Frank Vyan Walton
As is often the case and we last saw when teenager Dejarria Becton was assaulted by Corporal Casebolt in McKinney, Texas, pundits have already done plenty of pundifying about how the black teenager who was slammed to the floor for the "crime" of not leaving the classroom when asked brought it all on herself by her failure to comply. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott has said as much.
“She was very disruptive, she was very disrespectful, and she started this whole incident with her actions,” Lott said during a press conference. “She refused to leave the class as directed by the teacher, she refused to follow his instructions, he called for assistance from the school administrator, the school administrator got there — he was African American — and he attempted to get her to leave the class also, she refused his instructions and was disrespectful to him.”
Not many news agencies have reported, or even wondered why she was asked to leave in the first place. As it turns out she had momentarily looked at her phone during class, and apologized for it at the time. Nor have they wondered why the phone issue, which she had already put away, escalated to an administrator and then the now fired school resource officer who had a reputation around the campus as "Officer Slam" for his tendency to throw students to the ground, assaulted her in the first place. They say she was "disruptive and disrespectful" but witnesses state that she was arguing that she'd done nothing wrong, which actually she hadn't. Before Slamster even approached the student he had another student move his desk and clear a path, then removed the Chromebook that was on her desk -- so he planned from the moment he entered the room to assault her regardless of anything she did or didn't do.
And also it's not true, despite the claims of CNN's leading cop-apologist Harry Houck that this WWE move was "just fine" because she wasn't injured. She was injured.
State Rep. Todd Rutherford (D-Columbia) told WLTX-TV the 16-year-old girl suffered arm, neck and back injuries when Fields grabbed her by the throat and threw her to the ground after the teen refused to hand over her cell phone to a teacher.
“He weighs about 300 pounds,” Rutherford said. “She is a student who is 16 years old, who now has a cast on her arm, a band aid on her neck, and neck and back problems. There’s something wrong here.”
Rutherford told the New York Daily News that the teen recently lost her mother and is living in a foster home. The teen’s foster mother said the girl was “devastated and emotionally traumatized by all that has happened to her,” according to the Daily News.
The fact is that what this officer did was extremely dangerous, the girl could have very easily hit her head on the floor, cracked her skull, broke her neck or suffered a concussion as a result of this Officer's actions. She could have died.
And for those who say that the problem is improper parenting, the young girl in question happens to be an orphan in foster care.
[Below is] an interview with one of the videographers in the classroom, a fellow student who was also arrested for daring to say out loud that what was happening was wrong.
First from Chris Hayes who interviewed Niya Kenny who was one of the people who shot the video and was also arrested, sorry for the quality of the video I haven't found a better copy yet.
Hayes: What happened in that classroom before the video starts?
Kenny: Well, she was asked to leave the classroom. She refused to leave the classroom, and our teacher then called an administrator in the class, and she still refused to leave then Deputy Ben Fields was called in.
Hayes: Was her infraction that, I had seen reports, that she was looking at her phone? Is that what attracted the attention of the teacher, initially?
Kenny: Yes, sir.
Hayes: So she was looking at her phone, she wasn't like standing up and yelling for example?
Kenny: Not at all, she's a quiet girl. She doesn't do anything to anyone in the class, it was really because she wouldn't give up her phone.
Hayes: The teacher tries to get her out of the class because she won't turn over her phone to the administrator or leave.
Technically that's not exactly what she says, she says the teacher demanded the phone not the administrator. She wouldn't turn it over, so the administer is called who asked her to leave, she still said "No", so Deputy Fields is called.
It's after this that things get interesting.
Hayes: Is this something that you've seen before that the school resource officer is called into a situation like this?
Kenny: Never have I ever seen anything like this.
Hayes: Were you and other students surprised that it seemed to escalate to that point?
Kenny: Maybe the other kids were because they were younger and they haven't been at Spring Valley that long, I've heard about him so I wasn't really surprised, because I've heard so much about him. So I -- before he came to class I was actually telling the others to "take out your cameras" because I felt this was going to go downhill, because I've heard so much about him.
Hayes: This school resource officer in particular you have already heard about before he came in, what do you mean you've heard things about him? What have you heard?
Kenny: Yes, sir, he's known as Officer Slam around our school. I've heard, in the past, he's slammed pregnant women, teenage girls, he's known for Slamming.
Hayes: Um.. one of the things that's so striking in this video is the other students in the room seem so quiet and scared and contained. No one seems to be intervening. Why do you think that was?
Kenny: They were scared, I was scared myself. I felt the two grown men in the class were also scared themselves because who's seen anything like that? That's not normal for anyone to be handled like that, let alone a 16-year-old girl by a 300 lbs man.
Hayes: You at one point did get up to say, what were you saying, what happened?
Kenny: I was screaming, crying, like "Are you guys seriously letting this happen? This is not right, you guys know this isn't right. You guys are really letting this happen right now?" I guess they were in shock but still I felt like somebody in the class should have helped her.
Hayes: Did the teacher or the administrator say anything to the officer like "hey, this is excessive" or try to intercede in any way?
Kenny: Not at all, they were both quiet just like the kids.
Hayes: So everyone is sitting there in stunned silence, you start saying something, what happens next?
Kenny: And then the administrator, Coran Webb who was also in the class, starts telling me "Sit down Niya, be quiet Niya, put your phone away Niya." And I'm like "No, no, this is not right. I can't believe ya'll are doing this to her."
Hayes: And then you then, are eventually arrested?
Kenny: Yes, sir.
So it seems that the most dangerous and threatening thing that a young woman can say in a classroom, is "No".
This [is] an interview with another student from the same class, Tony Robinson.
Robinson: At the beginning of class I thought it was just going to be a normal day, get to work, finish off, go to lunch. Well, we were doing an assignment on the computer and I believe the girl had her phone out. And so our teacher, Mr. Long, came over, asked for the phone, she denied, she said "No". Then shortly after that he threatened to call an administrator, he did, he came, when he came the administrator tried to get her to move, and plead[ed] with her to get out of the seat, she still denied, because y'know she hadn't done anything wrong.
She said she had took her phone out, but it was only for a quick second, she was kinda begging, kinda apologetic about what happened and everything. Next the administrator called the resource officer, Deputy Fields, and when he came in the first thing that he said was he asked my friend to move the desk. And to me, that was a sign off, he could already tell what he was about to do. As far as the precaution he was gonna take for that student.
So after he told him to move the desk, he did. The video shows him shutting the Chromebook, her Chromebook, and putting it on another persons desk. He asked her again, "Will you move, will you move?"
And she said "No, I have not done anything wrong."
He said, "I'm gonna treat you fairly".
And she said "I don't even know who you are." I believe you can hear that on the tape. That is where it started right there, and I've never seen so nasty looking, so sick, to the point that other students [lifts hands as if to cover his face] are turning away, don't know what to do and are just scared for they lives. That's supposed to be somebody that's going to protect us, not somebody that we need to be scared of, and afraid. There's no justfiable reason for him as to why he had to do that to this girl.
This account jibes: she was simply saying "No" to someone in authority who simply wouldn't accept that answer and move on, they have to show they were in control even over something as minor as a quick peek at a phone by one student when clearly several other students in that class also had phones.
There's more to the video including a ridiculous cat-fight between Don Lemon and CNN's Legal Analyst and former Federal Prosecutor Sonny Hostin. Somehow Lemon thinks he knows the law better than she does, and that he has to "see more" before he can be a "judge" the officer's actions.
You actually don't need to know more, passive but adamant 16-year-old girl vs 300 lbs hyper-aggressive Cop tells you everything, she posed no threat to him or anyone else other than to their delicate egos, but the thing is that when you do -- when you listen to the other students who were right there in the room -- most of what the pundits are saying is completely, totally, absolutely wrong about what was happening before this girl was brutally assaulted by a 300 lbs 'roid raging power lifting unemployed ex-Deputy on a big giant power-trip.
Wed Oct 28, 2015 at 8:27 PM PT: Fox News decided that they want to take the advice of Mark Fuhrman on this issue, yes, really.
He claims, amazingly enough that she threw herself backwards in the chair, which makes no damn sense at all.
“I’ll tell you why it’s not excessive,” Fuhrman said. “He verbalized, he made contact, he verbalized, he was polite. He requested her. He verbally did that.”
“The next level is he put a hand on her,” he continued. “She escalated it from there. He used soft control. He threw her on the ground, he handcuffed her. He didn’t use mace. He didn’t use a Taser. He didn’t use a stick. He didn’t kick her. He didn’t hit her. He didn’t choke her. He used a minimal amount of force necessary to effect an arrest.”
All of that is, to put it mildly, bullshit.
Originally posted to Vyan on Wed Oct 28, 2015 at 06:46 PM PDT.
https://www.dailykos.com/
(2) What Niya Kenny Saw in a South Carolina Classroom
By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker
01 November 15
When a deputy sheriff named Ben Fields walked into Niya Kenny’s math class at Spring Valley High School, in Richland County, South Carolina, she took out her phone and got ready to film him. One of her classmates was in trouble for not paying attention to the lesson and for taking out her own phone; she allegedly refused to leave when a teacher, and then an administrator, told her to. So they called for a school resource officer, as the in-house law enforcement is known. “We have two—I didn’t know which one was coming,” Kenny told the local newspaper The State. When she saw it was Fields, she said, she turned to some of her classmates. “I told them to get the cameras out, because we know his reputation—well, I know his reputation.”
There are, as a result, three videos of what happened next. Fields, a tall man, flips the girls out her seat and throws her across the room. As she lands, with a thud, he berates her and begins dragging her out, by which time Niya is on her feet. “I was crying, like literally crying and screaming like a baby,” Niya told WLTX, the local CBS television station. “I was screaming what the F, what the F, is this really happening. I was praying out loud for the girl.” The teacher, meanwhile, just stands there; most of the students seem frozen, some half-hiding their eyes. One of the videos shows Fields yelling at Niya. But she wasn’t going to be quiet. Her reaction to what was happening, she told WLTX, was one of “disbelief,” mixed with something more: “I know this girl don’t got nobody.”
The first girl, whose name has not been released, does appear to have been left without the protectors she deserves, in many senses. Fields has been fired, but Sheriff Leon Lott, in announcing that decision, made a point of saying that the teacher and administrator “supported” Fields’s actions. “Even the physical part. They had no problems with the physical part.” (The Sheriff, however, did have a problem, because Fields didn’t use “proper technique”—hence the termination.) Fields was a football coach, which seems to have made him popular with some students (on Friday, a few dozen assembled to show support for him), even as others knew him as “Officer Slam.” And the Sheriff kept returning, unbidden, to what seemed to be his main message: “We must not lose sight that this whole incident was started by this student. She is responsible for initiating this action.” He also said, “She was very disruptive, she was very disrespectful—she started this whole incident.” And she had to be “held accountable.”
Disrupting school is a crime in South Carolina, a misdemeanor carrying a possible penalty of ninety days imprisonment or a thousand dollar fine, and Sheriff Lott had no qualms about pronouncing the girl’s guilt, even though what he meant by “disrupting” sounded singularly vague; there is no allegation, for example, that she was screaming or throwing things in the class, but, rather, as the Sheriff haltingly put it, “she wasn’t doing what the other students were doing…. He was trying to teach … she was preventing that from happening by not paying attention.” He said that one of the videos showed her “striking Ben Fields and resisting,” though what it actually shows looks like shocked flailing. In an earlier press conference, the Sheriff said that the girl had no injuries except possibly “rug burns”; asked why there were now reports that she had multiple injuries, he suggested that they had emerged only “now that she has an attorney.” She needs someone. (There have been conflicting reports about her family situation, including about whether she may have been in foster care at some point; Simone Martin, one of her attorneys, would confirm only that the girl’s mother, contrary to one report, is not dead; Martin declined to comment on her father, or any other aspect of her family situation.) When she sat there, in class, not brightly following the lesson, not moving, Niya appears to have known that, and probably some of the other children did, too. The adults running the school decided that they were witnessing a crime—actually, multiple crimes.
“I just couldn’t believe this was happening,” Kenny told WLTX. “I was just crying and he was like, ‘Since you have so much to say, you coming too…. You want some of this?’ And just put my hands behind my back.” Both girls were arrested, on the charge of “disturbing the school.” Spring Valley’s policy is part of a larger move, across the country, toward criminalizing school discipline. (Yesterday, the Times reported on an internal e-mail exchange at the Success Academy, a charter school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, which mentioned encouraging certain first-graders to withdraw from the school, in part by calling 911 if they caused trouble.) It is as if there is a general wariness toward children, particularly black or other minority children, or perhaps a blindness to the fact that they are children at all. (Another example is the case of Tamir Rice, the twelve-year-old who was shot dead in Cleveland seconds after the police saw him playing in a park with what turned out to be a toy gun.) When Sheriff Lott was asked, at the press conference, if the charges against Niya, at least, might be dropped, he sounded almost offended. “To my understanding, no charges have been dropped against anybody,” he said. “And, to my understanding, the charge is going to continue. What they did was wrong. They violated the law.” He said he didn’t “know all the facts” (which is certainly true) and was glad that the incident had been filmed—and yet he seemed to feel that he knew enough to condemn two young girls. Even when a reporter pressed him on the point—Niya had only stood up, after all, in response to what even he was now acknowledging was unacceptable behavior by a law-enforcement officer—he said, “She still disrupted class. You saw other students that did not disrupt class. They sat there, and they did what students are supposed to be, and that’s well-disciplined.” He also didn’t like Niya Kenny’s “language.”
But it’s the two girls who have had their education disrupted—Niya told The State that she has been suspended—and her record may have an arrest on it. She is due in court in December, though perhaps prosecutors will have seen some sense by then. (The F.B.I. is investigating whether the students’ civil rights have been violated, or if another crime has been committed.) “It should have been an adult, that’s what I think,” Niya told The State. “One of the adults should have said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa—that’s not how you do this.’ ” Niya’s mother, at least, told reporters that she was proud of her, and that seems right. In a moment when a classroom was full of shouting, Niya understood the difference between an adult with a badge and a child who was alone—or even just between an adult and a child.
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