By David French
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
The latest viral video of alleged “police brutality” is
remarkably short and devoid of context. According to cell-phone video –
apparently shot by students at Columbia, S.C.’s Spring Valley High School – a
“student resource officer,” Senior Deputy Ben Fields, approaches an
unidentified female student. After she refuses to move from her desk, he grabs
her, yanks the desk over, and appears to drag, then throw her to the front of
the classroom, where he apparently places her in handcuffs. The relevant
portion of the video is here:
According to local reporting, Fields was called to the
classroom after the student had refused to leave the room, first at the request
of the teacher and then at the request of an administrator. A longer video
shows Fields asking the student if she’ll leave, she refuses, he reaches down
and says, “I’m going to get you up,” she appears to resist, then the officer
escalates his use of force:
No one was injured in the fracas, but the media
immediately identified it as an example of a white police officer brutalizing a
black youth. Vox breathlessly said
the video “shows what happens when you put cops in schools” and called it an
example of the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Within a day, local officials had
requested an FBI and Department of Justice investigation, and the media feeding
frenzy was fully underway.
I have a different perspective. After watching and
re-watching the incident, I keep coming to the same conclusion: This is what
happens when a person resists a lawful order from a police officer to move
(UPDATE: CNN is now reporting that a third video shows the student hitting the
officer in the face when he initially put his hands on her). Unless the school
is willing to have one student commandeer the classroom indefinitely, the
officer has few options beyond physical force — and the use of physical force
is rarely pretty to see. In this instance, the use of force was decisive,
brief, and did not physically harm the student.
While I hardly claim to have grown up (or live) on the
wrong side of the tracks, I’ve seen multiple police interventions in my 46
years on this planet — including in my own high school in the 1980s — and I’ve
never seen the police be gentle when a person resists arrest. The use of
physical force is never elegant, it’s always potentially dangerous, and it’s
always easy to critique from a distance. Lawlessness typically leaves a police
officer with options that simply don’t look good on camera.
As for the Vox
critique of police officers in public schools – which writer German Lopez
called “outsourcing discipline to the police” – let’s not forget that in this
instance the school appealed to the officer only after a teacher and an
administrator failed to get results. I’ve known multiple public-school teachers
who were grateful for police assistance after spending years getting punched,
kicked, bitten, and otherwise physically abused by their students. I distinctly
remember seeing my own teachers tossed around like rag dolls by angry students
during raging hallway brawls. At some schools, even small children will attack
and harm their teachers.
While I support body cameras and, of course, support the
rather obvious right of the public to record the police, videos like the one
from Spring Valley show how subjective our snap judgments can be. Some watched
the video and were immediately outraged. Others simply saw an officer handling
a student who was resisting arrest. Experts from both sides will no doubt weigh
in, with some officers defending Fields and others proclaiming they could and
would have handled the situation with less force. Yet, at the end of the day,
the most likely outcome is the one feared by FBI director James Comey, that the
fear of “viral videos” is like a “chill wind blowing through American law
enforcement.”
America’s opinion and law-making classes – walled off in
doorman-fronted buildings, gated communities, and generally growing up in the
best educational environments – are making judgments about behaviors and police
reactions that are utterly alien to their experience. Having little to no
exposure to physical conflict, they have no idea how difficult it is to move an
unwilling person, and having blessedly lived in the absence of physical fear,
they have no real idea how a human being responds to physical danger. But that
won’t stop them from opining about police conduct, condemning cops because
they’re insufficiently graceful when exerting physical force on a defiant
person, and then being self-righteously certain that dissent from their
authoritative view is motivated by hate and bigotry.
The arrested student at Spring Valley High School should
have left her seat when her teacher demanded that she leave. She should have
left when the administrator made the same demand. She should have left when
Fields made his first, polite requests. She had no right to stay. She had no
right to end classroom instruction with her defiance. Fields was right to move
her, and he did so without hurting her. The fact that the incident didn’t look
good on camera doesn’t make his actions wrong. Unless additional evidence
emerges, the Spring Valley video is going viral for all the wrong reasons.
In other words – to use a police cliché – move along.
There’s truly not much to see here.
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