2021-10-30
26 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News Today.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
In 2016, a video popped up on YouTube.
It showed two little kids, boys 5 and 6 years old, throwing their tiny fists at a bigger kid as he walks away.
Other children are gathered around watching.
Some are yelling.
The video has a heavy filter on it, so it's hard to make out faces, but you can see that no one seems to get hurt.
It's a pretty unremarkable scene, probably familiar to any parent of young kids.
As a result of that video, 11 children in Rutherford County, Tennessee, were arrested, not suspended from school or put in timeout, arrested by the police.
The reason police gave for these arrests, they said that children who were bystanders who ranged in age from 8 to 14 years old, were criminally responsible for not stepping in and stopping the fight.
Now, if that sounds like something you shouldn't be arrested for, especially if you're a child, you're right that crime does not exist.
What that episode revealed was this really ugly and unsettling culture in this county of mass detention over years and arresting of children who didn't need to be arrested.
That's Mariba Knight.
She's a journalist for Nashville Public Radio, and she reported the story with ProPublica's Ken Armstrong at the time.
In 2016, lots of media outlets picked up the story, but she and Armstrong saw it as an opportunity to ask not only why did this happen, but also, is this happening more often than we realize?
And what they found was a disturbing pattern in Rutherford County's juvenile justice system.
Hundreds of kids, some as young as seven years old, were locked up every year.
Black kids were far more likely to be detained.
And what ProPublica found was in many of these cases, the adults responsible acted illegally.