Video showing US policeman’s brutality against black student prompts shock response

The FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said Tuesday they had opened a civil rights investigation into the violent arrest of a black, female high school student by a white police officer in a classroom, the footage of which has gone viral and sparked outrage.

The incident in South Carolina comes amid a heightened focus on police brutality in the U.S. after a string of incidents – some deadly – involving law enforcement officials and black Americans.

Politicians, school officials and rights groups expressed outrage Tuesday, saying such violence has no place in schools. In two mobile phone videos of Monday's confrontation at Spring Valley High School in the state's capital, Columbia, an officer has a short conversation with a girl sitting at her desk before grabbing her by the neck, flipping her along with her desk over and then dragging her along the floor.

The school resource officer is heard saying: "You're either going to come with me or I'm going to make you." No one was hurt in Monday's confrontation. Officials said the incident occurred after the student refused Senior Deputy Ben Fields's order to leave the classroom for being disruptive.

School officials called the incident shocking. "It was outrageous and unforgivable, and it does not represent who this district is," Debbie Hamm, superintendent of the Richland School District Two, told reporters Tuesday. "Regardless of the reason for the officer's actions, such egregious use of force – against young people who are sitting in their classrooms – is outrageous," Victoria Middleton, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) rights group, said in a statement.

The civil rights investigation is being conducted by the Columbia field office of the FBI, the bureau's Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of South Carolina, the FBI and DOJ confirmed Tuesday to Agence France-Presse (AFP). "The FBI will collect all available facts and evidence in order to determine whether a federal law was violated," they said in a statement. Lott said the officer has been suspended without pay since Monday, and that an internal investigation to determine whether there were any violations of use-of-force policy would be wrapped up within the next 24 hours. At that time, Lott will decide whether the officer will be fired or not.

The sheriff also said the student was not injured as far he knew, though "she may have had a rug burn or something like that," and that whether or not she hit the officer was not relevant to his investigation into whether the officer should keep his job. NBC News reported Fields was previously named as a defendant in a 2013 federal lawsuit that claimed he "unfairly and recklessly targets African-American students with allegations of gang membership and criminal gang activity."

The hashtag #AssaultAtSpringValleyHigh trended on Twitter Monday as the videos went viral. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, tweeted her outrage on Tuesday. "There is no excuse for violence inside a school. The #AssaultAtSpringValleyHigh is unacceptable – schools should be safe places," Clinton said. It follows in a line of highly publicized incidents in which police have attacked Black Americans with excessive or even deadly force, incidents that are increasingly being caught on film.