We went to the same middle school, and every time someone learned that we were sisters, they gasped in disbelief. Like a military presence in a foreign land, police officers in schools set a wrong tone from the start.
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Temoney released a statement from the school several hours later and said the students and staff were safe during the protest. The older generation may look at this story and are stunned by the fact that there is a deputy sheriff posted in a school all day long and even has the obscure title of school resource officer.
What do you do when you’re sitting in the middle of class and an officer enters the room for a disruptive student? Austin ISD Police Chief Eric Mendez acknowledged he doesn’t know all the circumstances in the South Carolina school incident.
The Richland County Sheriff’s Department has a “memorandum of understanding” delineating when officers should be involved, but the district has declined to make it public, so it’s not clear whether Senior Deputy Ben Fields was asked to cross a line at Spring Valley High School. The officer, Deputy Ben Fields, was sacked and federal authorities have since opened a civil rights investigation into the incident.
Now other school resource officers are speaking out. Similarly vague offenses come with high disparities in school districts across the country; this summer, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund complained that in McKinney, Texas-where another viral video captured a police officer throwing a teen girl to the ground-“disorderly conduct” citations were given to black students twice as frequently as white students.
The South Carolina incident and the Twin Cities incidents were very different but they shared a common thread: They all got a confrontational response from police. “We’re seeing a rapid criminalization of students for behavior that violates school rules is now being cast as obstruction, or disorderly conduct or criminal”. The numbers of police officers in schools understandably mushroomed into the thousands after the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado and other mass shootings in schools. “This has to be one of the best officers in your department”.
Numerous administrators then told the students to return to class, and the students obeyed, The Daily Beast reports. It also says officers lack grounding in juvenile case law.
Delaying consequences can be effective, said Larry Thompson, a former Kansas teacher who consults with schools via his “Responsibility-Centered Discipline” program. Both girls were charged with “disturbing schools”. “She is responsible for initiating this action”.
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According to a 2015 report by the African American Policy Forum and Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectional and Social Policy Studies, black girls were suspended from school six times as often as their white counterparts, and 12 percent of black girls were subjected to exclusionary suspensions in comparison to only 2 percent of white females. The vice principal would have figured out a way to deal with it. If the student wasn’t violent and didn’t threaten violence, that’s what he should have done in this situation.
