Police in Montgomery County released body camera footage of two officers screaming at a 5-year-old Black boy near East Silver Spring Elementary School in January 2020.

“A crate! Crate him, if he’s going to act like a little beast,” one officer says at one point.

At another point, an officer handcuffs one wrist of the child. “When you get older and you start to make your own decisions, you know what’s going to be your best friend? These right here,” the officer says, holding up the handcuffs.

According to the police department, the officers — who are named in litigation as Dionne Holliday and Kevin Christmon — were responding to a call for assistance from an employee at the school, who said the child had left the grounds. Body camera footage shows the two officers, who both appear to be Black, approaching the young boy, who is leaning up against a car parked on a residential street. They immediately begin berating him.

“You feel like you can do what you want? Are you an adult? Are you 18? So why are you outside of school? Look at me! Why are you out of school? Get back over there, now, NOW!” one of the officers shouts, seizing the young boy by the wrist.

The boy begins to cry and cough as the officer forcibly puts him in the back of a police cruiser. “I don’t want to go,” he cries.

Throughout the video, the officers advocate for physical discipline to punish children. One says “see, this is why people need to beat their kids.” One officer described being beaten by family members as a child.

“Does your mama spank you?” one of the officers asks the boy directly. “She’s going to spank you today, because we’re going to call her and tell her what’s going on.”

Holliday and Christmon took the child and a school employee back to the school. There, their yelling and verbal abuse continued. At one point, one officer puts her face close to the crying boy and yells “Ahhhhh, ahhhhhh!” at him, as if to mimic his crying.

Throughout the nearly hour-long video, school employees stand by and appear to accept the officers’ treatment of their student. School employees and officers discuss the boy’s misbehavior leading up to the police call — one employee says he threw things at her and scratched her — and criticize what they perceive as his mother’s lax parenting throughout the video. At another point, officers question several school employees about where things stand in the process of expelling the child from school.

When the child’s mother arrives, the officers ask her how she regularly disciplines him.

One officer advises that parents can hit their children if they don’t use a weapon. Later, in a conference room with the officers and a school employee, the mother threatens to hit the child herself.

The video provoked immediate outrage from officials and community members, who point to it as an example of institutional racism in policing and disproportionate in-school discipline toward Black children.

“It made me sick,” Montgomery County Council member Will Jawando, who has been requesting the release of the footage for months, wrote in a statement. “There was no attempt to defuse the situation. Instead, we saw grown adults insult, berate, degrade and try to instigate a kindergartner. Before our eyes, we watched a little boy be failed by every adult whose purpose was to help him.”

“We also see why many Black residents in Montgomery County don’t feel protected by the police,” Jawando wrote.

Another county councilmember, Hans Riemer, said in an emailed statement that he was “appalled by the traumatizing behavior and verbal assaults” of the Montgomery County officers and advocated for restorative justice policies in schools.

Jawando called for the firing of the officers and a “robust investigation” of the incident and their previous behavior. He also said the school system should place administrators involved on leave and conduct an investigation.

“There must be transparency and accountability,” Jawando wrote. “This video showed us raw footage of multiple of our systems failing at the same time and served as a powerful reminder of why police should not be in schools or used to discipline our children.”

The police department said in a statement that it had conducted “a thorough investigation” and that both officers were still employed by the department. The statement said it would not comment further due to pending litigation.

The boy’s mother, is now suing the individual officers, the police department, and the school board.

“Our heart aches for this student,” school board vice president Brenda Wolff said in a statement.” There is no excuse for adults to ever speak to or threaten a child in this way.” The statement also says the school board can’t offer further information due to pending litigation. Wolff did not comment on a potential investigation by the school system.

Local activists and community members are joining calls for institutional accountability. The Silver Spring Justice Coalition, an advocacy organization dedicated to ending police brutality in the county, is calling on police department leadership to condemn the officers’ actions and suspend or fire them, and demanding that the school system take steps to investigate the incident and institute policies to minimize police interaction with students.

“We feel strongly that the nightmare endured by this five-year-old at the hands of Montgomery County Police would never have happened had this child been White,” an open letter from the coalition reads. “We find no reason whatsoever to justify two armed adults in police uniform yelling at a five-year-old child, berating and threatening him, and putting handcuffs on him.”

They are also calling for the Montgomery County council and County Executive Marc Elrich to put policies in place to prevent police from interacting with small children unless there is an immediate safety concern, and to provide compensation, mental health care and treatment for trauma to the boy and his family.