Carey Wedler

November 24, 2014

(TheAntiMedia) SANTA MARIA, CA- Ernest Righetti High School in Santa Maria, California is dealing with controversy after a police officer punched a female student to the ground. The student was fighting with another girl and the police officer stepped in to attempt to stop the fight.

Instead, he made it worse. Sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol reportedly showed up to “stop” the fight. A dozen patrol cars eventually arrived and a helicopter circled overhead.

The video, which you can watch by scrolling below, shows the punching cop’s aggressive response to the girl. She does appear to run toward him, but he quickly knocks her to the ground. Another cop appears the drag the girl away while the initial cop grabs a different female student.

Student Chloe Williamson told the Santa Maria Times:

“The cops made it a lot more than it had to be, pretty much…She was resisting, but he did not have to go punch her in the face. They could have tried other things before.”

This action prompted the fight to grow in size as students who witnessed the officer’s actions jumped in. Food was thrown at the officers, who remained entrenched in the fight. This allegedly followed a previous fight that according to a police statement, the offending officer had broken up.

Righetti H.S. and a neighboring school were placed on lockdown. Six students were arrested, taken to juvenile hall and charged with everything from resisting arrest and assaulting a peace officer to possession of marijuana and a knife. The police say more arrests are expected.

Though this can be taken as an example of poor police judgment and brutality, the incident highlights deeper problems with present-day policing in America.

As parent of student, John Martinez, Yolanda Martinez pointed out,

“Our daughters graduated from here, and we had never heard of anything like this. Now, we hear cops are coming here all of the time, so I don’t know what’s going on with the school. Outside of that it seems like a good school. I just don’t know what’s going on now…There are fights all the time, but when you hear guns are drawn and a girl is knocked down, you need to find out what’s happening.”

Schools have seen an increased presence of police officers in recent years, resulting in far more convictions. This not only erodes the sense of trust between student and institution, but helps foster the idea that school is a prison. If the drill bells, assigned seating, dress codes and uniform curriculum are not enough to make students believe they are controllable cogs in a machine, adding police officers into the mix to surveil them at all times certinaly does. Adding the increased risk of state punishment creates a hostile, punitive environment.

Worse, the punching police officer incident demonstrates the worst paradox in government institutions: that violence can be solved with violence.

The police officer, due to the nature of his job and training, believed it was best to stop a violent altercation by using violence. However, his action backfired and inspired further violence.

This conundrum applies in any area of government that explicitly uses aggression. The best example of this is the military, which uses violence to “stop” terrorism and oppressive regimes around the world. By using violence they inspire further acts of terrorism, a form of “blowback.”

If schools (and government and society) truly want to inspire students to be peaceful, the solution is not to let police officers set a violent example. Though in extreme circumstances individuals may be forcibly pulled off of one another, the idea that punching a teenage girl is necessary is ludicrous — even if the police claim, as they did in the Righetti High instance, that:

“You definitely have to understand that the law enforcement that are here are definitely outnumbered and I’m not sure what happened in that instance, but I feel confident that they were reacting to what was happening to them.”

Rather than perpetuating a cycle of violence and a “do as I say, not as I do” mentality, government institutions should be practicing non-aggression and communication. However, to discontinue the use of violence would be to crumble the basic foundation of the state, which relies on the use of force to compel citizens into obeying rules — as evidenced in the Righetti High School fight.

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