Rough Arrest Highlights How In-School Police Officers Are — and Aren't —Trained for Kids

Deputy Ben Fields was fired on Wednesday after shocking videos surfaced of the officer yanking a student at South Carolina’s Spring Valley High School to the ground. But due to their training methods, experts say that school resource officers may use the same types of defensive techniques they’d use on adults. Here’s what every parent needs to know. (Photo: Reginald Seabrooks)

Videos of school resource officer (SRO) Ben Fields flipping a student in her desk went viral this week, leading to his firing on Wednesday.

The incident reportedly began after the student, who has not been named due to her age, refused to put away her cellphone at the request of her teacher and a school administrator. Fields was called in to deal with the situation soon after.

While graphic and shocking to watch, this is not the first time an in-school police officer has used questionable methods to subdue young students.

In 2010, a Texas officer shot and killed Derek Lopez, 14, when the boy ran away after getting into a fight with another student. In November 2013, 17-year-old Noe Nino de Rivera spent 52 days in a medically induced coma after police used a Taser to subdue him when the teen tried to break up a fight between two female students.

In May 2014, Cesar Suquet’s family says he was repeatedly struck by an SRO with a nightstick after asking teachers to return his cellphone, which had been confiscated earlier in the day. And in January, a middle-school girl received 10 stitches —four of them internal — after she was beaten with a baton by an SRO.

The presence of school resource officers in schools increased by 40 percent between 1997 and 2007, according to data released by the U.S Department of Justice. Those numbers may have grown dramatically in such a short period of time due to school shootings at Columbine (1999) and Red Lake Senior High School (2005). The Virginia Tech massacre, which claimed the lives of 32 people, occurred in 2007.

But police presence in schools escalated even more after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, in which 26 people were killed — the majority of whom were children. In 2013, the Department of Justice announced that it was allotting $45 million for 356 new school resource officers across the country. “In the wake of past tragedies, it’s clear that we need to be willing to take all possible steps to ensure that our kids are safe when they go to school,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a press release at the time.

There are anywhere between 14,000 and 20,000 school resource officers in the U.S. today, Mo Canady, executive director for the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), tells Yahoo Health.

While NASRO trains many of them, they do not train school resource officers in South Carolina. The training that all SROs receive in South Carolina is the same, Major Florence McCants, an instructor with the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy, tells Yahoo Health. Fields underwent the same 40-hour training that other SROs receive in order to be a liaison between schools, communities, and law enforcement officials.

That training includes how to deal with students who are disabled, navigating gang issues and how to identify gang members, and learning about drugs in schools. Officers are also given insight into how a child’s mind works and how to apply their training based on the type of school that they’re in.

“A lot of it is that you learn and apply it as need be,” McCants says.

But SRO training doesn’t teach officers how to use defensive tactics with students, she says. Rather, they learn them from a 12-week training in the police academy.

NASRO takes a similar approach. Canady says it addresses conflict from a philosophical standpoint, but doesn’t specify actions that officers should take because “every department has their own standard training.”

As a result, McCants says, SROs may use “the same type of techniques that would be taught when dealing with adults.”

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That’s a problem because adults and teenagers mentally process conflict in different ways, Art Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Smart Change, tells Yahoo Health.

“In emotional situations, it can sometimes be difficult for teens to stop themselves from doing something that as an adult they would be much more effective at stopping themselves,” he says.

In this particular case, if the student were an adult, she may have weighed her options and decided it would be better to just listen to the officer — regardless of whether she agreed with his order. Instead, she refused, which Markman says is a “fairly common reaction” for a teenager.

Teenagers also view law enforcement and authority figures differently than adults, Markman says. He explains it this way: Children tend to view the world in black and white and are taught that all police officers are good and are there to protect them. Adults have a more balanced view and realize that, while there are great police officers, there are also some that aren’t so great.

But teenagers are still trying to figure it all out. “They’re realizing these oversimplified stories they were told as a kid aren’t true and are beginning to see the reality,” Markman says. As a result, they can have strong, almost rebellious reactions to police officers and authority figures in general.

“They go from thinking, ‘these people only care about me’ to thinking, ‘they don’t care at all about me,’” he says. “It becomes extreme in the other direction, and you can get these very strong reactions as a result.”

Teenagers are also not as afraid of police officers as past generations have been, clinical psychologist John Mayer, author of Family Fit: Find Your Balance in Life, tells Yahoo Health. “They know what powers police do or do not have,” he says. As a result, they’re more likely to be defiant when dealing with a police officer.

Related: 7 Ways Anger Is Ruining Your Health

McCants says officers need to use their own judgment to try to figure out the best way to deal with each situation, adding that no two incidents are ever the same. “You apply the amount of force that is demonstrated by the person you are addressing,” she says. “Officers should always be one threat level above the aggressor.”

However, she isn’t ruling out that defensive training may become a part of the SRO program in the future. “We’re always adjusting our training to better meet the needs of the community,” she says. “We evaluate what’s going on in the nation as a whole and see if we’re addressing it properly.”

McCants also points out that, even if an officer is properly trained, he or she may not always follow proper protocol with their actions.

And, in this particular situation, that seems to be the case.

“I can’t say that’s the form of training that we do,” she says. “That’s a little different from what we’re training here.”

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