A video of a female student being violently thrown to the ground and arrested by a sheriff’s deputy at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina is quickly becoming a campaign issue. Both Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley’s campaigns are calling the arrest unacceptable, with O’Malley reacting to it with apparent horror live on MSNBC last night.
Here’s O’Malley, watching the video for the first time on All In With Chris Hayes on Monday night:
“As a parent and as a father, I would be ripped ballistic if somebody did that to my daughter,” O’Malley said. “That’s pretty outrageous behavior... That’s not appropriate behavior for any adult to treat a kid.” He added that his oldest daughter is a teacher, that he’s spent time in classrooms, and that there’s “no excuse for that sort of behavior.”
Hillary Clinton, as is her wont, has avoided actually making a statement of her own on the matter just yet, but did retweet her South Carolina state director Clay Middleton, who’s also furious:
Bernie Sanders, the candidate who’s had the most to say in the past about over-policing and police violence, didn’t issue a formal statement about it, nor did he discuss it last night during an appearance on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC. As the video started to circulate yesterday evening, his campaign did tweet this, which may or may not be a reference to the video:
Ben Fields, the sheriff’s deputy working as a school resource officer, has been placed on administrative leave with pay while the sheriff’s department investigates his behavior. They claim the student was not injured.
Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.
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