MURFREESBORO, Tenn. – Parents and community leaders in Murfreesboro are fuming after police arrested numerous elementary students at school over a fight that occurred off campus several days prior.

“About two days ago, a couple of kids in one of the neighborhoods here in the city get into it, not really a fight even, one of the kids was picking on another kid. One of the additional kids that was watching it video tapes the situation, brings it to school, and a teacher literally oversees the video,” James McCarroll, a pastor at First Baptist Church Murfreesboro, said in a video posted to Facebook last week.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

“Once that teacher oversees the video, she gets concerned, gives it to an SRO (school resource officer). The SRO looks at the video and … doesn’t really feel right about it and … does a full scale investigation, talking to children, talking to parents, to figure out who the kids in the video are,” McCarroll explained.

“She then talks to a sergeant and they issue a warrant for arrest. What ends up happening is today the sergeant tells the officer to go to school in the middle of the day and arrest children,” he continued. “One of our officers at the church literally was there and said, ‘hey, let’s wait until after school,’” but the officer in charge refused, he said.

Several students at Hobgood Elementary School, ranging in age from about 6 to 13 years old, were then handcuffed and arrested, and hauled to a juvenile detention center before their parents were even notified, WKRN reports.

Local police have refused to discuss the circumstances surrounding the case, but McCarroll alleges most of the students arrested were not directly involved in the incident.

“Here’s the catch, the girls were just bystanders in the video. They were not fighting, they were not instigating it, they were just standing in the video. And there was actually no technical fight in the video,” he said. “But the claim and the accusation is that they didn’t stop the fight, so they should be arrested.”

“This is absolutely unacceptable, this is absolutely unjust, and this is scary because this means the police have the ability to go into the schools without alerting the parents up front and literally arrest young children and take them to jail,” McCarroll said.

The pastor called a community meeting for Sunday, where a church member and officer who was at the arrests spoke to the congregation, as did the local police chief.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

Several parents who attended the meeting said their children were arrested in the sweep, even though they were not even physically at the off-campus altercation, according to WKRN.

“I have a 9-year-old and a 13-year-old who were arrested last Friday for a crime they weren’t even at,” one unidentified mother said.

Another man, Zaccahaeus Crawford, said only one of his children were at the scuffle as a bystander, but all three – ages 9, 10 and 11 – were arrested at school.

“They are being carted off … to a place to be detained for something they had nothing to do with,” he told the large crowd that attended the Sunday meeting. “My anger is not just festering, I’m not going to lie to you, my anger is over boiling.”

Officer Christopher Williams apologized for the in-school arrests and explained how they’ve impacted the community and school.

“On behalf of myself and so many others, I’m sorry. I apologize,” he said. “My wife has seen me cry twice. She saw me cry once when my grandfather died, and she saw me cry Friday. The principal shed tears, the vice principal shed tears, and the office staff shed tears.”

One man in the crowd had a message for Murfreesboro police chief Karl Durr, who was also at the community meeting.

“I’m sorry for the new police chief because you came into a fireball. And when I say fireball, hell is about to break loose if you do not get a handle on his,” the man said.

Durr told the audience the department is conducting an investigation to determine whether the arrests were legal or necessary, WKRN reports.

“We will take a look at this and say how can we do things better? How did we error and what can we do different next time?” he said.

School officials issued a statement that seemingly attempted to distance the district from the controversy.

“The arrested that occurred at Hobgood Elementary last week were not the result of any behavior that occurred on school property,” the statement read. “The school was merely the location of the arrests. The authority of the school is superseded when law enforcement or the Department of Children Services become involved.”