Police berated a boy, 5, who ran away from school. They were suspended and sued.

Two Maryland police officers who berated and threatened a 5-year-old boy who had run off from school were suspended without pay, according to newly released police records of the encounter that went viral last spring and was condemned nationwide.

The sanctions, details of which emerged as a separate lawsuit over the incident was settled for $275,000, came after a lengthy internal affairs investigation by the Montgomery County Police Department. In that probe, Officers Dionne Holliday and Kevin Christmon voiced both regrets and justifications for how they treated the East Silver Spring Elementary School student over the course of the 51-minute encounter.

“I really do think that my actions were appropriate at the time, because of the fact the child was acting noncompliant,” Christmon said when asked specifically about holding the child down in a chair for 80 seconds at his school.

Holliday told investigators that raising her voice at the child probably didn’t solve anything. She acknowledged telling the boy he should be beaten and calling him “a shepherd for the devil,” but asserted that’s how he was acting.

Their views of what transpired also played out during 18 months of separate, contentious litigation during which their attorneys criticized the boy and said it would be difficult to gauge what effect the incident had on him. “This child had a lot of problems before this event,” an attorney for the officers asserted in court this summer.

Such claims, countered attorneys for the boy and his mother, trivialized what he was put through. Uniformed officers shouted in his face. One compared him to a “little beast” who should be placed in a crate. “Way past the line of emotional child abuse,” lawyers James Papirmeister and Matthew Bennett wrote in court filings.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/02/yelling-police-suspended-child/?itid=hp-more-top-stories

What big, brave cops!