A South Carolina sheriff has asked federal authorities to investigate an incident in which a white high school resource officer was caught on camera yanking a black student out of her desk backwards and dragging her along the ground on Monday.
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott called videos of the confrontation between a female student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S.C. and the school’s resource officer “disturbing,” and said he asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate, USA Today reported.
Lott also planned to return early from a national law enforcement meeting in Chicago where officers were set to discuss the “Ferguson effect” after months of viral videos documenting violent interactions with police.
“It’s very disturbing what happened,” Lott said. “It’s something I have to deal with and that’s what we’re going to be doing.”
The videos showed a school resource officer wrap an arm around the student’s neck, flipping the desk backwards in an effort to remove her from the seat. Once on the ground, the officer threw the student several feet toward the front of the classroom before putting her in handcuffs.
The officer, identified as Deputy Ben Fields, was placed on leave pending completion of the investigation. Fields is white, and the student involved in the confrontation is black, according to the Associated Press.
Wtf… #AssaultAtSpringValleyHigh I’m disgusted pic.twitter.com/T1JRdTN4aM
— Jimmy Paradise (@HIFTBABG) October 27, 2015
The student was charged with disturbing school and was released to her parents, AP reported. Another female student from the class was also reportedly charged. Neither have been publicly identified.
Tony Robinson Jr., a Spring Valley student who captured video of the incident, told local news station WLTX that the female student was working at her computer in the classroom with her phone out around 10:30 a.m. on Monday.
After the teacher asked for the phone and the student refused, an administrator was called to the classroom and “pleaded” with her to get out of her seat. She again refused, and Fields was called to the room, Robinson said.
Fields first asked Robinson’s friend to move a desk, he told the station, and then the officer moved the computer off the student’s desk.
“He asked her again, ‘will you move, will you move.’ She said ‘no I have not done anything wrong.’ Then he said, ‘I’m going to treat you fairly.’ And she said ‘I don’t even know who you are’…And that is where it started right there,” he said.
Shortly after, the incident turned violent. Robinson said he’d “never seen anything so nasty, so sick” and the incident made the other students afraid for their lives.
“There was no justifiable reason for why he did that to that girl,” Robinson said.
