It's an unusual sort of headline, isn't it? Grabs your attention. Of course, in this day and age, we all know that there are children who need to be handcuffed, children who commit horrific crimes, children with no idea of right and wrong, no concern for the welfare of others. Even children who murder others in cold blood, like the Columbine killers or Kip Kinkel . So when we read that police handcuffed a child, the natural reaction is to wonder what the kid was doing. Maybe there was a weapon involved, or perhaps other students or bystanders were at risk.

There is a subset of cases involving police handcuffing children that does not fit the above picture. A kindergarten student arrested for a temper tantrum. A little boy fingerprinted for being on a dirt bike. A girl handcuffed and detained because she had a pair of scissors in her backpack. Is this just unavoidable backlash as the terrible crimes committed by a few children naturally alter our evaluation of the danger posed by any child? Or is something else going on?

Here are a few relatively recent cases to consider (material in blocks is copyright linked source):

AVON PARK, Fla. -- Police arrested a 6-year-old Florida girl and even handcuffed her when she acted out in class. Police officers said Desre'e Watson, a kindergarten student at Avon Elementary School in Highlands County, had a violent run-in with a teacher on Thursday. The kindergartner was booked in the Highland County jail and was charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. , April 25, 2005 -- An attorney says he plans legal action against St. Petersburg (Fla.) police officers who handcuffed an unruly 5-year-old girl after she acted up in her kindergarten class. "The image itself will be seared into people's minds when you have three police officers bending a child over a table and forcibly handcuffing her," said Trevena, who represents the girl's mother, Inga Akins. "It's incomprehensible. ...There was no need for that."

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - 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. Gerard was brought to the Eastern District station house, where he was cuffed to a bench, then interrogated, he told The Examiner. Note: Gerard's mother was later arrested , supposedly for being "verbally abusive" to police; she claims it was retaliation for publicizing Gerard's treatment.

Friday, October 3 , 2003 -- A federal judge said this week that it was "foolish" for Metro Transit Police to handcuff a 12-year-old girl for eating a french fry on a subway platform, but he ruled that the transit system did not violate her constitutional rights. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan dismissed claims by Tracy Hedgepeth that Metro Transit Police Officer Jason Fazenbaker illegally searched her daughter's backpack and treated her unfairly when he arrested her Oct. 23, 2000, after watching her enter the Tenleytown-AU Station and pop a single french fry into her mouth. Note: current Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts ruled against Hedgepeth in an appeal.

ST. PETERSBURG -- The police officer handcuffed the suspect she was arresting on a charge of battery on a law enforcement officer, but not in the usual way. Officer Kathleen Shelley asked 6-year-old Trayvon McRae to put his hands together. Because his arms were so skinny, she snapped a single cuff around both slender wrists. The other cuff she clipped through a belt loop of the dark blue pants that are part of his school uniform.

PHILADELPHIA -- Two top Philadelphia officials have apologized to a mother whose 10-year-old daughter was handcuffed at a public school. Jackson was outraged after her 10-year-old daughter was handcuffed and put in a police wagon for bringing a pair of scissors to school.

In all of these cases the treatment of the children was unnecessarily harsh. The situations and confrontations were escalated rather than defused. Teachers have a wide range of discretion for how to handle misbehaving students, school officials can exercise their judgment as to whether to involve police, and police have a great deal of flexibility when dealing with children. It appears the authorities involved made an evaluation and decided the child needed to be handcuffed -- a decision that is, in retrospect, highly questionable in each of these instances.

It's also hard not to notice what sort of kids get handcuffed. The examples above cover a range of ages, include both boys and girls, and involve a variety of behaviors. The one constant is the race of the child. These examples aren't cherry-picked; you're welcome to search for yourself, but I consider them representative of such cases. From a purely logical perspective, there are two possible explanations for the apparently higher rate at which black children are unnecessarily handcuffed. The first possibility is that black kids are more disruptive or violent or prone to breaking rules. The second is that black kids are treated unfairly because of their skin color. (These possibilities aren't mutually exclusive, of course.) Let's see if the available data can shed some light on the topic.

Consider first the hypothesis that black students act differently from white students. There have been controversial suggestions that black kids view success in school as "acting white" and pattern their behavior on different role models than those adopted by white kids. For example :

"What amazed me is that these kids who come from homes of doctors and lawyers are not thinking like their parents; they don't know how their parents made it," Professor Ogbu said in an interview. "They are looking at rappers in ghettos as their role models, they are looking at entertainers. The parents work two jobs, three jobs, to give their children everything, but they are not guiding their children."

Bill Cosby went further and suggested blacks need to change their behavior in an inflammatory speech :

50 percent drop out rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse, I want somebody to love me, and as soon as you have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them. All this child knows is “gimme, gimme, gimme.” These people want to buy the friendship of a child... and the child couldn’t care less. Those of us sitting out here who have gone on to some college or whatever we’ve done, we still fear our parents. And these people are not parenting. They’re buying things for the kid. $500 sneakers, for what? They won’t buy or spend $250 on Hooked on Phonics.

A more nuanced interpretation is given by Juan Williams, who laments the lack of strong black leaders: "Where are the black leaders who will make it plain and say it loud? Who will tell you that if you want to get a job you have to stay in school and spend more money on education than on disposable consumer goods?"

With this in mind, it might be tempting to look at statistics showing blacks are punished more often in school or incarcerated more frequently (relative to the percentage of the population that is black) and conclude that blacks are, to put it bluntly, more badly behaved. But when you look more closely this hypothesis cannot explain the variance in rates. Start, for example, with the well-known discrepancy in drug sentencing guidelines that helped put a disproportionate number of blacks behind bars:

Blacks account for 80 to 90 percent of defendants convicted of crack offenses; whites and Hispanics for more than 70 percent of powder offenders. In 1992, one federal appellate judge said that the 100-to-1 ratio [in amount of cocaine versus crack that results in mandatory minimum sentences] "makes the war on drugs look like a 'war on minorities.' "

Then consider that even disregarding any bias in the structure of the laws, black youth who commit similar crimes and have no previous record are more likely to be incarcerated . Now it starts to become clear that some of the explanations for the disparity in black/white imprisonment are circularly self-serving: for example, from Florida we have the statement that "black offenders had higher rates of characteristics generally considered appropriate for higher rates of imprisonment and longer prison sentences. Black offenders had 14.3% higher total sentence points, were 27% more likely to have a prior record, and were 40.4% more likely to have a prior prison sentence." Well yes, if you ignore the bias in who enters the system then it looks fair to consider prior criminal history; in practice, you get a vicious loop.

Unfortunately (and predictably), these trends aren't confined to the criminal system. Black children are disproportionately punished in school; for example, 38% of students experiencing corporal punishment in 2003 were black, from a 17%-black student population. Again, there might be a temptation to attribute this result to greater black misbehavior; again, the data contradict such an interpretation. For example, see this study :

Black adolescents are much more likely to run afoul of the juvenile justice system than are similar white adolescents, even though the two groups self-report similar rates of offending. Within public schools we find the same differential pattern. Using three waves of longitudinal data collected in schools we evaluate several explanations for the disparity. The greater rates of punishment for blacks occur as a consequence of teachers' perceptions of the students' behavior, their knowledge of students' recent academic performance, and their knowledge of students' past record of being sanctioned. Since black adolescents in our sample received poorer grades and were rated as less well behaved in the past, they were more likely to have been sanctioned and therefore to acquire a cumulative disadvantage. The punishment disparity is best understood as the result of a social construction process.

As with the court system, punishment in schools shows another feedback loop of bias that discriminates against black youth. Teachers appear to unconciously judge students based on non-academic criteria -- even something as mundane as the name of the student can trigger bias: "According to Figlio, teachers see certain names as signals that students are from low-income homes, and in turn they do not expect the children to perform as well as their classmates. Those expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies." What is particularly upsetting is that these initial impressions are extremely difficult for students to overcome. If you will forgive a somewhat lengthy quote, I think this is a good summary:

Interestingly, schools with a large number of African-American teachers do not assign the same weight to children's names, Figlio found. If teachers are using the names as stereotype shorthand, the researcher said, schools with more African-American teachers and students tend to overcome the stereotype.

Doug Downey, an Ohio State University sociology professor, also has studied teacher expectations based on race, looking at how student behavior is evaluated. He found that white teachers say their African-American students are more disruptive and have shorter attention spans. However, he also found that African-American teachers did not assess black students in the same way, nor did white teachers rate white students as having similar behavior issues.

Downey said he doesn't believe white teachers deliberately see black students as troublemakers. "I suspect the process is more subtle than that," he said. "White teachers are not consciously aware of evaluation. They may be more comfortable with the behavior of white children than black children."

The problem seems clear: unconscious stereotypes lead to bias against black children, bias that is repeated and reinforced as they grow older. The solution is unclear. Human behavior is difficult to change, but perhaps by understanding the potential for bias teachers, principals, and police will be able to self-correct. Authority figures with significant flexibility should be held accountable for how they use their discretion through tracking and review, and they should have legitimate justification for their actions. Those who exhibit a pattern of profiling or outright racism should be either required to change their behavior or, if necessary, removed from their position. Until we identify and correct the pattern of bias, we'll only notice each incident on a case-by-case basis (if we happen to see the newspaper article at all), and just remark to ourselves how unfortunate it is that the police handcuffed that little kid.