Ben Fields Fired - Disparities in Classroom Discipline Based on Race

Ex-Deputy Ben Fields

In April, 33-year old police officer Michael Slager was caught on video shooting unarmed African-American driver Walter Scott eight times in the back as Scott fled a routine traffic stop on foot. 
 
Just two months later in June, 21-year old self-described white supremacist Dylan Roof's senseless massacre of nine unarmed African-American members of the Emanuele AME Church in Charleston during an evening bible study horrified the nation and the world.

A month later on July 10th, after intense debate in the South Carolina legislature and public pressure, the Confederate flag was taken down from in front of the statehouse permanently.

But even though that divisive symbol of hatred and racial oppression has been relegated to a museum, the legacy of that flag still seems to fly over the Palmetto State.

A day after a controversial court ruling that no criminal state charges will be filed against Seneca, South Carolina police lieutenant Mark Tiller for shooting and killing unarmed 19-year old Zachary Hammond on July 25th as he tried to flee a minor drug bust, the Richland County Sherriff's Department announced that Deputy Ben Fields has been fired in the wake of a shocking video showing him violently dragging an African-American female high school student from her desk and throwing her across the room.       

It's fair to assume that a healthy chunk of the American populace have seen the disturbing video clip of Fields loosing control in a Spring Valley High School classroom - and the varied reactions to it once again illustrate the extent to which issues related to race in this country continue to divide us.

CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin 1 - Don Lemon - 0

Yesterday I was watching a heated CNN discussion on the video and I thought legal analyst Sunny Hostin (pictured left) was going to pitch a fit when Don Lemon suggested that the media needed to withhold judgement on Ben Fields' actions until all the facts about what prompted the incident were known.

She made headlines herself for tearing Don a new so-and-so on a live broadcast.

When she said "Are you guys kidding me??" I seriously thought the television screen was going to crack.

On the other side of the spectrum, there were the inevitable conservative voices who predictably blamed the teenaged student whose use of a cell phone in class, sass and refusal to stop using the phone prompted Fields being summoned to the classroom.

During an appearance on Fox's The Kelly File yesterday, the dependably racist, unbalanced fringe Birther Glenn Beck leaped to the defense of Fields:
  
"The police officer is being put in an absolutely no-win situation and we're sitting around speculating on what he did. What about the teacher? What about the school? What about all the other teachers in all the other schools that now this is being seen on television and they know "all I have to do -- I can punch a police officer, I can resist arrest, and the cop's going to get in trouble." This is an absolute ticket to anarchy, which is exactly what many in our country would like."

"Ticket to anarchy", riiiight.

Mark Fuhrman: Fields used "Soft control" - Huh?

As MediaMatters.org reported, Former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman (who has admitted to intentionally targeting blacks as a police officer because he's a racist) had a rather interesting take on Fields' police technique on the unarmed female student during an appearance on Hannity yesterday when he said:

"I'll tell you why it's not excessive. He verbalized, he made contact, he verbalized, he was polite. He requested her. He verbally did that. The next level is he put a hand on her. She escalated it from there. He used soft control. He threw her on the ground, he handcuffed her. He didn't use mace. He didn't use a Taser. He didn't use a stick. He didn't kick her. He didn't hit her. He didn't choke her. He used a minimal amount of force necessary to effect an arrest."

Soft control. I guess that's where Fields threw the girl across the room onto the carpet? Got it.

Hopefully the result of the intense media scrutiny of this video will prompt greater public scrutiny of the wide disparities in school discipline based on race and ethnicity in this country; a topic which has been covered on this blog multiple times.

If you're interested in looking at some of the hard data on how the race of the student impacts the frequency and severity of school discipline, take a few minutes to look at the blog I published back on February 8th of this year entitled "Separate & Unequal: Who's Getting Disciplined in U.S. Schools and Why".

I don't mean to just "wave my own flag" or anything, I'm pressed for time as I have to get some laundry done before I go watch the GOP presidential debate and Buster the Cat gets tense when dinner is late.

So click the link above. There are some good links to Nina Stochlic's February 5th Daily Beast article on how the trend towards more frequent and severe discipline for students of color in this country is increasing; you can find links to an in-depth Department of Education report on disparities in school discipline based on race as well.

Remember, Ben Fields' actions in that Spring Valley High School classroom are not an anomaly in this nation; they're part of a wider trend that merits attention and action on the parts of teachers, administrators and most of all parents.

I doubt Mark Fuherman would call Fields' actions "soft control" if it was his own daughter being ripped out of her desk and dragged across the floor like an animal.

A lot of people are calling for charges to be filed against Fields, I'm curious to see if that happens in a state like South Carolina where violent overreactions by white police officers on unarmed people (black and white) engaged in relatively harmless rule violations seems to be disturbingly common.
 

How Early Do Disparities in Punishment & Sentencing in America Begin? Try Pre-School

Guess who's most likely to be disciplined in US schools?

The reality of the huge gaps in disparities in America based solely on race in terms of indicators like unemployment, access to mortgages, insurance rates, car loan rates and total savings are glaring enough in these troubled economic times.

Perception is a huge part of that, and when we look at how perception impacts how disciplinary measures are handed out to students in US schools, some disturbing trends are evident.  

According to Department of Education statistics, disparities in punishment based on race in the US begin as early as preschool.

Of 8,000 preschool students who were suspended from school in 2011 (yes, that's toddlers suspended from school) an alarming 45% were black or Latino children compared to 26% of white children- even though the actual enrollment rates are actually the reverse.

It's a disturbing trend that continues right on through kindergarten, elementary, middle and high school. Between 2011 - 2012, a staggering 42% of K-12 students who were suspended were black, even though blacks make up only 16% of the overall population.

The math doesn't paint a pretty picture. But it does offer some insight into how the judicial system and law enforcement agencies serve as catalysts for channeling so many minority offenders into the vicious cycle of the American prison system - many of whom are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses.

There's no question that ground-breaking books like author Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" or historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad's    "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and, the Making of Modern Urban America" originally published in 2010 have helped to bring a new energy to, and analysis of, the approach to prison reform in the United States.

Groups like The Campaign to End the New Jim Crow (CENJCPNJ) are part of a growing nation-wide network of grass roots movements dedicated to prison reform in a modern industrialized nation where the statistics are both alarming and unambiguous.

Despite ranking third behind China and India in terms of population, the United States is the world's leader in terms of the total number of human beings incarcerated in prisons. While our politicians are quick to point to China, Iran, Russia and other nations for their human rights violations, there's no nation on Earth that imprisons a higher proportion of it's own populace than America.

According to The Sentencing Project, there are currently more than 2.2 million men and women imprisoned in America; that represents an increase of 500% over the past thirty years.

Despite such daunting statistics, real gains have been made by organizations, scholars, legal experts, politicians and activists finding innovative ways to address the myriad injustices resulting from disparities in incarceration rates to enact meaningful change.

For example, according to an article in the Des Moines Register by Rekha Basu, recently a delegation made up of representatives from the NAACP and voting rights groups traveled to Geneva to petition the United Nations to address the issue of American ex-prisoners having their voting rights stripped away by state legislatures even after their sentences have been served and they've been released.

How does that translate in terms of numbers? According a report entitled "Democracy Imprisoned", a staggering 8% of the adult African-American population is disenfranchised from voting as a result of state laws that bar former inmates from the ballot box compared to 1.8% of non-whites.

Look at the statistics in some Red States: 23% of African-Americans can't vote in Florida, in Kentucky (Senator Rand Paul and Senator Mitch McConnell's state) 22% of the adult black population can't vote - in Virginia 20% can't vote. Or look at Iowa, African-Americans make up 3.2% of the total population there - yet they make up 26% of the prison population.

Criminalizing non-violent behavior isn't just limited to harsh drug sentencing laws these days either. Even though debtor's prisons were largely outlawed in the United States around the 1830's and the US Supreme Court ruled that jailing people for being unable to pay debts violated the Constitution in 1970, even today some cities and towns still lock people up for failure to pay debts.

ThinkProgress.org reports that four residents of Montgomery, Alabama recently filed a lawsuit in Federal court after they claimed they were locked up for unpaid parking tickets and forced to do cleaning work inside the jail to work off their debt.

Some cities and towns in Georgia not only lock people up for failing to pay debts, they make the debtors pay a monthly fee to Judicial Corrections Services; JCS is a private company based in Georgia that handles debt collection for a number of municipalities across the US.

Back in 2012 a judge in Harpserville, Alabama severed the town's contract with JCS because he deemed the company functioned as a "debtors prison" that piled excessive fees on people convicted of minor offenses then jailed them when they couldn't pay.

Of course companies like JCS aren't new in the United States. The south has a long and particularly disturbing history with debtors prisons and "work farms" that once functioned as a state-sanctioned method of keeping huge numbers of mostly poor rural African-Americans incarcerated doing arduous enforced physical labor sometimes for years over relatively low, or completely fabricated fees that courts knew the defendants couldn't pay because they were so poor.

For a nation that loves to present itself as a beacon of human rights to other countries, the US certainly has a broad range of issues going on within its own borders that require more public attention, as well as meaningful legal remedies to address them.

Perhaps if we can start by looking closer at why much higher percentages of black and Latino preschoolers are being suspended, we can find ways to stem the tide of young lives being steered into the American prison system; lives forever branded into a state of permanent 2nd class citizenship from being simultaneously shut out of the voting booth and the chance to find a job to become productive members of society. 

Sadly for many kids, it begins early and lasts a lifetime.