A campus cop should never have the right to violently drag a high school student out of class.
On Monday, Oct. 26 at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, a young African American girl was on her phone in math class. When the teacher saw she wasn’t participating, he asked her to hand over her phone.
When she refused to give up her phone, the math teacher called in an administrator for assistance. The administrator asked her to get out of her seat but she didn’t move.
The teenage girl apologized for taking her phone out and pleaded with the school staff to stay. The administrator called in Deputy Ben Fields to take care of the situation, leading things to go terribly wrong.
Once Deputy Fields got into the classroom, he asked a student close by to move their desk. With the area now cleared, he moved the young girl’s laptop off her desk and asked her to move several times.
With this in mind, he had it already made up in his mind that he was going to act with force.
The teenage girl refused to leave because she felt as if she hadn’t done anything wrong. She reassured them that she’d only taken her phone out for a second to do something.
According to dailymail.co.uk Deputy Fields stated, “I’m going to treat you fairly,” and the girl’s response was “I don’t even know who you are.”
From that point, it appeared as though he’d had enough. He proceeded to flip her chair over on the floor, and dragged her violently out of her seat like a rag doll.
Neither the administrator nor the teacher stepped in to prevent the violence from going any further. He pinned her to the floor and arrested her.
He was not within his rights to arrest her for refusing to get out of her seat. What could she have possibly been charged with?
Just because she was in the wrong with using her phone in class, and refusing to leave class, doesn’t make it right for him to react as violently as he did with her.
In fact, this wasn’t his first violent offense against a student. He had a violent reputation among the students; so many students were scared of him.
There should have been a procedure in place for the campus police in cases where students refuse to leave the classroom. It should be something that protects students from harm, and something that isn’t morally wrong for the cops.
Things shouldn’t have been able to escalate so quickly. Both the teenage girl and Deputy Fields were in the wrong. She was wrong for being on her phone and he was wrong for using excessive force.
But, two wrongs have never made a right, and for that reason Deputy Fields was fired.
