An attorney in Mississippi is preparing to file a federal lawsuit after a 10-year-old Black child was arrested and sentenced to a three-month probation for urinating in public.
Police in Senatobia, Mississippi, arrested a third grader who urinated outside his mother’s car in August. The child’s mother, Latonya Eason, was in a meeting in a nearby building when an officer came inside and told her that he’d seen her son relieving himself. Eason told HuffPost she then went outside to ask her son why he’d done that, and his sister replied that a bathroom hadn’t been available.
More officers arrived at the scene moments later, Eason said. The officer who witnessed the child urinating initially did not want to arrest him, according to Eason, but a lieutenant advised him to. Police took the child to a cell inside of a precinct, and Eason said they questioned him without her present.
When Eason arrived at the precinct, she said the police “did not take me where my baby was.”
“It was taken way too far and out of hand,” she said. “It should have never happened. That first officer that made contact with him, saw him do it, allowed him a break and that should have been that. It really did not take four more officers to pull up. I mean, he is only 10 years old.”
The child was charged this week in youth court as a “child in need of supervision.” He will be required to check in with a probation officer once a month for three months, and to write a two-page report about the late basketball player Kobe Bryant.
The prosecutor suggested increasing the charges if all parties didn’t agree to the probation terms, according to Carlos Moore, an attorney representing the child.
“To criminalize this boy for something that is so common across America is asinine. We are dismayed that an officer did this at the direction of the lieutenant,” Moore told HuffPost. “That tells me that there was some animus there. I believe it was some racism. You won’t find in America where a white boy has been done like this.”
Moore told HuffPost he plans to file a federal lawsuit against the police officer and the city of Senatobia.
“It was only for 90 days, but in a perfect world, the charge would have been totally dismissed,” Moore said.
The chief of the Senatobia Police Department released a statement about the incident on Aug. 21, saying the officer’s actions “violated our written policy and went against our prior training on how to deal with these situations.”
One of the officers involved in the arrest was fired and others were disciplined, the statement said.
“As a result of the investigation, one of the officers involved is no longer employed, and the others will be disciplined,” the statement says. “We will also have mandatory juvenile training department-wide, just as we do every year.”
The department did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for additional comment on Thursday.