On These Grounds: a shocking film about police brutality within US schools [View all]

In On These Grounds, an expansive, insightful and infuriating documentary about police brutality in the public education system, former school resource officer Ben Fields makes his case. Fields, a hulking and defensive white cop, meekly looks at the camera, clinically explaining away his actions when confronting a 16-year-old Black student identified as Shakara at Spring Valley high in South Carolina. The violent incident caught on multiple videos immediately went viral and led to his dismissal.

Fields arrived at Shakara’s classroom on 15 October 2015 after a math teacher accused the young student of being a disturbance. When Shakara refused to leave her desk, Fields wrapped his arm around her neck, slammed her to the ground, flung her across the classroom and put his knee on her as he made his arrest. He also arrested a fellow classmate, Niya Kenny, for speaking out against the use of force that left Shakara with a carpet burn over her right eye, a hairline fracture on her wrist and trauma that she will carry for years.

You’ve probably seen the videos, recorded by Kenny and her classmates, but you’ll be forgiven if you don’t remember which specific incident this is. There have been so many like it: the 2016 video of 12-year-old Janissa Valdez slammed to the ground, leaving her unconscious; the 2017 video of 15-year-old Jasmine Darwin thrown down in a cafeteria, enduring a concussion; the 2019 video of officer Zachary Christensen pinning an 11-year-old to the ground in Farmington, New Mexico, and so on. Just as I’m speaking to Garrett Zevgetis, the director of On These Grounds, over Zoom, a new video surfaces of a California school resource officer body-slamming 16-year-old Mikaila Robinson to the ground.

The issue is systemic, which is why there’s a sustained push among activist organizations to remove police from US schools. But Fields, and the majority in South Carolina who defend police conduct on campus and beyond, refuse to believe that either he or the system is to blame. Instead, they pick at Shakara, a child in foster care, and everything she may have done to bring that violence on herself.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/sep/21/on-these-grounds-documentary-police-brutality-us-schools