A South Carolina sheriff says he was appalled by a widely circulated video showing a police officer pulling a female high school student from her desk and dragging her across a classroom.
Sheriff Leon Lott of Richland County said on Tuesday he “wanted to throw up” when he saw the video of the incident, which is now under investigation by the Department of Justice and the FBI as well as local police.
Lott said at a press conference that his department’s internal investigation should finish swiftly, possibly by Wednesday afternoon. “When I say I’m disturbed, I think you can read between the lines,” he said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Dena Iverson, said the investigation will look into “the circumstances surrounding the arrest” and determine if federal law was broken.
Ben Fields – a sheriff’s deputy – was captured on video on Monday pulling a female high school student from her desk and tossing her to the floor. The video circulated quickly online and was joined by two others showing the same incident, filmed by students in the classroom.
Lott said that although the deputy’s actions disturbed him, he did not feel race played a role. The president of the South Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People disagreed. Lonnie Randolph called the officer’s behavior “aggressive and inhumane” and asserted that racism was a factor; the student is black and the officer is white. Randolph called for the officer to be criminally charged. He is currently on unpaid leave, pending the conclusion of the investigation.
The incident started, the sheriff said, when the student was caught using her phone in class. The teacher reprimanded her and she talked back to him in a way Lott called disrespectful. An assistant principal then entered the room and told the student to come to the office. When she refused, the administrator called Fields and asked him to remove the student from the class.
When she continued to refuse to leave her seat, he told her in the video: “I’ll make you.” He then wrapped his arm around her neck, flipped her desk backward, and dragged her across the floor. He arrested her and another female student who tried to intervene.
“I don’t think it’s proper to respond to students as if they are being arrested,” Randolph, the NAACP president, said. “For what? For what?”
A spokeswoman for the school district, Libby Roof, said on Monday night that the administration was “deeply concerned”.
“We are investigating it, along with the sheriff’s office,” she said.
According to a classmate, the student in question had peeked at her cellphone during class. When the teacher tried to take the phone away, the student refused to hand it over, and when a school administrator told her to leave the class, she stayed at her desk, which is when Fields was summoned.
Officials said the confrontation at Spring Valley high school in Columbia occurred on Monday after the student refused the officer’s order to leave the classroom for being disruptive.
The sheriff’s department has placed Fields on administrative leave while it investigates the case.
The county sheriff’s office had requested a federal investigation. The federal inquiry will include the FBI, the Justice Department’s civil rights division and the US attorney’s office in South Carolina.
