South Carolina High School Student Dragged From Class

[Zeke]

(Deep breath...)

In today's litigious society teachers, principals, authority figures, et al, are at immediate legal peril if you touch a student. Good, bad, irrelevant, etc., doesn't matter. So, they defer to police. The issue is that police -- again constrained by legal recourse -- possess less options than educators used to once called in.

There used to be things like:

1. Detention.
2. Expulsion.
3. Corporal Punishment.
4. Extra scholastic duty.

We can make up more but the important thing is that officers don't have them.

The point is, each of these -- in some manner -- can leave you open to some sort of exposure and, by and large, school systems have eradicated, gutted, left behind or otherwise minimized them with increased intervention from enforcement agencies that only possess a single option: compliance or arrest. I'm not saying this is good or bad but it is inherently hypocritical to tarnish the behavior of an officer who arrives with two options and he was called because the first one is off the table. And once we've moved to arrest, you're going down.

Look, I dealt with felons. I did not typically walk or drive a daily beat. My job as a POST certified brown guy, with a degree, who was trained by Massad Ayoob and spoke Spanish was to locate felons with warrants. They came back to incarceration whether they wanted to or not. Most of them could be readily talked down, it was not as bad ass as TV would have you believe. I used to be really good with a Glock 21 and Mini-14. If I ever touched them? I told myself I'd lost control of the situation. Even when we got our guy, I felt like I lost... But by virtue of them being parole absconders, felons, prior criminals, etc., the...nuance...of operating in a scholastic environment is not something I am familiar with. I am wholly familiar with powers once the decision to arrest has been made.

Once this officer made that call? Surrounded by innocent students? He could drag this chick out by her hair macing her face into oblivion and be legally protected. The only way he could NOT be protected is if the decision to arrest was wrong. By the time he'd arrived, he was the 3rd layer of non-compliance. Given such, it's pretty hard to sell this girl not only got what she deserved but was let off lightly.

If there is an issue here, it doesn't rest with force. Any troglodytic officer can sell, in a room full of kids, that damned near any measure of force to subdue and arrest immediately is codified as justifiable. If you really, truly, desperately desire to disparage an officer than you need to question the arrest.

Personally, once this worked it's way up the chain, I don't perceive that as questionable.

Also, I just had a tooth pulled. Vicodin makes me verbose.