This. Is. Not. Acceptable.
As you may have heard, the police officer assaulting a South Carolina high school student in this video has been fired.
And, predictably, the wingnuts are sad. Yes, that’s right. The teen-age girl being assaulted in this video had it coming, they tell us, because the nice Officer Man had asked her nicely to leave the classroom, and she refused. So the Officer Man had no choice but to make her hurt. Because a great big man couldn’t possibly have taken a 90-pound girl into hand and escorted her from the classroom otherwise. (sarcasm off)
Some vile excrement named David French actually wrote:
This is what happens when a person resists a lawful order from a police officer to move (UPDATE: CNN is now reporting that a third video shows the student hitting the officer in the face when he initially put his hands on her). Unless the school is willing to have one student commandeer the classroom indefinitely, the officer has few options beyond physical force — and the use of physical force is rarely pretty to see. In this instance, the use of force was decisive, brief, and did not physically harm the student.
If in fact this assault did not harm the student, then the student, the policeman and the school are lucky. Because he could have snapped her neck or twisted her spine.
I don’t know if David French has children, but I suspect his tune would be very different if one of his offspring were manhandled like this, for any reason. And, for the record, I’m not accepting on face value anyone’s story of what this teenager was doing in the moments before the assault.
This is so obviously outrageous you’d have to be blind not to see the wrong here. But there are lots of blind people on this planet. Indeed, the Dumbest Man on the Internet sees a double standard because a white principal was slammed to the floor by a black student (who was subsequently arrested and charged), and to him this is just the same thing as a large, and white, and male, police officer and Public Employee and Authority Figure violently assaulting a black teenage girl. And merely getting fired.
Yep, righties are whining that this is just the Liberal Media making a big Politically Correct deal out of nothing.
But this is not acceptable. There is no excuse for what the officer, Ben Fields, did in that video. I don’t care if she was not following directions. I don’t care if she punched him with her girlie little fist or spat at him or insulted his mother. He’s supposed to be an adult in charge. He’s supposed to be trained to handle situations like this in a professional and competent manner.
Oh, and the student who shot the video is still facing charges for shooting the video.