Backing the Blue

Hunter Cloud, Sports Editor

Recently, a school resource officer in Spring Valley high school was shown physically removing a young woman from her desk to arrest her. Immediately, social media and news sites blew this story out of proportion. The NAACP also called for his termination. The main reason this story has gotten so big is because he used excessive force to get her out of the desk. The question is not if the excessive force too much, but was the arrest necessary and just based on  the rules that are in place at her high school.

Looking at the facts, the young lady was using her phone in class which is prohibited according to the school handbook. The teacher asked her to leave the classroom. She refused. The administrator asked her to come along and she refused once again. The handbook said that disobedience, disrupting class, poor attitude, refusal to obey, and disrespect are all punishable by some amount of detention and suspension, which she is guilty of. The school also has a rule that if there is verbal confrontation, it can lead to the arrest of a student which would justify the arrest.

    The arrest was justified, but what about the excessive force. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has described use of force as the “amount of effort required by police to compel compliance by an unwilling subject,” according to the National Institute of Justice website. The young lady in the video was uncompliant and wouldn’t get out of her desk, so the officer tried to drag her out at which point she reportedly punched him, which resulted in the officer slamming her to the ground.  

There is no problem with dragging her out of the desk to arrest her, it’s the body slam that people have an issue with. It was unnecessary to body slam her to the ground and the officer shouldn’t have done that, but at the same time hindsight is 20/20 and what may seem like the best choice then may not have been the right choice.

The officer shouldn’t have body slammed her, but in the end all the young lady had to do was follow the teacher’s, administrator’s, and the officer’s instructions and it could have been avoided. Instead, she broke several rules in the handbook including one that leads to her arrest and she resisted arrest and assaulted a police officer. The officer was just doing his job, even though he used too much force.