Spring Valley Incident Turns Spotlight on Cops in Schools

On Oct. 26, several students recorded and posted videos of a sheriff’s deputy violently ejecting a defiant student from a classroom at Spring Valley High School.

The episode cast a spotlight on issues that were already under discussion in South Carolina and nationwide: Why are there cops in schools in the first place? What should their role be? And why can students in South Carolina be arrested for “disturbing schools”?

The deputy, school resource officer Ben Fields, was summoned to the classroom after both the teacher and an administrator had unsuccessfully tried to get a 16-year-old girl to leave the class. The deputy toppled the student and her desk, dragged her out of it, then tossed the student several feet across the floor. He then handcuffed her. She and another student, 18-year-old Niya Kenny, who said she’d been defending her classmate, were charged with disturbing schools.

Outrage spread quickly. And though some have been defending the officer, school officials and Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott condemned his handling of the incident. Lott has since fired Fields.

Police have been occasionally stationed in American public schools since the 1950s, but it wasn’t until the 1990s — after the Columbine shooting and an increase in federal anti-drug funding — that school resource officers, or SROs, became commonplace.

Nationwide, there are now around 20,000 officers working in schools.

There are 87 SROs in Richland County’s two school districts, according to the Richland County Sheriff’s Department.

There’s little qualitative research on whether SROs keep schools safer. But there is some research showing that students at schools with SROs are more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses, according to a 2013 congressional report.

Despite the lack of evidence, after school shootings a clamor often rises for more officers in schools. In South Carolina, lawmakers have periodically proposed requiring every school in the state to have an SRO. Most recently, in 2014, a State House task force recommended placing an officer in every school, in addition to improving mental health services, as a way to keep children safer. Gov. Nikki Haley opposed that recommendation, saying the state shouldn’t dictate what individual schools should do. (The task force’s report has so far been ignored.)

But according to some critics, officers’ role in schools often isn’t clear. And that can create troubling situations.

Their roles should be simple and straightforward, according to Seth Stoughton, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and a former police officer. Officers should be there to keep students safe, and to establish positive relationships with young people, he says.

“Police should have no role in disciplining students,” Stoughton says. “Discipline for garden-variety schoolchild misconduct should be exclusively in the hands of educators and administrators. … Teachers and school officials need to know not to call officers to deal with that type of situation, and officers need to know that they can and should refuse a request.”

“We think of police officers as having a great deal of authority,” Stoughton went on. “They really have one authority, one thing they can do: They can arrest.” That becomes a problem when they’re called to deal with a behavioral incident, he says: “When all you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.”

Victoria Middleton, executive director of the South Carolina chapter of the ACLU, agrees, saying officers’ roles have been poorly defined.

“Are they getting enough training in identifying what behaviors are truly threatening or risky, to students themselves or to others?” Middleton asks. “Or are they not responding appropriately?”

But it’s not just civil liberties activists who are concerned.

At a news conference following the incident, the sheriff himself spoke to his discomfort with SROs’ role.

“I think sometimes our officers are put in very difficult positions — when a teacher can’t control a student, is that our responsibility to go in there and remove that student?” Lott said.

“Unfortunately, our legislature passed a law that’s called ‘disturbing schools,’” Lott said, that covers a wide range of disruptive activities. “Our goal has always been to see what we can do without arresting students. We don’t need to arrest these kids; we need to keep them in schools.”

There’ve been many legislative attempts to get rid of the disturbing schools law over the years, or to limit its scope, but they’ve lingered in committee.

Stoughton criticizes the statute, and similar laws in other states, for blurring the lines between policing and discipline.

“Essentially what they have done is allowed school officials and officers to make a call about whether a particular act should be dealt with criminally or as a behavioral disciplinary issue, and that’s a problem,” Stoughton says. “It confuses the role [police officers] should be playing in schools. It blurs a clear line that should demarcate their responsibilities.”

In the wake of the incident, Lott says, the department is reviewing its SRO policies.

Meanwhile, a coalition of groups including the League of Women Voters, the ACLU of SC, South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, the NAACP’s Charleston branch and Girls Rock Columbia has called on the state to fix the disturbing schools law “so it does not apply to students in their own schools;” to improve SRO training to address “youth development, non-violent conflict resolution, implicit bias and interacting with students with disabilities’” and to launch a study of whether police should be in schools at all.

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