Peruse the
South Carolina Code of Laws, current through the 2014 legislative session. Scroll down to Title 16, Chapter 3, and you'll see an important heading -
Offenses Against the Person. This is the section of the law that many would say is most important. It's the embodiment of the basest notions of the social contract, that the law should protect human beings from the harm inflicted by other human beings.
This chapter covers lots of different offenses. You have your various types of homicide, from the type of murder that OJ Simpson didn't do to the type that might be assessed if you attempted to poison your enemy. Then you've got the parts on assault and battery. The state defines assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature as a felony, punishable by no more than 20 years imprisonment. It's there in the SC Code to protect citizens from those times when other citizens might decide to beat them to a pulp.
There's a reason this exists in South Carolina law, and in the law of every other state in these United States. It's because physical assaults are painful and humiliating. Being thrown to the floor causes actual physical pain - the firing of nerve endings in the body's response to alert the brain that something has gone badly awry. They're psychologically damaging, causing in the victim a sense of impending dread. Many victims of violent crime have difficulty going back to their usual lives, require therapy, and suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The law recognizes that invading a person's space, and laying hands on their person, for the purpose of inflicting pain, is a tangible harm that has tangible effects.
The law in South Carolina has been interpreted to care at least somewhat about who is doing the assaulting and who is on the receiving end of the force. If you're a 220 pound man, for instance, you can be charged with a more serious crime when you choose to beat on someone half your size. A bodybuilder or person with boxing experience faces higher criminal responsibility when he inflicts damage on someone who's defenseless. That, too, is an embodiment of the best parts of our law - that we can protect the physically weak from the physically strong through disincentives as applied by law.
It's important to remember these laws, and their purpose, when news comes about from Shaun King that a South Carolina sheriff's deputy slammed to the ground and dragged a black child after putting her in a headlock. It's important to remember that the physical harm of an assault is real when you watch videos of that officer man-handling an apparently non-compliant, but obviously non-violent child in front of her classmates.
Too often, we view police actions in a detached manner. The cop who illegally stops and searches the black man on the street is just doing his job, we say. He's making sure nothing is awry. We fail to properly frame this incident, understanding that the act of putting one's hands on a fellow citizen without his consent is an invasive act that would otherwise be criminal. We fail to see that restraining the freedom of a fellow citizen for one of these stops is enough to constitute false imprisonment if it was done by anyone other than a police officer.
This is not to say that police officers must be held to the same standards as the rest of us. After all, there are parts of their jobs that entitle them to more privileges than a citizen might have. To effectuate arrests and ensure the public safety, they have to be permitted to, at times, restrain the freedom of citizens or otherwise exercise their power. But there must be no mistake made about it - the harm inflicted by a police officer is every bit as real as the harm inflicted by the average criminal on the street. The person whose neck finds itself under the boot of a New York City cop has suffered the same deprivation of breath as the person strangled under the sandal of a stranger. The man whose face receives the blow of a baton from a New Orleans deputy has the same broken bone as the man slammed by the weapon of his non-uniformed assailant.
We just make decisions that we'll allow police certain privileges because of necessity. We allow it because we must, because we're trained to believe it makes us safe. And sometimes, it does. But we allow the police these privileges only when they're necessary. Because we know that the most important function of the law is protect human beings from the abuses of other human beings.
Today, a self-proclaimed "strength coach" and defensive line coach, trained in bodybuilding, uses his superior strength to slam a black female child to the ground, while she was still in her taxpayer-provided desk. That same coach, also a deputy with the local sheriff's department and the school's appointed "resource officer," used this force to protect the important societal interest of ensuring that a teenager did not give too much back-sass to her teacher.
The details of what led to the assault are in dispute. Reports indicate that the young girl "refused to leave class." Surely, her violation of school code was disruptive, and surely, it should have been met with a call to home, a detention, or in extreme circumstances, an in-school intervention. That her violation led to an aggravated assault by a hulking man twice her size would defy logic if it weren't so common in 2015 America.
Video captured at the scene shows students watching helplessly. Some turned away, hoping that their averted gaze would somehow cause the offending officer to ignore them should he seek to expand his brutality. It's in this reaction that we see a snapshot of what's wrong with not only this school, but also myriad schools like it around America today.
Those students didn't respond strongly because they had seen it before. Some stated on Twitter that this is normal for the officer in question. Others surely are just used to officers in Sheriff Leon Lott's Richland County showing aggression to young black people as a default response mechanism. The video from the scene shows a student population so beat down, so oppressed, that the students were scared to speak up for fear of retribution. The message was clear, from school personnel and from the officer, that offending students could find themselves in the same position if they showed any distaste for the officer's offense.
And why wouldn't students respond that way? Their compliance is the logical result of the police state, mobilized against the poor and people of color even before they graduate high school. More and more, South Carolina is joining the legion of states that create a school to prison pipeline by dealing with behavioral issues through the placement of police officers in school. Increasingly, issues that would have been dealt with by teachers in the past are handled by cops, who tend to do what cops do. South Carolina has been an especially egregious offender when it comes to school discipline. The state has higher than average out of school suspension and referral to law enforcement rates according to a snapshot provided by the federal government. Not surprisingly, those rates are disproportionately high for both black boys and black girls in comparison to their white contemporaries, who are suspended and arrested at lower rates.
A report from the Justice Policy Institute mirrors what most within South Carolina schools already know to be true. That is, black youth are much more likely to be referred to law enforcement than their white counterparts. That report found:
In South Carolina, black students are more likely to be referred to law enforcement than their white peers. Black students make up 42 percent of student
enrollment, but 75 percent of disorderly conduct charges, of which 90 percent are
referred to law enforcement.
The easy response is to blame the police officer, to suggest that he made a mistake outside of police protocol, and that this incident was a one-off instance rather than a reflection of what happens in schools across the country. Unfortunately that's not true. The officer was just doing what officers do, which is to respond with force when they're told to do so. The officer's far from blameless, but more of the blame should be shouldered by legislators and administrators who believe it's a good idea to place deputies in schools.
South Carolina is far from lonesome on this issue. Texas used to be a primary offender before it cleaned up its act in 2013. Then, the legislature passed a new bill making it impermissible for police officers to issue Class C misdemeanor citations for a host of behavior-related offenses in schools. As the Texas Tribune reported, before the passage of that law, Texas's legal system had been bogged down with a host of trivialities that were better suited for either school punishment systems or parental punishment:
If students are charged, prosecutors can choose to make students get tutoring, do community service or undergo counseling before they get sent to court. According to the Texas Supreme Court, roughly 300,000 students each year are given citations for behavior considered a Class C misdemeanor, including disruption of class, disorderly language and in-school fighting.
It makes little sense from a societal perspective to make more cumbersome the already difficult road walked by students in America's public schools. In Spring Valley High School, the Columbia-area school where the young girl was assaulted, just more than half of the student population is black. More than one-third of the students in the school receive either free or subsidized lunch. While Spring Valley does not represent the poorest of South Carolina or Columbia's schools, the high school is home to a significant population of at-risk kids. These are kids whose futures are already endangered by a lack of opportunity and by the future-killing throws of generational poverty. Adding to those challenges a criminal record for otherwise trivial acts of teenage obstinacy is neither good for that community nor good for society at large.
Problematically, arrests in schools can haunt students down the line, even when they don't lead to convictions. Research from the Wall Street Journal suggests that students earn less when they've been arrested once. This is probably due to the fact that arrest records can dog students far into the future, making it difficult for them to get jobs, apartments, and the like. These arrest records fall heavier on the heads of poor youth, whose families lack the legal savvy or financial resources to get the charge expunged.
Schools are supposed to be places where young people are supported, where they are given the safe space to explore their intellectual curiosities, and where they're allowed to work through the sorts of behavioral issues that plague almost every teenager I've ever known. They're supposed to be places that nurture the skills and talent of every American young person before sending them to college or out into the world, where they might earn a living, make a difference, or ideally, both.
And in many parts of the country, in those small, suburban enclaves, that's what schools are. That's not what happens at the Spring Valleys of the world, though, where over-juiced deputies lie in wait to inflict harm upon young black bodies if the minds that control those bodies refuse to comply. It's not quite Comply or Die , but it's a far cry from Protect and Serve, too. Few who know South Carolina schools could imagine an officer coming into a classroom in neighboring Lexington County and taking a Chapin High School or Dutch Fork High School student out of their chair in such brutalistic fashion. Even fewer could imagine, with a straight face, a scenario where a police officer would physically assault a "nice looking" white girl in such a manner. If that officer ever braved such a mistake, the response from the prevailing community would be swift, and there'd scarcely be discussions of what the student might have done to bring this about, nor what the parents had done in failing to teach their daughter "respect." No, in those schools, this would have been dealt with like it should be dealt with, as the parents would be called, the girl would be disciplined in a way that wouldn't disrupt her intrinsically valuable life, and no one would be worse for the wear in a few weeks.
This is what happens when we don't respect the value of young black life, however. Dentionable offenses become arrestable ones because the life in question ceases to matter. And unthinkable harms - the sort of harms that would garner the perpetrator a felony sentence if they were done in any other setting - all of a sudden become not just reality, but the sort of reality that's so prevalent that students watching the attack can barely be bothered to raise a finger, except to help avert their gaze in hopes of sending the message - "NOT ME NEXT."