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What We Should Learn From Viral Police Videos

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

On the same day that President Barack Obama was expressing doubts that cellphone cameras are making police too cautious, video of a police officer in a South Carolina high school was going viral on the Web because he failed to be cautious enough.

That's not the only reason that video of sheriff's deputy Ben Fields' rough takedown and arrest of an uncooperative 16-year-old girl in Spring Valley High School raised a national uproar.

The fact that he is white and the girl is black instantly became part of the ongoing national debate about how black people are treated by police.

I had an additional question as a black parent: What did the girl do to bring this trouble on herself?

Yes, we can raise that question without becoming kneejerk apologists for police brutality -- or the troubles in our racial dialogue have become way more than skin deep.

Other African-Americans like CNN anchor Don Lemon and "The View" cohost Raven-Symone have sparked backlash from some quarters for raising similar questions. How dare they "sound like conservatives," I've heard some critics say.

 

But I raise the question as a black parent and a former black student whose own parents warned me to (1) obey my teachers and (2) don't go asking for a smack-down from police.

By that simple standard, can we acknowledge that both the teen and the cop behaved badly?

The student -- whose identity was withheld because of her age -- was told multiple times by her math teacher and a school administrator to leave the classroom for using her cell phone, according to Fields' boss, Sheriff Leon Lott of Richland County.

When she refused, Fields was called in to remove her from the room, which he proceeded to do in a fashion that cannot in any way be described as gentle. On video shot by other students' cellphone cameras, Fields grabs the student's chair, flips her backwards out of her desk, drags her swiftly across the floor and tosses her across the room like a rag doll before he cuffs her hands behind her back.

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(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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