13-year-old girl reported missing in Kansas City
According to Kansas City police, family members last heard from Jamea Mitchell on Thursday, March 27 around 2 p.m. She is believed to have been in the area of Ruskin Park between 6 and 7 p.m.
Joe's Blog: Severe weather risk late Saturday
Mitchell is described as a Black female, 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighing around 200 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes.
Family members told police that they are concerned for her safety.
Anyone with information about the teen's whereabouts is asked to call KCPD's Missing Persons Section at 816-234-5043.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Miami Herald
21 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
Miami judge becomes first confirmed U.S. attorney during Trump's second term
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Los Angeles Times
3 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Brutal arrest of Black student shows benefits of camera in car in recording police stops
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'Because what it tells us, just like with George Floyd, if we don't record the video, we can see what they put in the police report with George Floyd before they realized the video existed.' McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on because of bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver's seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states. The incident reports don't describe the officer punching McNeil in the head. The officer, who pulled McNeil over and then struck him, described the force this way in his report: 'Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.' But after McNeil posted his video online last month and it went viral, the Sheriff's Office launched an internal investigation, which is ongoing. A sheriff's spokesperson declined to comment about the case last week, citing pending litigation, though no lawsuit has been filed over the arrest. McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized, with a brain injury, a broken tooth and stitches in his lip. His attorneys accused the Sheriff's Office of trying to cover up what really happened. 'On Feb. 19, 2025, Americans saw what America is,' said another of McNeil's lawyers, Harry Daniels. 'We saw injustice. You saw abuse of police power. But most importantly we saw a young man that had a temperament to control himself in the face of brutality.' The traffic stop, he said, was not only racially motivated, 'it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful.' 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Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, said he thinks it's a good idea for citizens to film encounters with police — as long as doing so doesn't make the situation worse. 'I think that's a form of protection — it's safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etcetera,' Brunson said. Although the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office declined to speak to the Associated Press last week, Sheriff T.K. Waters has spoken publicly about McNeil's arrest since video of the encounter went viral. He challenged some of the allegations made by McNeil's lawyers, noting that McNeil was told more than a half-dozen times to exit the vehicle. At a news conference last month, Waters also highlighted images of a knife in McNeil's car. The officer who punched him wrote in his police report that McNeil reached toward the floor of the car, where deputies later found the knife. Crump, though, said McNeil's video shows that he 'never reaches for anything,' and a second officer wrote in his report that McNeil kept his hands up as the other officer smashed the car window. A camera inside a motorist's vehicle could make up for some shortcomings of police body cams, which can have a narrow field of view that becomes more limited the closer an officer gets to the person being filmed, Mercado said. After the police murder of Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, some states and cities debated how and when citizens should be able to capture video of police. The Constitution guarantees the right to record police in public, but a point of contention in some states has been whether a civilian's recording might interfere with the ability of officers to do their job. In Louisiana, for example, a new law makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet of a police officer in certain situations. Waters acknowledged those limitations at a news conference last year, as he narrated video of a wild brawl between officers and a fan in the stands at EverBank Stadium during a college football game last year between Florida and Georgia. The sheriff showed the officers' body-cam videos during the start of the confrontation near the top of the stadium. But when the officers subdued the suspect and were pressing against him, the footage didn't capture much, so the sheriff switched to stadium security video shot from a longer distance away. In McNeil's case, the body-cam video didn't clearly capture the punches thrown. If it had, the case would have been investigated right away, the sheriff said. For the last 20 years, Brunson has been interviewing young Black men in several U.S. cities about their encounters with law enforcement. When he began submitting research papers for academic review, many readers didn't believe the men's stories of being brutalized by officers. 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Boston Globe
9 hours ago
- Boston Globe
‘It's not an education agency': Advocates slam school use of the court for student truancy
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Advertisement 'It's not an education agency,' Francine Sherman, a clinical professor emerita at Boston College Law School, where she founded and led its Juvenile Rights Advocacy Program, said of the court system. 'The court simply doesn't have the tools to address this particular problem.' School leaders agree courts are not their first choice to resolve truancy issues, and said they first try to help connect children and families with services such as education help and clinical mental health care. But in extreme cases, schools may need the assistance of the courts to resolve truancy cases, said Mary Bourque, a former Chelsea superintendent who serves as the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. 'This is about the parent and guardians, and making sure that the parent or guardian is getting [their child] to school,' she said. 'Sometimes you do need leverage with the parent or guardian.' The court petitions, referred to as Child Requiring Assistance filings, are intended to to help connect families with services such as educational assistance and mental health programs. They can be filed by schools, police, or families. Students are considered truant when they 'willfully fail' to attend school for more than eight days in a quarter. Under state law, Conley said her B-average student had never been in trouble, yet she watched as her daughter suddenly stood before a judge, had to be represented by a lawyer, and was assigned a probation officer. Advertisement 'For her to have to go from never getting in trouble in school to that, it was traumatizing,' Conley said. Experts and education advocates agree absenteeism harms students' abilities to learn. In Massachusetts, chronic absenteeism rates remain 50 percent higher than before the pandemic. To appear before a judge for truancy, students often miss school to be brought to court. Many of the cases involve children with special needs. The petitions also disproportionately involve Black and Latino students, the child advocate's office said in its report. The danger, advocates argue, is that these court filings — which do not allege criminal behavior — can create issues for children such as post-traumatic stress disorder and negative emotional well-being, 'Not only is it traumatizing, it has clearly very adverse consequences for children,' said Jay Blitzman, a retired juvenile court judge who spent more than two decades on the bench before retiring in 2020. 'Going to courts to address these issues is not the preferred thing to do.' From Blitzman's experience, 'many of the truancy cases' that came before him appeared to involve children who did not receive appropriate school services for their disabilities and special needs. The state's Office of the Child Advocate, established by the Legislature to ensure children receive appropriate services, reviewed truancy court data Advertisement Among those calling for reform is state Senator Robyn Kennedy, a Worcester Democrat, who filed legislation this year to change the current law. The proposal includes measures such as barring children under age 12 from being involved with Child Requiring Assistance petitions, plus expanding the role of the state's existing network of family resource centers, including a requirement schools refer families to one of those centers before filing a petition with a court. Bourque, with the state school superintendent association, said a better solution to districts filing court actions is for the state to expand the number of its School administrators in some of the state's largest districts, including Boston, Worcester, Brockton, Lawrence, and Chelsea, said they typically pursue truancy cases only when other measures fail to connect children and families with support services. Such services include conducting special education evaluationsand mental health assessments, and sending letters to parents and guardians. 'In VERY rare occasions do we consider judicial intervention,' Chelsea Superintendent Almi Guajardo Abeyta said in an email. 'We do everything possible to avoid it.' The 6,100-student district filed 123 Child Requiring Assistance petitions in truancy cases from 2022-2025, but was able to reduce its rate by 44 percent to 25 in the 2024-25 school year, progress Conley said more districts should be making. In Chelsea, administrators attribute the decline in court filings to a focus on family engagement as a priority for the district, Abeyta said. Advertisement The district has more than doubled its number of family liaisons, social workers, and counselors. And it has launched a Navigator program for students with chronic absenteeism or other needs, which pairs them with a teacher, social worker, or other district staff member, she said. 'We believe that parents are our partners and do our best to work with families,' she said. Conley, whose daughter appeared in court, said the Acton-Boxborough district's decision to push the truancy case to court was a breach of trust. The March 2024 court hearing ended with an 'informal assistance agreement' signed by her daughter, her probation officer, and the judge, according to a copy reviewed by the Globe. The girl agreed to terms that required her to attend school, participate in tutoring, and cooperate with therapeutic services. About two months after the hearing, the girl's school notified the girl's probation officer and attorney it had received enough information 'to drop the CRA,' according to a brief email viewed by the Globe sent by a school vice principal. It was unclear what led to the decision. Peter Light, the district's superintendent, declined to answer Globe questions, citing student privacy laws. Conley said her family has since moved from Massachusetts. Schools need to do more to provide services for children with disabilities, she said. 'If these kids were given the tools needed to properly learn, most of these cases could go away completely,' Conley said. John Hilliard can be reached at
