Rough Student Arrest Puts Spotlight on School Police
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA, CHRISTINE HAUSER and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

A deputy’s rough takedown and arrest of an uncooperative 16-year-old girl in a high school classroom adds fuel to a debate over the proliferation and proper role of the police in schools, where officers are often called on to deal with student misbehavior that used to be handled by teachers and administrators.

The encounter Monday near Columbia, S.C., recorded on videos that were soon seen by millions of people, was startling. But physical confrontations between officers and students in schools are not as unusual as they once were. Just this month, the actions of officers on campus generated protests in Round Rock, Tex., where an officer put a student in a chokehold to stop a fight, and in Pawtucket, R.I., where an officer slammed a student to the floor. In August, a school district in Kentucky was sued over an officer shackling children ages 8 and 9.

Since the early 1990s, thousands of school systems around the country have put officers in schools, most often armed and in uniform, while many schools have adopted “zero tolerance” policies for misconduct. That has produced sharp increases in arrests, especially for minor offenses, giving criminal records to students who in the past might have faced nothing more serious than after-school detention.

In Texas, officers often issue tickets for misbehavior that is not criminal — to offenders as young as 4, according to Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit group — and students who fail to appear in juvenile court or pay fines later find that there are warrants for their arrest.

But as common as the officers and their arrests have become, there are no generally accepted standards for how they should be trained, used, armed or organized. No one even knows for certain how many there are — most experts estimate between 10,000 and 15,000 nationwide.

Experts on school safety say the line between security, the officers’ prime responsibility, and discipline, which administrators and teachers traditionally manage, has been blurred. In the South Carolina case, a girl at Spring Valley High School defied a teacher’s instruction to stop using her phone in class and refused orders — first from the teacher, then from an administrator, and finally from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the school — to stand up and leave the classroom.

On Wednesday, Sheriff Leon Lott of Richland County fired the deputy, Ben Fields, saying that his response violated department policy. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the F.B.I. are investigating. On the videos, Mr. Fields, who is white, can be seen grabbing the girl, who is black, half-lifting her from her seat. He tips her backward until her desk and chair fall over, slamming her to the floor, and then drags her to the front of the class, all in a few seconds.

How Mr. Fields should have acted is open to debate, but people who specialize in school security said the better question was whether he should have been involved at all.

Too often, school officers are “using law enforcement responses to work with kids, and that doesn’t look so pretty,” said Lisa H. Thurau, founder and executive director of Strategies for Youth, an organization in Cambridge, Mass., that trains school officers around the country. Calling in the police undermines educators’ authority, she said, and officers “should not be dealing with cellphone issues.”

Sheriff Lott seemed to agree.

School officials “have to understand when they call us, we’re going to take a law enforcement action,” he said at a news conference.

“Should he ever have been called in?” the sheriff asked. “That’s something we’re going to talk to the school district about. Maybe that’s something that should have been handled by that teacher and that school administrator without ever calling the deputy.”

But he insisted that the girl who refused to leave the room, and another who was arrested after coming to the other girl’s defense, deserved to be arrested. “They still need to be held accountable for their actions,” he said.

Sheriff’s officials said Tuesday that the first girl was not seriously hurt. But on Wednesday, her lawyer said her arm was in a cast, and she had suffered neck and back injuries.

School discipline was already a sore point in Richland School District Two, which includes Spring Valley, with some parents maintaining that too many students are suspended and that black students are punished disproportionately. Nationally, black students and disabled students are far more likely than their peers to be suspended or drawn into the court system for school infractions.

Experts say school resource officers often have inadequate training in dealing with teenagers, defusing tensions and keeping a sense of proportion when handling minors in the absence of immediate danger. Some local lawyers have raised such concerns about Richland School District Two and have asked Ms. Thurau’s group to step in. But she said the Sheriff’s Department did not respond to her offer last spring to train school deputies.

The National Association of School Resource Officers recommends 40 hours of education in how to work in schools, and additional training in how handling special-needs students. Mo Canady, the group’s executive director, said South Carolina was one of the few states that has not agreed to send its officers to the association’s courses.

It is unclear how many organizations follow the association’s guidelines. Some campus officers receive no specific training for working in schools, while in Boston, they must pass a 100-hour training course at the William Cloran Academy, a training facility for security professionals, and then pass a so-called special police officer exam administered by the Boston Police Department.

Mr. Canady, a former school officer in Alabama, said he could not judge Mr. Fields’s conduct without knowing more, but the videos raised the question, “Was it a criminal offense going on that got him involved, or was it the heart of a school discipline matter that could be handled by school administrators?”

Who the officers work for can influence approaches to the job, experts say. Some school systems, like those of Los Angeles, Houston and Philadelphia, employ their own officers, but far more often, districts pay the local police or sheriff’s departments to assign officers to schools. In Richland County, as in many places, work in schools is a full-time, long-term job for some deputies; in others, officers rotate more quickly through that assignment.

In the South Carolina case, there may have been no easy solution to a student who is disruptive but nonviolent, and refuses to budge.

“This is why it’s so important for the S.R.O.’s to have good training and have a rapport with students,” said Chris Dorn, an analyst with Safe Havens International, consultants on school safety based in Macon, Ga. In other cases, he said, an officer “needs to make a judgment that even if forcibly removing the student might be justified, you don’t want to take it to that level.”

Moses Robinson, a school resource officer in Rochester who helps with Strategies for Youth training, said his approach was to draw attention away from the misbehaving student and not force a confrontation.

Mr. Canady said his group trains officers to first “remove the audience.”

“I would ask the school administrators to please excuse the other students and let them go out in the hall,” he said, and then talk calmly with the one left behind. “Simply ask the student, ‘What’s wrong, what’s going on, how can I help you?’ That’s a difference maker. Many times they just need somebody to listen to.”

白人警教室摔非裔女生 引民權調查

南卡羅來納州一名非裔高中女生拒絕要她離開教室的要求，被白人警察動武將她連人帶椅摔倒地上，接著又將她身子甩到一旁，再用手銬銬住她，過程被人錄下送上網路，在警方執法過當廣遭質疑之際，再度引發軒然大波，司法部27日火速表達立場，宣布將展開民權調查。

尋求聯邦協助是應富地郡警長洛特的要求，洛特表示，發生於南卡哥倫比亞市春谷高中(Spring Valley High School）的事件「非常令人憂心」，他已讓動武的資深警官菲爾德斯(Ben Fields)留職停薪。警長辦公室強調，此事件無人受傷，但在數名學生將部分經過錄下並上網分享後，已引起公憤。

被貼上網的影片顯示，菲爾德斯站在該女生身旁，叫她起立，否則要強行執法，被該女生拒絕，菲爾德斯即用手臂環扣女生頸部，將她連椅帶人翻倒地板，接著又將她往前拖幾步，然後扣上手銬。

第二名女生當場發言抗議警察對同學施暴，也被逮捕。兩名女生都被控擾亂學校秩序，之後交回家長。警方未公布這兩名女生姓名，但第二名女生妮亞‧肯尼告訴當地電視台，她對警察施暴感到震驚，覺得自己應挺身反對。妮亞母親桃樂絲說，女兒能「勇敢仗義執言」，讓她感到驕傲。

警官威爾森證實，菲爾德斯是白人，兩名女生都是非裔，但他強調此事件和種族無關。該學區非裔家長協會駁斥此說法，該協會說，此影片「暴露了非裔家長長久以來遭遇的問題」。

拍攝衝突影片的羅賓森說，事件源起於這名女生上課中掏出手機，數學老師試圖沒收，被她拒絕，並且口出惡言，老師告知學校行政當局，校方隨即召來警察。羅賓森說：「校方人員試圖要她起身離開，她說自己沒做錯事，只把手機拿出幾秒鐘，她再三懇求、道歉。接著就是校方召來警官菲爾德斯，他要求女生：『請妳離開』，她回答：『不，我沒做錯事。』」

美國執法官員和非裔男子或男孩爆發一連串時而致命的爭議事件後，警察濫施暴力事件再次成為關注焦點。公民自由及人權組織羅瑟弗中心創始人懷特海德說，警察受的訓練是對抗罪犯，「孩子不是罪犯，當他們不聽你要求起身， 或收起手機，顯示他們是愚蠢不聽話的孩子，不是罪犯」。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/police-officers-in-schools.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/usa/20151028/c28carolina/zh-hant/

2015-10-29 世界日報 編譯張玉琴