BALTIMORE - Gerard Mungo Jr. starts to cry when he tells the story of his arrest by the Baltimore City police. Since he was handcuffed, photographed for a mug shot and fingerprinted Tuesday afternoon — all for allegedly sitting on a dirt bike on a sidewalk — Gerard said he is afraid to talk about it. “They scared me,” he said, before breaking down in tears. Gerard, who just turned 7 in February, was pulled off the dirt bike he sat on — with the motor off — by police while waiting for his father to pick him up in East Baltimore, according to his mother, Likisa Dinkins. Dinkins said she was incensed after the police pulled Gerard up by his collar and dragged him off the bike. Seven-year old Gerard Mungo Jr. sits back on his living room couch after telling the story of his arrest by the Baltimore City Police Department. “I told them to let go of my baby,” she said. “Since when do you pull a 7-year-old child by his neck and drag him? “It broke my heart the way they were treating him.” Dinkins said she called for a police supervisor to intervene, but after he arrived, Dinkins said, he started scolding her son. “The started yelling at him, ‘Do you know what you did wrong, son?’” she said. “He was so scared he ran upstairs.” After police confiscated the dirt bike, Dinkins said, the police said her son was under arrest. “They put his hands behind his back and put him in black metal handcuffs. They handcuffed a 7-year-old child,” she said. “I cannot believe they did this to a child.” Gerard was brought to the Eastern District station house, where he was cuffed to a bench, then interrogated, he told The Examiner. “They asked about my mother,” he said. Charging documents state that Gerard was charged with riding a dirt bike on city streets. He was released into the custody of his parents after being fingerprinted and photographed. Mayor Sheila Dixon said she was concerned about the arrest. “I am very concerned about what I am hearing. As a mother and as a parent, I am bothered by it,” she said. “I will get to the bottom of this.” Police officials said they did not have enough information on the arrest to comment before press time. Dinkins’ only concern is for her son’s well-being. “This has changed his life,” she said. “He’ll never be the same.” Stephen Janis, The Examiners / janis@baltimoreexaminer.com / Mar 15, 2007 3:00 AM (1 day ago) posted 16 March 2007  http://www.wbaltv.com/news/11271436/detail.html?taf=bal

Response

Gerard’s sitting on his bike near or on a public road reservation, could well raise some public safety and wellbeing issue. Such a misbehavior however, does not rise to the level of a crime warranting the draconian act of arrest, handcuffing and physical abuse of a 7-year old child! In a “civilized” society, we would expect the “Peace Officers,” if Peace Officers these … can be called, to explain to little Gerard Mungo Jr. the dangers presented by an underage child riding on the road. Next, professionally, the Police Officers would escort the child home. Then notify his parent(s) of the problems and consequences of leaving their child unsupervised, sitting on his bike on the side of the road.

The barbaric act against a Black 7-year old, by public officials in a city with a black Mayor and a black Commissioner of Police may be pointing to a larger societal problem–a severe crisis in America.

Well thinking persons may conclude that if public officials believe that a child can be abused with impunity in a “civilized” state, then such a society must be wobbling into deeper and deeper calamity. Imbibed racist values and its siblings, our dominant, redundant social, economic and political principles are the best explanation for the City of Baltimore’s shameful conduct. It is a sign of social bankruptcy! If our society is morally bankrupt, it is a condition created by the germ of our dominant bankrupt social, economic and political worldviews. Thus Baltimore’s shame cannot be blamed on the offending policemen, only. Instead it must be laid squarely on the shoulders of our elites, whose ideas and standard of social conduct created the injustice that Gerard Mungo Jr. experienced in Baltimore.

—Lloyd D. McCarthy, author of In-Dependence from Bondage

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After the Mayor apologizes for the arrest of Gerard Mungo Jr., City Police arrest Gerard's mom

“If they want war, they’ll have war,” said Marvin “Doc” Cheatham,

president of the NAACP Baltimore Chapter outside Central Booking

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The officer took the boy to the Eastern District station, where Mungo Sr. and Dinkins say he spent two hours handcuffed to a bench. If there were a Richter scale that measured outrage, this incident would have blown the needle off the thing. . . . Dinkins said the officer who arrested Gerard is white, as is the officer's supervisor, who came to the scene after she complained. . . . What she might see if she looked in the mirror is the fury still in her eyes one week after, she says, the arresting officer waved a pair of handcuffs in her face and told her just before he arrested Gerard, "He's coming with me." . . . .. But Dinkins, [Police Commissioner Leonard D.] Hamm said, called for a supervisor. It was after the supervisor arrived that Gerard was arrested. Hamm said police are investigating what happened between the supervisor and Dinkins that led to the arrest. . . . In her house later, Dinkins said the supervisor "loud-talked" Gerard, raising his voice and bellowing, "Son, do you realize what you did was wrong?" . . . . It was after she demanded that the supervisor leave that Gerard was arrested, Dinkins said.
"I think they're mad because I asked for a supervisor," Dinkins said. "Gerard told me that the police officer who arrested him told him that 'if it weren't for your mother calling my boss, you wouldn't have went to jail.'"

—Gregory Kane, "It's a crime that police arrested dirt-bike kid." (Sun, 21 March 2007)

posted 16 March 2007 / repost 26 March 2007

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updated 16 October 2007