11-year-old Black boys ‘traumatized’ after police handcuff them and hold them at gun point
A Grand Rapids mother is outraged after she said police handcuffed her 11-year-old sons and falsely detained them after accusing the boys of having a gun.
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Juanita Ligon said the ordeal has now left her sons traumatized after the cops drew their guns and confronted the twin boys and ordered them to the ground because of a 911 call reporting that gun-wielding teens were suspected in the area last week.
The 37-year-old mom of five said she wants the officers who pulled a gun on her unarmed sons fired, MLive reports. She said they racially profiled her sons and that no gun was found. She also said the cops failed to follow a new youth-interaction policy protocol.
“How do we have a policy in honor of Honestie Hodges and you violate that policy and the new training by doing the same thing you did a few months ago with the same age kids?” Ligon asked.
“They wrote a policy to shut the community up. They’re supposed to take better precaution, not use excessive force unless they feel in danger. No way they felt in danger by my boys because they’re trained to seek out if a person is acting suspect.”
Honestie is the Grand Rapids girl who police mistakenly pulled a gun on and placed the girl in handcuffs. They were looking for a 40-year-old woman who was a suspect in a stabbing but Honestie was only 11.
Ligon said her sons and a 17-year-old male friend of the family, where on their way to Little Caesars pizza when about “six or seven” police officers surrounded them.
The officers ordered each juvenile to walk backward toward them with their hands in the air, Ligon said.
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The boys were searched, handcuffed and placed in the back of a police accuser. When no weapons were found, police released the twins to their grandfather, who had arrived on scene, Ligon said.
“The police told me they had to call the initial caller back and get a clearer description and that they got an extra detail that the suspect had on blue jeans and none of the boys had jeans on,” Ligon said.
“They didn’t have a clear description so they stopped the first group of Black boys they saw? That’s nothing but racial profiling.”
“The police told me they were looking for a suspect but didn’t have a clear description from the caller but they were looking for a boy, age 13, who was believed to have a gun but they believed it was a BB gun,” Ligon said.
The Grand Rapids’ police chief is defending the actions of his officers’ saying they followed the department’s youth-interaction policy. According to MLive, Police Chief David Rahinsky‘s said, “What you see in the video is the officers quickly de-escalating the situation. As the [youth] policy states, the officers used the most reasonable and least restrictive measures consistent with public safety.
“When the allegation is someone has a firearm, the response has to be appropriate. Once officers learned that’s not the case, the youths are un-handcuffed within a minute, their grandfather is contacted, and I think the conversation that ensures shows the officer’s compassion in explaining what happened and why.”
Ligon has filed a complaint with the police department’s internal affairs unit, and contacted the Grand Rapids NAACP, according to reports.
