The Egregious Video | The Kids of Rutherford County

The Promise

Nashville Public Radio

Society & Culture

4.9 • 777 Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A police officer in Rutherford County, Tennessee, sees a video of little kids fighting, and decides to investigate. This leads to the arrest of 11 kids for watching the fight. The arrests do not go smoothly.

Credits: “The Kids of Rutherford County” is a production of Serial, The New York Times, ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio. It was written and reported by Meribah Knight with additional reporting from Ken Armstrong at ProPublica.

The show was produced by Daniel Guillemette with additional production by Michelle Navarro. It was edited by Julie Snyder and Jen Guerra. Additional editing by Anita Badejo, Sarah Blustain, Tony Gonzalez, Ken Armstrong and Alex Kotlowitz. The Supervising Producer is Ndeye Thioubou; research and fact checking by Ben Phelan, with additional fact checking by Naomi Sharp. Music supervision, sound design, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. Our Standards Editor is Susan Wessling. Legal review from Dana Green and Al-Amyn Sumar.

Original score by The Blasting Company. Additional production from Jenelle Pifer. Mack Miller is the Executive Assistant for Serial. Art by Pablo Delcan. Sam Dolnick is a Deputy Managing Editor of The New York Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It was a March afternoon in Rutherford County, Tennessee, a growing community about 30 miles
0:09.0	southeast of Nashville.
0:11.3	School was out for the day, and a dozen or so little kids were playing a game of pickup
0:15.1	basketball in someone's backyard.
0:18.0	And then, as kids do, one said something about another kid's mom. This insult led to some
0:23.6	shoving. And then as kids also do, one of them pulled out a cell phone and started filming.
0:31.2	There's some kind of heavy neon filter over the whole video, so it's hard to make out any
0:35.5	faces. But here's what you can see.
0:38.5	An eight-year-old boy, hands shoved into the pockets of his oversized parka,
0:42.8	is trying to walk away from everyone when a smaller boy, about five or six,
0:47.9	runs up behind him and smacks him in the back a few times.
0:51.1	Then another little kid runs up and takes his turn,
0:55.9	throws a couple feeble punches to the back of the kid walking away. Some of the older boys are egging them on.
1:05.1	Meantime, off camera, you can hear one girl try to break it up. Other kids just stand around watching,
1:13.5	and a few of them are also filming on their phones.
1:16.7	And then the video just ends.
1:20.5	It's the type of fight that barely seems worth posting online.
1:24.4	But that happened anyway.
1:26.0	And soon the video started to make the rounds, spreading from
1:29.0	the kids to teachers and eventually to one police officer. And it's what happened next, once this
1:36.9	officer got involved, that the story really begins, because it's what caught everyone's attention
1:41.8	to what's been happening to kids in Rutherford County.
	...

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