Students Speak Out After Cop Is Caught on Camera Forcefully Arresting Girl

The video of a teenage girl being wrestled out of her desk and dragged from the classroom by a police officer at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, has quickly gone viral this week, sparking fellow student and high-profile outrage on Twitter and igniting a national conversation about the increasingly muddled roles of school administration and law enforcement.

STORY: Mom Calls Police on ‘Disrespectful’ 10-Year-Old

“Welcome to the school-to-prison pipeline! This unjust criminalization of our youth has to end,” tweeted presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Tuesday morning, using #AssaultatSpringValleyHigh, a hashtag that has been quickly growing since Monday, when it was apparently started by an activist with the profile name End Police Violence. Others who have used Twitter to weigh in against the assault include the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Montel Williams, Jack Johnson, and Piper Kerman.

STORY: Principal Suspended Over Terrifying School Safety Drill

The video, made by a student, shows school resource officer Deputy Ben Fields — reportedly a huge man who power-lifts in his spare time and who was sued following another arrest-related altercation in 2005 — ordering a student from her seat. When she doesn’t move, he grabs her, slams both her and her desk to the ground, and then drags her across the floor before arresting her as the other students in the classroom watch in stunned silence.

The moment when the officer tosses the student to the floor, as caught on video. (Photo: Aisha Thomas)

The young woman, who has not been publicly named, was reportedly not injured and was released to her parents. Fellow students have said the officer has a history of being rough with kids at the school, and one student in particular, Niya Kenny, 18, spoke out about the incident to WLTX after witnessing it during her math class.

“I know this girl don’t got nobody and I couldn’t believe this was happening,” Kenny said. “I had never seen nothing like that in my life — a man use that much force on a little girl. A big man, like 300 pounds of full muscle. I was like ‘No way, no way.’ You can’t do nothing like that to a little girl. I’m talking about she’s like, 5′ 6″.” She explains that her classmate was not participating, and was asked to leave the room by her teacher and then an administrator. When she refused, the officer was called in to handle the situation.

“I was screaming, ‘What the f, what the f, is this really happening?’ I was praying out loud for the girl,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe this was happening. I was just crying, and he said, ‘Since you have so much to say, you are coming, too.’ I just put my hands behind my back.” She was reportedly charged with disturbing schools.

The student behind the main recording (another has been posted here), Tony Robinson Jr., told WLTX, “I’ve never seen anything so nasty looking, so sick to the point that you know, other students are turning away, don’t know what to do, and are just scared for their lives. That’s supposed to be somebody that’s going to protect us. Not somebody that we need to be scared of, or afraid.”

Spring Valley High School officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Yahoo Parenting. But Richland School District Two Superintendent Debbie Hamm issued a statement, according to WSPA, saying the district is “deeply concerned about the incident that occurred at Spring Valley High School,” and that the officer would not be returning to the school while an investigation is pending.

And Sheriff Leon Lott of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, of which Fields is a member, said he found the video “disturbing,” and made requests for various outside investigations, including from the FBI.

Though many commenters have been quick to point out that various questions remained, specifically about what happened before the video was taken, most point out it shouldn’t even matter. “I can’t imagine any justification for treating a child like that in a classroom,” Victoria Middleton, the head of South Carolina’s ACLU chapter, told CNN on Tuesday. “Whatever led up to it, whatever rationale may be presented, does not justify the force with which that student was treated.”

Kenneth S. Trump, a school safety expert who trains schools through his National School Safety and Security Services, based in Cleveland, tells Yahoo Parenting the video is a “classic example” of a growing confusion at schools across the country over the role of the administration vs. that of law enforcement. “Where was the school administrator here?” Trump wonders. “We’re finding, more and more, they’re delegating some of their tasks to school resource officers, which puts them in an unfair position and sets up both them and the kid for a situation like this one.” Outsourcing such situations to police officers, he adds, is often a symptom of a “weak administration,” and is usually inappropriate, as there’s a “huge difference between a violent student and a noncompliant student.”

Schools across the country have been employing school resource officers for decades, Trump explains. They grew in popularity following the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, faced cuts for years after that, and were largely resurrected after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. “By and large, they’re excellent programs that prevent more than they arrest and build relationships with students,” he says, noting that the officers are trained — or should be trained — in specific ways, such as in using verbal de-escalation techniques and how to handle special-needs kids. “But when you task a police officer to do a job, he or she is going to do it — and do it differently than a school administrator would.”

Though it’s difficult to say exactly what should have happened at Spring Valley just by watching the short video, Trump says, it would have likely been helpful for the teacher or administrator to simply clear the room, leaving just the problem student to be dealt with. “It’s a basic technique — you take away the audience,” he says. “Because otherwise, it becomes a test of will, and the kid has to save face.”