Cops searching for a 20-year-old suspect draw shotguns on a 10-year-old instead

Police continue to make headlines with terrible decisions.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Ten-year-old Legend Preston was playing basketball with friends in his neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, a couple weeks ago when the ball bounced out into the street. He went to retrieve it and looked up to see multiple police officers running at him, shotguns drawn.

Preston panicked, as any fifth grader would do under the circumstances. "I ran because they thought that I rolled the ball into the street on purpose," he said, "and they were just holding shotguns at me trying to shoot me." The cops gave chase, and soon he was cornered in an alley with the guns allegedly pointed at his head.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.