Regarding the Spring Valley High School Matter

By now, I assume that you've seen the video of the Richland County Sheriff's deputy "removing" a Spring Valley High School student from her desk. If you haven't seen it, here's a link.

I've noticed that all of the comments I have seen flying around on FaceBook, Twitter, and the other parts of the web have fallen into two categories. The two categories are this:

Category 1: You have to respect authority, and a student who won't obey teachers and openly defies a police officer gets what's coming to her. She should have known better.

Category 2: The police officer has no excuse whatsoever for his actions, and under no circumstances should force be used like this against children in school, who are just there to learn their ABCs in a safe space.

Not a lot of room for middle ground between those two lines of thought, is there? And it would be nice if life was simply a binary choice like this all the time. The answer is either A or B. Either the police officer is totally at fault, or the student is totally at fault. The thing is, life isn't this simple; it's complicated and messy.

Both the student and the officer contributed to this situation. They both made decisions that led to the ultimate violent outcome of the conflict. Both sides are wrong in certain ways, in my opinion. Let's take them individually.

The student: In this instance, it's clear that the student is openly defying the teacher, the administration, and eventually law enforcement. This is a disruption to class. As an initial matter, I think this student needs to be expelled. If a police officer has to be called on you, and you still don't go quietly, then, as "Viper" in Top Gun says...you are history. So, up to this point, the student's failure to comply is her mistake.

She should obey the teachers, the administrators, and ultimately, the police officer. However, she choose to remain defiant. It is a mistake to say that the violence carried out absolves her of this bad decision.

Now, what happens after the student fails to comply is all on the officer. The ball is in his court, so to speak. He did not handle the situation very well. So let's turn to him.

The officer: Here, you have a uniformed police officer who is faced with a high school student who is refusing to go quietly. He has the legal authority to remove her from the classroom, but the question is how. She's refusing to obey. I'll admit, I have no idea how long the standoff between the non-compliant student and the officer went on before this video began. I would hope that a police officer would not immediately resort to force, but would rather talk to the student, and attempt to convince them that she should come quietly, reserving force as truly a last measure. He's an adult, and trained at this, so it is fair to expect more of him than the student.

Accordingly, if the police officer resorted to force this quickly, then his first mistake was being impatient. However, non-compliance from a student is a big deal. Even, teachers (maybe especially teachers and administrators) expect compliance from students, and treating police like teachers was another mistake that the student made. You cannot allow non-compliance in a school.

So let's be clear what we are dealing with here is a student who has openly defied a teacher, openly defied an administrator, and now is faced with law enforcement. At this point, the situation changes, the student isn't facing a teacher or an administrator. They're facing law enforcement.

(Side note: You want to have a really bad day? Openly defy a police officer who is giving you an order. See how that turns out for you.)

So let's move on and assume that the application of force was inevitable. Let's assume that no amount of cajoling or threatening was going to get the student to go quietly. Now, the only options are to either use force, or declare that the officer has no power over the student.

Obviously, the latter would end in an absurd result, so we should all agree that the police officer has legal authority to use appropriate force to resolve the situation. The key word in that last sentence was "appropriate". What force is appropriate here?

As the incident begins, the officer starts to forcibly remove the student from her desk. However, the student counters by intentionally intertwining herself with the desk, in an effort to thwart her removal.

Almost immediately the desk flips backwards. I can't say why for sure, but my guess is that it's simply an unintended result that occurred with both the officer and the student straining against each other. At this point in time, I really don't have a problem with the use of force. Maybe the officer should have cleared the area, because the desk flipping over might have hurt the person directly behind the non-compliant student.

So at this point, the student has created a situation where force is required to be used on her. So that's on the student to a large degree. The moment I have a problem with the police officer's use of force is when he tosses her forward along the floor. It's clear that the officer is mad, and the toss is a sort of "punishment" for resisting. It's not necessary. It's an inappropriate use of force. The police aren't supposed to toss you across the room simply because you resisted them. They're supposed to subdue you, and...that's it. After you're down, the force ends.

So ultimately, we have an officer who used more force than necessary in an engagement that was necessarily brought about by the student. Who's at fault?

They both are.

Just as I said we should punish the student with expulsion for her non-compliance, the police officer should be punished for his inappropriate and excessive use of force in the normal way that such things occur. I don't know if that's firing him, or something less. The ultimate determination will be the result of a great deal of factors, I'm sure.

Ultimately, we need to understand that incidents like this don't happen just by the acts of one person. Both people contributed to this event. Also, as a side note, if something like this happened to one of my children, I would be furious: mostly at my child for being so disobedient. But that's me, and that's my parental style. Your mileage may vary.