Authorities are investigating a classroom incident between a white sheriff's deputy and a black high school student in Columbia, S.C., where the deputy, a school resource officer, flipped the female student's desk backward and dragged her to the ground.
The Richland County Sheriff has asked the FBI to investigate the incident. School officials also say they're investigating. Columbia's Mayor Steve Benjamin also called for an independent investigation, as did the school district's Black Parents Association.
With an investigation ongoing, the deputy has been shifted to other duties and ordered not to visit any schools, according to The State newspaper.
The violent incident took place Monday at Spring Valley High School, after Deputy Ben Fields of the sheriff's department was called on to remove a student who had reportedly been disruptive and refused to leave the classroom.
After two separate videos of the confrontation were posted to social media, they were widely shared and drew thousands of comments online. Other recordings have since surfaced, showing the incident from more angles.
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott has seen a video of the incident "and was very disturbed by what he saw," department spokesman Lt. Curtis Wilson tells The State. Wilson says Lott is currently out of town at a law enforcement conference.
Several students in the classroom took videos of the confrontation; one of them says, "It was definitely a scary experience."
"I have never seen anything so nasty-looking, so sick, to the point where other students are turning away, you know, don't know what to do," student Tony Robinson Jr. tells local TV WLTX 19. "That's supposed to be somebody that's going to protect us, not somebody that we need to be scared of, or afraid."
Robinson says the incident took place around mid-morning Monday, moments after the deputy was called to the classroom, a step that he says was taken after the student refused to turn over her cellphone — first to a teacher, and then to an administrator.
Robinson says he believes Deputy Fields knew things would turn physical – he asked a neighboring student to move their desk, he says, and also removed the female student's laptop before grabbing her and pushing the desk backward.
He started recording events, Robinson tells WLTX, because he felt "this is something everybody else needs to see. This is something that, we can't just let this pass by."
In the classroom, a second student was arrested, Robinson says, for "literally saying what we were all thinking: 'This is wrong.' "
Both students were detained and charged with "disturbing schools," according to multiple local media news outlets. They were later released into their parents' custody.
In recent years, Deputy Fields has been the target of two federal lawsuits, The New York Times reports. The newspaper outlines the cases, both of which allege civil rights violations by Fields. In the most recent, filed in 2013, a former Spring Valley student said Fields unfairly targets black students.
In a statement about Monday's incident, Richland 2 Superintendent Debbie Hamm said, "Student safety is and always will be the district's top priority. The district will not tolerate any actions that jeopardize the safety of our students."
After making initial contact about the case with the Justice Department Monday, Sheriff Lott filed a formal request for an investigation early Tuesday, reports local WIS TV 10.
"I'm as upset as anybody and I'm very disturbed by what I saw." Lott tells WIS. "Appropriate action is going to be taken. We're going to do it as quick as possible. This isn't something that's going to linger on for weeks, or months or even days. It's going to be done very swiftly."
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
