Police Shootings / Possible Abuse Threads [merged]

Don’t remember this story
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It was 24 years ago that Ansché Hedgepeth got the nickname heard around the world, a name she hated as a kid: “French Fry Girl.”


She was 12 when a Metro cop handcuffed and arrested her, took the laces out of her sneakers, put her in the back of a squad car, drove her to police headquarters and fingerprinted her.

Her crime? Eating a fry in a D.C. Metro station.


Her case made international news and made her a figure in the confirmation of Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who ruled in a 2004 opinion that Hedgepeth’s Fourth Amendment rights were not violated, even if the transit officers overreacted.


“No one is very happy about the events that led to this litigation,” Roberts, then a circuit judge on the U.S. District Court in D.C., wrote in that opinion.


“A twelve-year-old girl was arrested, searched, and handcuffed. Her shoelaces were removed, and she was transported in the windowless rear compartment of a police vehicle to a juvenile processing center, where she was booked, fingerprinted, and detained until released to her mother some three hours later — all for eating a single french fry in a Metrorail station,” Roberts wrote. “The child was frightened, embarrassed, and crying throughout the ordeal.”

I remember sitting in her bedroom talking to her. She had a science fair trophy by her bed and had never been in that kind of trouble before.
“I was embarrassed,” she told me back then.

“[The officer] said: ‘Put down your fries. Put down your book bag.’ They searched my book bag and searched me. They asked me if I have any drugs or alcohol.”
…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/10/24/child-arrest-french-fry-girl-metro/