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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Tamir Rice was just 12 years old when he was killed by police while playing with a toy gun. Jordan Edwards was 15 years old when he was killed by police while attending a house party, and Dajerria Becton was 15 years old when she was violently arrested at a pool party.

Dajerria Becton: He grabbed me and he twisted my arm on the back of my back and he shoved me in the grass. He started pulling back my braids and I was telling him that he can get off me because my back was hurting really bad.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Data from 2015 analyzed by the Sentencing Project shows that Black young people are five times more likely to be incarcerated than white young people. From clothing to music, Black youth live under heightened surveillance.

Georgetown Law Professor, Kristin Henning, looks at the staggering number of cases where Black and Latino children were unfairly targeted and even killed by police. It's in her new book, The Rage of Innocence, How America Criminalizes Black Youth. Professor Henning is also a Director of the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative. Professor Henning, great to have you here.

Kristin Henning: Thank you so much for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What does American policing look like if we look at it through the eyes of Black young people?

Kristin Henning: American policing is traumatizing. What so few people realize is that there is a generation of Black and brown children growing up in certain pockets of our country that see police officers multiple times a day, police officers who park in their neighborhoods, drive through the community at all hours of the day and night, stopping children, asking them, "Where are you going? Where are you coming from?"

What the research shows is that there is extraordinary trauma associated with living in a heavily policed and heavily surveilled neighborhood. Young people who have frequent contact with the police report high rates of fear, anxiety, depression, hopelessness. Some of them become hypervigilant, which means they're always on guard, never trusting police officers. What's really unfortunate is that distrust of officers transfers over to other adult figures, teachers, counselors, folks who might be allies. There's a real cost to contemporary policing in certain Black and brown communities in our country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you say trauma, what do we know about what trauma does to young people?

Kristin Henning: It has an extraordinary impact during the adolescent years. The brain is still forming and so negative experiences with trauma in adolescents have a tremendous long-term impact. For example, again, young people who live in heavily surveilled neighborhoods report high rates of insomnia, not being able to sleep for extended periods of time, or poor sleep quality when they do sleep. For anybody who has a child, you know that children who don't sleep well really have a hard time focusing in school the next day, remaining calm and rational when asked to make decisions, so it's a real consequence.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Henning, walk back with me for a moment. I think about my own father growing up in the Jim Crow South in Richmond in the 1940s and '50s, is this a kind of surveillance and policing that is different from, heightened from, similar to that experience that he had, again, now 70 years ago?

Kristin Henning: I think there is a real through-line, historical through-line from, to be quite frank, the era of slavery when the Black child was treated as the property of the purported master, all the way through the civil rights era and the ways in which we use policing to control and limit blackness and particularly Black adolescents. I think about in the civil rights era, the killing or the lynching of Emmett Till by policing by proxy, if you will, by civilians who really lynch Emmett Till as a symbolic statement that our country will not tolerate integration, full integration, for example, in schools.

Then we get into the 1990s and we see a temporary uptick in crime and again, we have politicians who recognize that they can manipulate this purported, this pseudo-scientific theory of Black super predators, young people who are supposedly going to run amuck and rape, maim, and kill.

Politicians recognize for their own gain, they can manipulate this purported link between blackness and criminality, which was flatly refuted. I say all of that to say that those three distinct moments in history that your father, for example, two of which your father may well have lived through, the only way you can justify the horrific treatment of Black and brown children in those eras is to create a narrative, a narrative of fear, a narrative of threat, this pseudo-scientific super predator narrative. That narrative now lives on in American psyche.

You ask whether policing looks different or the same? I think it looks different in that it is not as explicit, but here we are and the fear-- A police officer, a civilian walks through a park and they see a young Black child and they have that same narrative that the Black child must be dangerous, must be a threat.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Connect this for me to a phenomenon we've heard about talked a bit about on this show, the adultification of Black children, what does that mean?

Kristin Henning: There's been some fabulous research by Dr. Philip Atiba Goff and some of his colleagues, and what they found is that young people, Black boys, in particular, are perceived to be four and a half years or more older than they actually are. Their studies involved both civilian participants and law enforcement participants. It has a profound impact upon the ways in which we view a young Black child when we see them, how we respond to them, how we interpret their language and their behaviors, and even when if they're arrested and sent to court, how we respond to them in court.

Dr. Goff's studies were done with Black, Latino, and white males, but similar research has been done with Black girls as well out of the Georgetown Centers Institute Against Poverty and Inequality. In that study, similarly, they found that adults perceive Black girls as older, more mature, less innocent, less in need of protection, more knowledgeable about adult-like information, such as sexuality and the like.

It's really has a profound impact on the ways in which policing happens and again, not just policing by folks in a blue uniform, but by policing by all of us as civilians who engage with young people.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Toward the end of your book, you do call for action and you offer up some possibility of reform, and because I don't want to leave us in this place of just how bad it is and how bad it's been for so long, just give me a little bit of a sense of what kinds of reforms are possible.

Kristin Henning: I start with the premise that young people are resilient, and that means Black folks and brown folks are resilient during those adolescent years. Part of what has to happen is for us to listen and be attentive to the mental health needs and be responsive to the trauma that young people are experiencing in our country. I like to say something that one of my psychologist friends taught me, which is every child needs at least one irrationally caring adult in their lives.

I got to tell you, Melissa, every child would do better to have a team of irrationally caring adults. We think about, what does that mean? That means just as you would treat your own children. You know that children make mistakes, they need guidance, they need support, they need redirection. The last thing that we want to do is incarcerate them, embarrass them, stigmatize them, criminalize them. That's not the road to recovery, so that's a big piece.

It is supporting and bolstering the resilience of Black and brown children but then also we have to take some global and collective policy reform in this country. We have to radically reduce the footprint of police officers in the lives of all children and especially Black and brown children who have been so disproportionately targeted.

That means decriminalizing certain normal adolescent behaviors. You can't call the police on children who talk back and who get into a scuffle and who are just being teenagers. We also really have to rethink policing in schools and it's not as radical as it sounds to imagine a school without police officers. Instead, we replace those officers with mental health providers, counselors, vocational specialists, social-emotional learning, and even in schools where there is evidence of violence, there are violence interrupters and credible messengers who have proven to be successful in intervening in those spaces. We really have to-- The bottom line, Melissa, is that we have to learn to treat children like children.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kristin Henning is the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law. Also, author of the Rage of Innocence, How America Criminalizes Black Youth. Professor Henning, thank you for joining us.

Kristin Henning: Thank you so much again for having me.

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