Tony Robinson Jr., the student who recorded the arrest in a South Carolina classroom in which a school officer flipped over a desk and dragged a teenage girl across the floor, said that he and the other students were terrified as they watched what happened.
Robinson said that an administrator had been called into the room after a girl was on her computer and took out her phone and refused to give her phone up to a teacher who asked for it.
“She really hadn’t done anything wrong,” Robinson said. “She said that she had took her phone out, but it was only for a quick second.” Although the girl did not comply with demands for the phone, she did apologize.
When the officer, Ben Fields, arrived in the class, Robinson knew something was wrong. Fields asked Robinson’s friend to move a desk, closed the girl’s computer, and then moved the computer to another desk.
“When I saw what was about to happen my immediate first thing to think is let me get this on camera. This is going to be something that not only I’m I going to be like ‘wow did this really happened at my class’ but just something that everybody else needs to see. This is something that we can’t let this just pass by,” Robinson said.
“He asked her again, ‘will you move, will you move.’ She said ‘no I have not done anything wrong.; Then he said I’m going to treat you fairly. And she said ‘I don’t even know who you are.. And that is where it started right there.”
That’s when the officer turned physical.
“I’ve never seen anything so nasty looking, so sick to the point that you know, other students are turning away, don’t know what to do, and are just scared for their lives,” Robinson said. “That’s supposed to be somebody that’s going to protect us. Not somebody that we need to be scare off, or afraid.”
“That was wrong. There was no justifiable reason for why he did that to that girl.”