David French:
The cycle of cultural hand-wringing moves fast indeed. Within 48 hours of rushing to judgment against a student resource officer in Columbia, S.C., Senior Deputy Ben Fields, forforcibly removing a young black girl from her seat after she refused demands from a teacher and administrator to leave class and then apparently hit Fields in the face when he first attempted to move her, the Left is using this incident to make a larger point about the problematic presence of police officers in public schools.
As I noted yesterday, Vox posted a widely read article saying the video “shows what happens when you put cops in schools” and called it an example of the “school-to-prison pipeline.”Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wrote a piece detailing the dramatic increase in the police presence in public schools, the much higher arrest rates when officers are present (which should surprise precisely no one), and the disproportionate impact on black youth.
Let’s begin with a point of agreement: Ideally, no one wants cops in schools.
A law-enforcement presence, by its very nature, introduces criminal law and criminal penalties into the kinds of altercations and disruptions that used to be dealt with entirely through in-house school and parental disciplinary processes. I still vividly remember the day when my father grabbed me by the arm — after receiving a note from my teacher that I’d been involved in a fight with the same kid on consecutive days — marched me over to the kid’s house, and then hashed it all out with his father, man-to-man. The dads agreed the fighting had to stop, pledged to punish us more severely than the school ever would, and — suddenly — peace reigned on the playground.
But in all too many public schools, parental involvement simply isn’t an option. As one inner-city public school teacher told me, in her first four years of teaching elementary school, she could count the number of intact, mother–father households on the fingers of one hand — and those parents weren’t even married. Very few parents bother to show up for parent/teacher conferences, and the interactions are often dominated by angry threats to sue for various perceived slights. Lousy parenting leads to horrific, often violent child behavior — and even seasoned teachers can be shocked and frightened when classroom incidents spiral out of control.
#share#Against the backdrop of a litigious culture, teachers feel hamstrung. Teachers and administrators are limited in their ability to place any physical restraint on unruly students, and when calling mom (dad typically isn’t around) isn’t a productive option, they can quickly find themselves helpless in their own classrooms. In such circumstances, zero-tolerance — as maddening as it is — starts to make sense. If teachers can’t handle significant discipline problems, then they should punish before escalation — suspend before violence.
Yet all of this represents the government schools’ inadequate attempt to respond to a problem that it simply can’t fix: the breakdown of the family and its horrific and lasting effect on young kids.
Just as I can vividly remember what it’s like to have parents fix school-discipline problems, I can also remember the moment in my high school when the police took control. A fight broke out during my senior year, a brawl so violent that teachers — even football coaches — were knocked to the ground and thrown against lockers. Students scrambling to get out of the way slipped on the bloody floors, and chaos reigned until first the sheriff and then the state police arrived in force. For the next week, we walked the halls with police officers in every corridor, and we were grateful for their presence.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426142/spring-valley-arrest-video-police
The arrest video doesn’t bother me at all.
Single parent households, children raising children, irresponsible parents…
We have allowed our politicians and bureaucrats to train the citizens to be dependent on the state and irresponsible in their personal lives, and now we are reaping the results.
The most relevant statement?
” Unless the school is willing to have one student commandeer the classroom indefinitely, the officer has few options beyond physical force — and the use of physical force is rarely pretty to see.”
This case has been glommed onto by BLM.
It has been second-guessed, using 20-20 hindsight by all sorts of pundits.
Gee, why didn’t the teacher or the administrator think of clearing the room of all students so as to deal with the disorderly girl privately, as opposed to calling in a cop?
I don’t know.
But, once the cop was there, what was he supposed to do?
His job was to get her out of her desk and out of the classroom, not run a PR campaign.
There’s at least 3 videos.
One clearly shows she tried to punch the officer more than once before he pulled her out of the chair.
Now he’s out of a job and she can’t be expelled until racial disparity is satisfied by a few white, Hispanic and an Asian student get expelled first.
I really believe that many of these incidents are just fabricated so people can make headlines. I think everyone did their job and the poor student shows up as the victim. She should be expelled.
Heh, already saw it on Yahoo hews. PC media lapdogs obviously couldn’t miss this chance to promote Great Wise Leader’s Tolerance agenda.
Seriously, libtards need to stop beating around the bush and just say it: what they want is caste society with complete impunity for … (here comes the list approved by Great Wise Leader.)
Heh, already saw it on Yahoo hews. PC media lapdogs couldn’t miss another chance to promote Great Wise Leader’s Tolerance agenda.
Seriously, libtards should finally stop beating around the bush and just say it: what they want is caste society with complete impunity for … (here comes the list approved by Great Wise Leader and Enlightened Ones.)
The far-leftist controlled press is furtively searching for such stories because it has joined Obama’s race-hustling “war on police” agenda. These progressive slime want the Federal government to seize control of all law enforcement to serve as their socialist-fascist brown shirts. The socialist-fascist controlled Democrat party needs that to happen before they can begin gun confiscation.
The day that happens will be the birth of our second Civil War.
The argument from the left is dominated by people that either do not know the nature of police work or refuse to admit it. Though I am not a cop, nor have ever been one, I know that when a physical altercation begins, the best and safest way to end it is with rapid, overwhelming force. A cop cannot afford to stand there and take blows to the face or body for the sake of polite behavior. The response which best assures the least physical harm to both the cop and the suspect is to overwhelm the suspect quickly and secure them. Girl or boy.
Remember, these are the same mentalities that condemn Israel for responding to unprovoked attacks against it; they see the attack as righteous behavior and the response as criminal. These are also the same people that love to criticize the sorry state of our educational system and demand more solutions from the federal government. Like most problems, all liberals have to offer is exacerbation of the problem.
Old guy, Nicolas, Ditto and Bill
One problem for this Peace Officer.
The incident was recorded—that’s why he’s been fired.
Excessive force by a 200 pound adult male against a 110 pound teenage girl cannot be condoned be it at home or in school.
What if it was your daughter getting man handled?
@Rich Wheeler:
I taught my daughter that if she wanted to be treated like a lady, she had to act like one. And she shouldn’t throw a punch if she didn’t want to get “man” handled by anyone, male or female, who would most likely throw a punch back. I also taught her that she should show respect for school officials, including teachers, principals and police officers, even if she didn’t agree with them about an issue.
Perhaps the parents of that girl should be pulled into the principal’s office and questioned why their daughter acted like such a shrew. Children learn by example. Obviously the examples that girl has are bad ones.
@Rich Wheeler: “The incident was recorded—that’s why he’s been fired.”
Yes, it was recorded. Part of the recording showed the suspect not only being insolent and undisciplined, but being violent. When the situation turns violent is what I was talking about.
“What if it was your daughter getting man handled?”
I would be wondering why, despite my years of impressing upon her the importance of respecting adults, respecting authority, respecting the educational system and doing in class what she was supposed to be doing there.
In other words, that situation would not be one my daughter would have been in… and never were. I wonder if the parents of this girl were wondering the same thing.
As retire05 states, garbage in, garbage out.
@retire05:
Taking a swing at someone bigger than you is stupidity. This is true regardless of the respective sexes of those involved. If you try to hit a cop, all bets are off.
What about you Rich? Would you teach your daughter:
(1) To give attitude, mouth off and take a swing at a cop?
Or would you teach them to:
(2) Use some damn common sense and don’t give the cop reason to get physical?
Rich: My wife and I brought up our daughter to be better than the shrew in the video.
Again, I think it was a planned event by the girl and her buds. I feel sorry for the officer.
If we assume a student has the right to defy authority and inappropriately in the classroom. Thus when an officer demands that the student submits and the student refuses: the officer is now supposed to walk away and admit defeat. The rights of the individual have been confirmed and protected. Police accept their role as impotent observers who can only arrest meek people who don’t want to assert their rights.
This will make life a little tougher on us who believe in the rule of law, but for the nonconformist and the criminal, life has become much easier. They are immune to the laws the rest of us observe and obey. How unique, to have a substrata of society who are above the law, like the Kennedy’s and the ruling elite’s status and the Hollywood types who are under a completely different judicial system, except this is for those without the money and prestige, “Just say ‘no’ to the cops” and everything will be OK.
The disciplinary problems in our schools has been created and made worse by liberals excusing the way punks act based on what race they may be and an overall aversion to holding anyone accountable for anything. So, as we see the left wing over-reaction to incidents like this, we see the authority throttled further and further back. The knee-jerk reaction is to involve more authority.
This is the same approach we see the left take to crime and gun control. They institute rules, regulations and laws which only affect those who would actually respect the law and abide by it. Meanwhile, left wing judges dole out light sentences to criminals and the left excuses high-crime areas because of poverty and race… all the while enacting policies which makes poverty worse for the races they have specified for special consideration. The knee-jerk reaction is to involve more authority.
Common now. It doesn’t take parents to raise a kid, it takes a village. It’s time to get with the collectivist mindset. Individual thought and responsibility are virtues of the past.
@Rich Wheeler:
One problem for this Peace Officer and cops in general those days is not actually the video.
It is gazillion of tantrum-happy social network junkies and PC media lapdogs, always happy to protect some “poor oppressed minority” until Ferguson-esque inferno starts raging around. Then they suddenly remember about authorities they were bashing not so long ago.
I may be too young to have a daughter, but not too old to forget what kind of thing public high schools are. Especially when teen cockiness is supercharged with guaranteed impunity.
And now, this girl is a hero to her friends and a nation of undisciplined, spoiled “yoofs” for getting a cop fired.
More of this behavior coming, nationwide.
They’ll even give it a cute name, like “pig trapping” or something equally fun.
Used to be, LEOs mostly had to worry about being injured by criminals.
Now they have to worry about being destroyed by people with no relevant experience, sitting in comfortable rooms sipping their lattes, taking their time judging the decisions that an officer had an instant to make.
How do we get off of this crazy merry-go-round?
@Petercat:
Maybe not. It is being reported that hundreds of kids walked out of Spring Valley High School in support of Officer Ben Fields.
http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/students-stage-walkout-support-fired-school-officer
There is a twitter video of the principal speaking to the students. Take a good look at the kids. What do you see? Kids, of all races, supporting the officer. At least we know that some of the students of Spring Valley High School have parents that taught them positive values.
If that girl had been my daughter, she would be grounded, with no cell phone, no internet, nada, until she turned 35.
@Petercat: Perhaps she can secure a home in Qatar. Isn’t that where all liberal media heroes go?