child, who, may I reiterate, is 11 years old, if she was the homeowner. Protecting and serving elaborate power trips!

It is a documented phenomenon that black children are treated as older than they are. And, clearly, less innocent: it’s hard to think what could possibly have been perceived as a threat by these two officers about a fifth-grader watching the Disney channel while tucked cozily under her pink-and-green bedspread – except the color of her skin. Protecting and serving structural racism!

Nothing about the little girl’s traumatizing experience made it into the official police report filed by the officers, for some mysterious reason, but her father, Jean Guirand, wants someone fired over the incident. The police station has launched an internal investigation into the officers’ actions at Guirand’s house, and hopefully it results in more than a finger-wag and a stern tsk-tsk. Especially since, as local news station WFTV turned up, both officers have multiple disciplinary actions filed against them in the past: including, and try not to faint from shock at this one, multiple cases of filing false reports in one officer’s case. These previous incidences of false reports resulted in a single demotion from corporal to officer. Protecting and serving bad officers’ pensions!

I can only imagine how traumatized this little girl is by her experience, and I can only imagine how furious her parents must be with a system that’s only interested in protecting children who look a certain specific way. I hope she’s back to normal 11-year-old fears and worries, like zits and annoying boys and starting your period in PE, soon. And I hope we can find a way as a society to truly protect the well-being and safety of girls like her, and to serve their needs as the citizens they are rather than treating them like the threats that they so clearly are not.

(Image: Schmidt_Alex/Shutterstock)

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