Pacific Standard Magazine
What makes the video shocking isn’t just the violence; it’s also how rote the violence is. In the clip from October of 2015, Ben Fields—at the time, a sheriff’s deputy and the school resource officer at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina—tells a young black woman to leave the classroom. She refuses. So Fields, who is white, wraps his forearm around the student’s neck, flips her—along with her desk—onto the floor, and tosses her several feet. He then handcuffs her with chilling casualness, as if this reflexive violence toward an alleged classroom disruptor is all in a day’s work. [READ MORE]