COMMENTARY: 10-Year-Olds In The News

By JOHN BRUMMETT

Posted: November 24, 2009 at 3:14 a.m.

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LITTLE ROCK — This is the season for 10-year-olds living in the northwestern quadrant of Arkansas to land international media attention.

That would be where similarities end.

First you had precocious Will Phillips of West Fork declining to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school because gays and lesbians don’t enjoy the liberty and justice that the pledge asserts to exist for all in America.

Now there’s the girl in Ozark who got shot in her own home with a Taser stun gun by a city policeman because her mom couldn’t get her into the bathtub or otherwise control her.

This Ozark matter came to the attention of the FBI in Fort Smith, an agent of which showed up in town Friday at the police chief’s office to say he’d handle things from now on.

Apparently the feds find it important when they hear or read of a supposed agent of law enforcement injecting himself into household childhood discipline to the extent of using a officially issued weapon. While not normally deadly, a Taser stun gun sure enough seems harsh when fired into the back of a 10-year-old girl.

It seems that Officer Dustin Bradshaw was acquainted with this mother through her part-time employment as a dispatcher at the Franklin County Jail. The mother is divorced and her ex-husband has professed outrage over this incident, asserting that his daughter is emotionally troubled and that he’s having a heck of a time figuring out how a city policeman with size and strengthadvantages had to electro-shock a 10-year-old girl to assert physical authority over her.

On this recent evening, the young girl was having a bit of an emotional episode and her mom couldn’t do a thing with her. So she got the local on-duty policeman to come over and help.

Bradshaw tells this on himself in his own report: He tried to help the mom get the kicking, screaming girl into the bathtub, but was unsuccessful. As he sought to control the girl, who made herself into a ball on the floor, the mom told him to “tase” her child if he need be.

When the policeman tried to subdue the girl to handcuff her and take her into self-protective custody, she apparently outgrappled him and kicked him in a sensitive spot, at which point he zapped her in the back with fire from his stun gun.

Then he handcuffed the reticent child and took her to the nearby shelter for troubled kids.

Ozark officials suspended Bradshaw for a procedural violation of firing his Taser without activating the camera or microphone, which would seem to be the least of it.

Then, appropriately, theyasked the State Police to provide an independent outside investigation. As the State Police processed the request, a more pro-active FBI came to town.

People are getting lawyers and the girl, at this writing, remains under the protective custody and treatment of the state.

In the category of truer words having never been spoken, there is this: Shortly after the first press reports of this incident, the police chief informed Mayor Vernon McDaniel of the officer’s suspension and said that, while he intended to deal with the incident, he figured the media firestorm would be over in a day or two. But McDaniel, a long-time local newspaper editor, informed the chief that, quite to the contrary, the media attention was just starting.

There are many important issues. The main one is that an emotionally troubled 10-year-old girl must receive good medical attention.

A close second is that one way not to help an emotionally troubled child is for a policeman to come into a private home and use a stun gun on her. At the very least, it would seem, the policeman should have brought a child-care official from Human Services with him.

A final question - more a curiosity, really - is how two grown people could fail to subdue a 10-year-old without using a public-issue weapon on her.

We look forward to the FBI’s sorting all this out.

JOHN BRUMMETT IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE ARKANSAS NEWS BUREAU IN LITTLE ROCK.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 11/24/2009

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