Dr. Jean Kennedy Sue Smyrna Police Department & Takes On State of Georgia Residents Law

 

By Andrew Scot Bolsinger

 

A California adjunct professor, organizational consultant and radio host visiting Smyrna, Ga. endured a humiliating arrest that now fuels her determination to hold the city’s police to account.

 

In May, attorney Eric Meder filed a “notice of claims” against the City of Smyrna on behalf of Dr. Jean Kennedy, who was arrested and jailed for the better part of a full day and fined $425. Kennedy was also forced to cυt off shells that were professionally sewn into her locs. Her notice of claims seeks unspecified damages for the emotional and psychological abυse Kennedy endured.

“Dr. Kennedy has suffered physical as well as emotional and psychological damages as a result of actions taken against her in viοlation of her rights,” Meder wrote.

 

Kennedy says that the humiliating experience came down in the end to little more than dollars and cents. Kennedy says she was jailed with four other women who were all there on charges stemming from money owed the city.

 

“I want the city of Smyrna to own up and show up and be accountable for the actions that are being taken. You can’t have a debtor’s prison. That’s been done away with,” she said in an exclusive interview with Your Black World.

 

Kennedy, 60, was visiting family in February when a Smyrna police officer pulled her over.

 

“The evidence shows that stop was pretextual and due to Dr. Kennedy’s California license plates and prominently displayed African symbols. The officer acted without ‘specific and articulable facts that provide[d] a reasonable suspicion’ that Dr. Kennedy was engaged in criminal activity,” Meder wrote.

 

The tenor of the conversation with the police officer changed when he noticed that she had a food stamps card and commented derisively about it. The police officer said Kennedy’s car was emitting fumes, a point the attorney refutes with seven points of fact in his filing, including that is was 28 degrees, a temperature in which “all cars” emit condensation. Soon she was being ordered to follow the police to the court building, according to court papers.

“Officer Durrance then approached Dr. Kennedy and wrote in his own hand on an unidentified piece of paper: ‘425.00’ and, indicating that number, asked Dr. Kennedy whether she would pay that amount by credit card or cash. Dr. Kennedy still believed that she was at the Court,” Meder wrote.

 

When Kennedy explained she couldn’t afford to pay that amount — she still had never been given an actual citation — the officer ordered her to again drive her own car and follow him to the “detention center,” which Kennedy did not understand to be the county jail. Once inside and being processed the full weight of her arrest set in, she says.

 

“I felt viοlated. I felt viοlated when they put their hands all over my body and between my legs. Then they told me to remove my (hair) clips. Then when they went and got me a pair of scissors it dawned on me just what was happening to me. I thought, ‘my God’,” Kennedy says.

 

Kennedy said she told the jailers that she couldn’t remove her shells. But they insisted she cut them off and put on jail scrubs. She complied.

“In all that is going on in your head a 100 miles per hour it took awhile to learn my life will not be normal. All of it leaves an imprint. They humiliated me, created an arrest and now it’s on my record.”

 

Kennedy’s calls to a co-worker back in California while she followed the police officer in her own car had paid off. Her friend found a local ally who promptly came to the jail to post bail. But Kennedy was not released for another four hours.

 

“As a result, Dr. Kennedy has since that time experienced continuous fraying and breakage of her hair locks; her physical appearance has been altered and she has continued to suffer the effects of that humiliation,” Meder wrote.

Kennedy, who was born in Jamaica, raised in England and then became a citizen of the United States, said her experience expanded her thinking about the impact of a single arrest. She said her experience as an educated woman with a background in psychology probably helped her navigate the situation without escalating it.

 

“But what if I was a young black man, and how different would they acted when you consider how they treated me?” she asked.

She defined her intent to sue as a “teachable moment” to hold the city of Smyrna accountable. Thinking of those women she was jailed with, she wonders how many others have been jailed for being the wrong class, the wrong race or from the wrong state.

“I left behind four other black women crying in the holding cell we shared,” Kennedy wrote on a blog site documenting her arrest. “They were arrested the same day that I was on traffic violations. They could not immediately pay their traffic tickets, like I couldn’t, so we were all immediately arrested. Did those sistahs manage to make bail so they could go home to their children that day? I don’t know. One thing I do know is that all four of our lives were seriously
disrupted because paying fines immediately was not possible for any of us.”

Kennedy said she is determined to see this through in the hope of changing police behaviors and attitudes in Smyrna. She said she wants to focus reform efforts on the first point of contact with police officers, which is often overlooked when educators and activists like herself talk about the school-to-prison pipeline than imprisons so many young men in America.

“You can’t get to a jail without a police officer,” she said. “They are the open door to where ever life leads you after that.”

For her the Smyra police opened the door to her lawsuit and determined effort for reform.

“I’m glad my attorney has some guts,” she said. “I’m glad that it’s down to this fιght. If you want restorative justice then you have to make a person whole. I want this to help that happen.”

Andrew Scot Bolsinger won more than two dozen press awards during his journalism career. He is a freelance writer, author and operates www.criminalu.co, which is focused on prison reform. He can reached at Andrew.Bolsinger@gmail.com and can be followed @CriminalUniv on Twitter.