The female high school student was disrupting her class. A male officer came to see what the problem was. He removed the girl, who complained afterward about how the officer treated her. An investigation began.
The details may sound like the controversial case in Columbia, S.C., where a video showed a sheriff’s deputy flipped over a 15-year-old girl in her desk and dragged her across a classroom. But this incident, not widely reported, occurred in April in DeKalb County.
The South Carolina case has highlighted concerns many have, including some Atlanta-area school administrators, about confrontations between school law enforcement and students. It has amplified the debate among some parents and others over when and whether forceful action is necessary to deal with students who some believe are more disruptive than they used to be, though the figures show the number of disciplinary incidents are falling. For others, it exposed long-standing concerns about how officers in schools interact with students, particularly those who are not white.
The debate is also happening as some metro Atlanta school systems are changing how they discipline students, and as they have hired more officers and beefed up security budgets.
School resource officers are primarily asked to break up fights, find weapons on campus and — in this age of mass school shootings — prevent such attacks. But the preponderance of cases they handle are students caught using drugs at school, theft, weapon possession and trespassing. The officers carry guns and can make arrests, though they also are trained in softer skills such as working with social workers and developing relationships with the students.
It’s a softer ethos than a street cop’s.
Atlanta schools still use Atlanta police, though the officers have 40 hours of special training. Atlanta leaders have discussed in recent years changing to school resource officers, which is what most districts use. Those officers are hired and trained by school administrators.
Atlanta Superintendent Meria Carstarphen is among those dismayed by what happened in South Carolina.
“Why is an officer called to a classroom when a kid doesn’t give up their cellphone?” she told the AJC. “To me that’s not an officer issue. It’s a classroom management issue … It’s about do we have relationships with kids.”
Tenisha Mercer, whose three children are high school students in Fulton County, has been paying close attention to the incident in South Carolina. She and her husband own a security company. Mercer believes a guidance counselor should have been called to handle that situation in South Carolina, not a deputy. She’s worried some schools don’t have clear guidelines about when to call in a school officer to handle an incident.
“As a parent, I want to know that,” Mercer said.
Posting officers on school campuses began in the 1950s and became more popular in the late 1960s. The number of officers in schools has drastically increased in the past decade.
Cobb County last year put school resource officers in all of its middle schools. DeKalb has officers in some of its elementary schools, and has added 10 officers to its force since 2014, which is now at 72. Gwinnett County’s budget for school resource officers has more than doubled in the past five years, from $2.2 million to about $4.85 million. Gwinnett, which was criticized a decade ago for not having enough officers, increased its force from 23 officers in 2006 to 41 in 2014. Clayton has about 30 officers.
Those increases have come amid a significant decline statewide in disciplinary incidents over the past three years, according to data The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reviewed. There were 465,959 disciplinary incidents in Georgia during the 2012-13 school year, records show. By comparison, there were 345,644 incidents during the 2014-15 school year, a 26 percent decrease.
It is not clear whether the decrease in incidents is a direct result of having more officers in schools. But school resource officer leaders defend their increased presence, saying an adult in school hallway discourages potential violence.
But that also means confrontations when officers step in. During the last school year, metro Atlanta school districts investigated more than two dozen complaints of excessive force as officers were detaining or arresting a student or intruder. Often, officers are accused of being too rough while handcuffing a student or forcefully grabbing a student. In one case, an officer was accused of hitting a student in the mouth.
In two separate cases in Gwinnett County, officers pulled out Tasers, but investigative files show neither officer used the weapon.
In many cases, the student’s version of events differed drastically from the officer’s. But in nearly every case, the officer was cleared of wrongdoing.
Some of the resource officers hired have come from police departments, and some bring troubled histories with them. An AJC investigation two years ago found at least 49 police officers who had been investigated or sanctioned by the Georgia Peace Officer Standards Training Council were working in schools. Their offenses included domestic violence, driving under the influence and lying under oath.
In the April case in DeKalb the student, who had mental and physical disabilities, began to toss over desks and chairs because she was upset about a failing grade, according to an arrest report. The officer, Willie Patterson, said he arrested her because she would not calm down. The student, who was not identified, claimed Patterson roughed her up.
“My arms were twisted like a pretzel behind my back and I was crying and yelling my arm is hurting,” she wrote.
Patterson defended his actions, and one internal report agreed with his viewpoint. The district’s public safety director, Don Smith, though, wrote in a memo to administrators that Patterson had to go.
“(B)ased on my professional experience, an alternative solution, other than an arrest would have been appropriate under the circumstances,” Smith wrote.
Patterson, who had a history of other complaints about manhandling students, resigned April 30.
Smith, who has been with the school district since 2001, said he felt the situation in South Carolina was an administrative issue that should never have involved an officer.
“Here’s the reality,” he told the AJC. “That was clearly an administrative issue. Whether (the officer) was asked or inserted himself, that should not have happened.”
In the South Carolina case, the deputy was fired Wednesday. The dynamics of the case — a white, male deputy dragging black, teenage girl — added to the alarm for some. Others wondered why a deputy was in the classroom if the student wasn't harming anyone.
AJC reader responses to the South Carolina incident are divided: the student got what she deserved because she didn’t leave the classroom; the officer’s actions were outrageous; both of them were culpable.
Carstarphen said she’s received pushback from some adults about unruly students.
“ ‘Those bad kids need to be handled like that,’ ” some have told her.
Atlanta school leaders under then-Superintendent Erroll Davis discussed replacing 55 full-time police officers and more than 200 part-timers that were working in the schools in 2013 with its own force of resource officers.
Davis said it would give the district more control over school security and be better for the students.
School officers would be there full-time, learn about the students personal lives and could work with more coordination in planning, identifying issues and heading them off. He also cited some national studies of “limited data” which indicated systems with resource officers had less violence.
Davis had filled the job during the APS cheating crisis, and the system was in transition. The system never decided to make the change, but Carstarphen said those discussions will probably come up again at budget time.
"Street cops in public schools do not necessarily make for the best, caring environment," Carstarphen said during a meeting last week with the Atlanta Association of Black Journalists.
Carstarphen spoke passionately to the journalists about how authorities deal with students, particularly African-American male students, who are often suspended and expelled at disproportionate rates in Georgia and nationwide. Carstarphen said she's heard stories from students about officers using excessive force. During the last school year, Atlanta police reported only one excessive force complaint. The officer was exonerated, Atlanta police said.
During the last school year, metro Atlanta school districts investigated more than two dozen complaints of excessive force by school officers or cases where an officer used force to detain or arrest a student or intruder. The cases typically consisted of an officer accused of being too rough while handcuffing a student, forcefully grabbing a student or, in one case, hitting a student in the mouth. In two separate cases in Gwinnett County, an officer pulled out his Taser, but investigative files show neither officer used the weapon.
Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said it was difficult for him to judge what happened in the Columbia, S.C. classroom because he didn’t know what occurred before the video recording. The group trains officers to handle potentially volatile classroom situations or remove other students from the room to prevent them from being harmed. He also said a one-on-one conversation between a student and officer often ends peacefully as opposed to an encounter with an entire class looking on.
The organization, which has about 4,200 members, doesn’t train officers on use of force because each state has its own standard operating procedure, Canady said. Many officers from Georgia attend their training. South Carolina is one of the few states that does not, he said.
Canady said he’s not entirely worried about increased scrutiny on school resource officers in the wake of the South Carolina encounter.
“Let’s face it,” he said. “It gives us a great opportunity to show what school resource officers ought to be.”
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