Texas mother Rebecca Briscoe wants answers after an incident she says occurred at MacGregor Elementary School, where she alleges a school resource officer placed his hands on her 8-year-old son’s neck. However, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office said there was “not enough reliable evidence to prove a crime occurred.” Briscoe is now calling for surveillance footage of the incident to be publicly released, saying, “if they don’t want to show the video, that tells me something.”
First reported by KPRC Click2Houston before spreading across social media, Briscoe told reporters the incident began when she arrived at the school to pick up her son and heard him screaming. Briscoe said her son told her, “I couldn’t breathe. The school resource officer choked me.”
YouTube via @KPRC2Click2Houston
After reviewing school surveillance footage, Briscoe claimed her son was sitting alone on a bench before the officer approached him. She alleged the school resource officer made physical contact with her son’s neck. She is now demanding accountability from both the school district and the officer involved, while continuing to call for the footage to be publicly released, asking, “Why would an officer approach my child and put their hands on him? What would give him the right to use excessive force on a second grader?”
The CEO of Jet Security LLC, a Texas company contracted by the Houston Independent School District to provide campus security, released a statement to KPRC denying the allegations. The company disputed the allegations and said surveillance footage did not support the claims. HISD says the matter remains under investigation. While the District Attorney’s Office stated that “if new evidence is discovered, we may reopen the case and pursue charges.” Authorities have not announced any charges related to the incident.
Online Commenters Divided Over Allegations
Commenters online quickly became divided over the allegations. One YouTube user wrote, “We keep being told these ‘officers’ are there to protect the kids yet they are attacking and arresting children while mass shootings and weapons in schools has NOT improved!!”
While some Facebook users asked what the child may have done “to deserve it,” another claimed their roommate worked at the school and that “the guard didn’t do anything wrong.” Another commenter dismissed the story entirely as “just another one-sided social news story.”
Debates surrounding the role of school resource officers have become increasingly controversial across the country in recent years. The incident also comes shortly after a separate case in the same Texas school district in which a student and his family alleged to FOX 26 that the child was assaulted by a school officer.
