The family of a 10-year-old Black boy who was arrested and placed in a cell for relieving himself in a parking lot say they will file a federal civil rights lawsuit against a Mississippi city unless police officers involved in the detention are fired.
Quantavious Eason was detained and taken to a police station in Senatobia after an officer spotted him urinating behind a car outside a law office last month while his mother was inside getting advice on a housing issue.
LaToya Eason questioned if her son’s race influenced officers’ decision to take him away in a police car and place him in a cell for almost an hour. “Would you have put a white child in a cage? If it had been a white child, he probably wouldn’t have even been stopped,” she told a news conference this week.
I call for complete freedom of toilets. No tickets, no scolding, no penalties at all for anyone peeing and pooping in public, unless there’s a 24/7 public restroom within, say, 5 minutes walk.
I don’t know if you’ve thought about the public health implications of people shitting in the streets but as a man who doesn’t enjoy contracting hepatitis and cholera I disagree.
how can you punish people for fulfilling a basic bodily need if there’s no proper place to do it
If their basic bodily need spreads disease you’re turning a small problem that affects one person into a large problem that affects many.
how about we give them a place to shit then
I have no problem with that. I just dont think that place should be the street.
I just don’t think we should punish people if they had no other option
Where I live, we have 25,000 homeless people and exactly zero 24/7 public restrooms, so many neighborhoods do reek of urine and there’s poop in every bush.
If you want people not peeing on the sidewalk and not pooping in the bushes, gotta give them someplace else to pee and poop.
I agree, I could get behind deploying public restrooms. I cannot get behind legalizing public urination/defecation.
It’s the same thing. Pretty much nobody poops or pees in public if there’s a restroom available, and if there’s a restroom available, by all means ticket and fine anyone who’s publicly pooping and peeing.
The kid in this story did. He was in the parking lot of a law office, while his mother was inside talking to her lawyer, so the place was clearly open.
Well, were the cops right to arrest him then?
I agree with the mom, they wouldn’t have arrested a white kid. But unequal application of a law doesn’t mean we should throw out the law it means we should apply it equally.
Well, I guess we’ll disagree then. “Arrest all children who pee outdoors” is not in my top 100,000,000 bright ideas for a better America.
You act like people would want to regularly relieve themselves in public if they were allowed to. Spoiler alert: they don’t. It’s usually last resort, in which case I prefer that to people having to pee/shit themselves in fear of a fine or being arrested.
And I prefer not contracting hepatitis from walking through human feces.
Let me guess, you’re an anti-masker aren’t you?
Well good news then, because you won’t. People generally don’t want to defecate in public, meaning that even if there’s no punishment for it, it won’t suddenly start happening left and right. Your chances of encountering human poop won’t significantly increase.
Quite the opposite, I’m still wearing masks when shopping or on public transit, even when everyone else in my area seems to have stopped caring.