Public defender calls violence against students ‘all too common’ after another student at the school filmed the altercation and posted it to Facebook

A Baltimore city school police officer was caught on video repeatedly slapping and kicking a student while another officer stood by watching. City schools police chief Marshall Goodwin was put on administrative leave Wednesday while the issue is investigated by both the school and law enforcement officials.

The video was filmed on a cellphone by another student at the Reach Partnership school. The 11-second video, in which the officer curses at the student as he strikes him in the head, doesn’t provide any context surrounding the incident, but mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told the Baltimore Sun that “the behavior that was demonstrated on the video, you never want to see anyone treated like that”.

A video originally posted on Facebook Tuesday shows a Baltimore city school police officer repeatedly slapping and kicking a student.

“Any time there is a law enforcement officer with that level of authority that seems to be abusing that authority, it impacts all of us across the country,” the mayor said, adding that it “is not helpful, as we work to build bridges of trust, to see that level of mistreatment”.

Late Wednesday, law enforcement officials opened a criminal investigation, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Jenny Egan, of the juvenile division of the state office of the public defender, said incidents like the one caught on video are “all too common”.

“Unfortunately, the incident I saw on the tape was horrifying but it didn’t shock me,” she said. “I see school police escalating minor incidents that lead to altercations every week.”

Egan said that there was another problem in addition to the physical violence depicted in the video. Both of the officers are clearly wearing guns.

“The law says that police officers not permanently assigned to school won’t carry weapons except before and after hours,” she said. “The school police changed deployment strategy … because they wanted to carry their weapons. What they’re interpreting the law to say is if a police officer is assigned to two schools, they can carry their weapons. But these officers don’t even fall under that very strained interpretation.”

School officials maintain that the officers were on foot patrol, and therefore allowed to carry their weapons.

South Carolina sheriff fires deputy seen manhandling teenage girl in video Read more

City Bloc, a student activist group, issued a statement calling for the offending officer to be fired and for an evaluation of the second officer, who stood by. “It is clear there are serious problems in the school police department that must be rectified immediately for the sake of student safety.” The officer’s name has not been released.

City Bloc’s statement refers to a previous case in which a school police officer, Lakisha Pulley, was caught on camera hitting students with a baton and was later criminally charged. “After two [publicly known] beatings of black students in the span of a year, there are no more excuses for inaction, subpar training, and unaccountability.”

The Baltimore city schools police department is independent of the city police department, which is still struggling to regain public trust after the death of Freddie Gray led to riots last April.

“They don’t report to BPD,” Egan said. “They don’t have the same transparency. Baltimore city schools doesn’t have any of those checks and safeguards, as limited as they are, that are in place for city police.”

Egan said the school police department was created in response to the “now-debunked myth of the super predator” and that school police still primarily arrest “young black students who are being over-criminalized inside the place that is supposed to be a sanctuary for them”.

“Right now, officers in schools aren’t making kids safer; they are the danger,” she said.

Egan said because most of the incidents aren’t captured on video, they go unreported because the children, who often face criminal charges, are afraid that it will hurt their case if they report the officer. “This is not like a police officer on the street. This person is at the door of their school every day. That person still has the power to harass them, arrest them, mess up their lives,” she said, adding that it was very unlikely that a court would believe a child over a police officer without video proof. Nevertheless, she said that of the 152 school-based arrests she tracked over the 2013-2014 school year, more than 70% were either dismissed, diverted, or found non-delinquent.

School officials said they became aware of the video after it was posted on Facebook on Tuesday and are “vigorously” investigating.