Federal judge finds officers attached to Birmingham schools routinely used a military-grade pepper spray-teargas mixture to quell normal adolescent behaviorA federal judge in Alabama ruled on Thursday that Birmingham police department officers violated the civil rights of tall school students when officers used chemical spray to subdue them for minor behavioral issues. The suit,initially filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2010, alleged that school resource officers (SROs) assigned to schools in the Birmingham public school district were routinely resorting to chemical spray to deal with “normal – and, or at times,challenging – adolescent behavior. This included what the US district court judge Abdul Kallon described as non-threatening infractions that are “universal to all teenagers – ie backtalking and challenging authority”. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com