These days you really have to wonder when enough is enough. When are we as a people going to come together and disregard politics for once and think about humans as humans.
Police need to have better training to figure out how to deal with certain scenarios. Just last week, police in Sweden of all places shot and killed a boy with down syndrome because he had a toy gun.
Now we have a police officer or a “school resource officer” from Denton, Texas pinning down an autistic boy for…trying to just get away from people.
Thomas Brown is a ten-year-old kid that was simply being a kid and not listening. That is really the only reason you don’t have to put handcuffs on a kid…but on top of that he also has autism. After his parents, Emily and Robert, saw this disturbing video they were outraged and knew they would be taking legal action.
It all began with Thomas was poking the other students in the special needs classroom and not listening to his teachers. Sounds like these teachers need additional training as well.
This is when Eric Coulson, a school resource officer, comes in and begins to pin down the child and put him in handcuffs. In the video you can hear him saying, “Well, we’re back to where we were the other day. Do you want the handcuffs? Or not?”
I don’t think anyone outside of the bedroom has actually wanted the handcuffs, let alone a child that can’t even understand the concept of handcuffs.
You can also hear Thomas screaming and yelling “Get off, I hate you!” and honestly I have to relate to his feelings.
Eventually you can see a teacher come into view and stroke his face to try and calm him down. I think they are past the point of trying to be nice and calm him down.
Again the officer tries to reason with Thomas saying, “I don’t want you to end up back in the same predicament, okay.” He takes the handcuffs off but Thomas begins to act out again so the two struggle all over again. Eventually Emily, his mother, shows up and takes him away.
I don’t think Emily knew the horrible circumstance her son had gone through until she saw the footage. She said to WFAA:
“It’s abuse, the torture, and the hell that he was put through. I didn’t notice until I got home, and started realizing there’s something really wrong here.”
The officers had told her at the time that Thomas was harming others and disrupting the classroom, and she believed them.
A review was done by the Denton Police Department Office of Professional Standards and it concluded that Coulson did nothing wrong. That’s a small Texas town for you, protecting their own.
The Browns have vowed to conduct an independent investigation and get justice for Thomas and any other child that could be potentially harmed at the Denton Independent School District.
They concluded:
“We as parents will never stop fighting for our son or other children.
So that they can be safe within the walls of their school and free of physical emotional, and psychological [abuse] at the hands of the very people that are publicly employed to protect them.”
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