Two Florida police officers allegedly put their three year old child in handcuffs
and in a jail cell to punish him after the child had trouble with potty training.
And one of them even admitted to putting their other child in jail
as punishment as well.
So here are the details.
Daytona Beach Shores Lieutenant Michael Shoenbrod told a Department
of Children and Families caseworker that his son was having difficulty
with toilet training and was jailed on successive days in October.
Now this is insane.
It's a three year old.
The officer's son was reportedly handcuffed the second time he was jailed.
On body camera footage from a sheriff's deputy,
Michael can be heard saying of the incident, quote, he was crying.
I was getting the response I expected from him.
Now Shoenbrod who said his son vowed to never again poop his pants,
co-parents the child with Deputy Sergeant Jessica Long of
the Daytona Beach Shores Public Safety Department.
Apparently, the cop has used this cruel tactic before.
Nine years earlier, he said that he disciplined his four year old son for
hitting a girl at preschool, and let me give you the details on that.
He said, quote, I took him to the jail and
he sat there and I watched him and he was crying and everything.
And to this day, if you mentioned that incident,
he's just like, I would never do that again, it was effective.
So that's why I did it with this,
meaning the potty training incident, he didn't hit anybody, but
I figured the same thing, discipline and he didn't want to go back so.
>> No. >> I mean, there are countless parents who
potty train their children effectively without putting them in handcuffs and
putting them in a jail cell.
>> Actually, almost all of them, okay?
So look, that is crazy traumatizing for a kid that age.
He says, he was crying, I was getting the response I expected from.
Yeah, you put a three and a half year old in prison, you should expect that they're
going to cry their heads off and they're going to be intensely traumatized.
Now, his excuse for all this, and I get it, everybody grew up differently.
And so I remember when Adrian Peterson, the star running back in the NFL,
was disciplined for hitting his kids with a switch and
he would take skin off their back, okay, when he hit them.
And a lot of people were like, what do you mean?
That's how we grew up.
So there's nothing wrong with that, that's culture, whatever, etc.
Just because you grew up that way doesn't make it right, right?
And just because you think, hey, he was potty trained, so it must have worked.
Well, every kid gets potty trained at some point, so that is not very convincing.
But even with the kid that hit the other girl and then he never did it again, okay,
here's another way you can get him to not do it again, that's also a terrible idea.
Like, you know what?
He hit the girl, and I didn't like that, so I broke a couple of his fingers, and
man he cried like dickens, but he never hit another girl again.
Yeah, I'm not gonna call that mission accomplished.
Maybe there are other pathways to that same result without being absurdly cruel.
>> So later on, on the hour long body cam footage, Long, so that's the mother,
could be heard calling the investigation insane, while Shoenbrod responded,
it's just disgusting that somebody would drag our family through the mud like this.
Now, the investigation happened.
Unfortunately, we don't know what the outcome of that investigation is,
because that has not been made public.
According to the city clerk, the records can't be released because they've been
sealed by a judge, but a court administrator denied that,
saying the judge to whom the cases are assigned has not sealed them.
An attorney with the county clerk of court's office wrote, the cases
are confidential due to motions for confidentiality filed within the cases.
Look, the point is, they're not making it public, so we don't know what the outcome
of the investigation is, but you shouldn't be throwing your three year old or
your four year old or any of your children in a jail cell because they're not
complying with your parenting, like it's insane.
You're traumatizing these kids.
>> Yeah, I think the potty training is like such not a big
deal that I can't believe they did this with that.
But in terms of even if the kid did something wrong, look I did terrible
things when I was a kid, right, and my dad was right to punish me.
And a couple of times he didn't really, really wanna do it, but because
of the way he grew up, he did beatings or whatever, but not really, right?
No, what is it called?
>> Spanking. >> Spanking or whatever.
>> I know beating sounds severe.
And so he didn't have his heart into it, etc., but that doesn't mean that I have to
spank my kids just because it happened to me, right?
And sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn't work with me at all.
It made me go in the opposite direction.
And this is a thing that is super common, maybe not at this extreme, but
just because your parents did X doesn't mean you have to do it.
Analyze what the upsides and the downsides are, and
nothing's worth traumatizing your kid like this for.