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​Video Shows Black Female Student Slammed to Ground by NC School Police Officer

After a video surfaced on social media showing a school police officers slamming a student to the ground, a law professor and educational policy expert weighs in on how we can reduce police-related violence in schools.
Photo via screengrab from video

On Tuesday, the first day of school in the New Year for North Carolina students, videos emerged on social media showing a school resource officer picking up a black female student by the torso and slamming her down on the ground. One nine-second clip shows the Rolesville High School student, sporting pigtails, looking dazed as she lay on the ground a moment before being lifted up by the officer and led away. A second video shows another angle of the officer manhandling the student, in addition to the chaos of a fight between two other girls beforehand.

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According to the poster of the first video, "the girl in the pink was trying to defend her sister who was fighting another girl. Then the cop came outta nowhere," she tweeted.

A statement released by the town of Rolesville said that school resource officer Ruben De Los Santos responded to a fight that broke out in the school cafeteria Tuesday morning. He has since been placed on paid administrative leave, and the Rolesville Police Department has requested a third party review of the incident by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.

The video is disturbingly reminiscent of other recordings showing police-related violence in schools in recent years. Last year, for example, a Baltimore school police officer was recorded slapping and kicking a young male student while a second officer watched. A Detroit officer was also captured on surveillance footage pushing, yanking, kicking, and reportedly pepper-spraying a female student who tried to ride an elevator with an expired pass. In 2015, South Carolina officer Ben Fields was fired after he was caught on video yanking up a black female student out of her desk and tossing her across the classroom when she refused to put away her cellphone.

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"The first time a lot of black and brown children experience police violence is in a school building," Brittany Packnett, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement who also helms the St. Louis office of Teach For America, told the Washington Post at the time. "The first place that our children learn to fear police, learn they're controlled instead of empowered, is in a school building. That's a perversion of the system of public education that we absolutely cannot allow, and that we cannot disconnect from this broader conversation about police violence."

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Jason Nance is a law professor at the University of Florida whose research focuses on racial inequalities in the public education system, school discipline, and the school-to-prison pipeline. He says it's unclear how often incidents of police-related violence happens in school. "To my knowledge, school districts are not required to keep these types of statistics regarding how often these incidents occurs," he tells Broadly. "Before the advent of handheld devices, we had heard about these incidents occurring. Many of these may have been brushed under the rug. But now that we have the capability of being able to video these, they're starting to surface and it's starting to substantiate many of the claims that we had heard."

Although we don't know how common these types of occurrences are, Nance says, they raise the question of what role police officers should have in schools, and whether or not they belong in schools at all. Two of the primary reasons why law enforcement would even be considered necessary in schools is to reduce school violence and deter school shootings, and thus far, the research has shown "the benefits are questionable," he says.

According to a 2013 Congressional Service Research Report, "[t]he research that is available draws conflicting conclusions about whether SRO programs are effective at reducing school violence. Also, the research does not address whether SRO programs deter school shootings, one of the key reasons for renewed congressional interest in these programs."

To help reduce the use of force on students, Nance says if administrators decide they want a school resource officer within their schools, they should specify when the officer is going to get involved in the interactions of teachers and students via a memorandum of understanding. "Hopefully what it will say is that they're not going to be involved in routine, disciplinary incidents—so, lower level incidents that historically have been dealt with teachers and administrators," he says.

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Secondly, Nance says, there needs to be better training, especially in how to handle students from groups that are more vulnerable when it comes to interactions with the police, such as people of color, LGBTQ and those with disabilities. "We need more training so that they can learn how to interact with these students better," he says. Nance argues that officers need to learn how to de-escalate and use alternative techniques to keep students out of the justice system.

"It's disheartening that we continue to see incidents like [what happened in North Carolina] occur within schools," he says. "We know that there are better ways to handle this."