Video of a school resource officer wrestling with and restraining a crying 11-year-old girl is getting new attention this week after it was announced that the officer resigned amid continued criticism over his use of excessive force on a child.
The anger stems from an August 27 incident at New Mexico’s Mesa View Middle School where the now-former officer, identified as Zachary Christensen of the Farmington Police Department, tried to force the girl’s arms behind her, pushing her into the side of the school building and slamming her to the ground in the process. Christensen said the girl had violated several school rules after standing on a school bus, taking too many milks at the school cafeteria, and picking at a sign taped to a door. Christensen also alleged that the girl had assaulted the school’s principal, a claim that has since been proven to be untrue.
A recording of the incident, which was captured by Christensen’s lapel cam after it fell to the ground, shows the officer shoving the 11-year-old against the building and pushing her to the ground when she tries to stand. The girl can be heard crying and pleading with the officer to let her go as Christensen yells at her to “stop resisting.”
“I’m not resisting,” the girl, a sixth-grader clad in a pink sweater, says. “Get off of me — you’re hurting me.”
Farmington, NM police officer Zachary Christensen has resigned after video showed him roughing up a sixth grader. The officer denied he was using excessive force on the 11-year-old girl even after a school administrator told him she is not a threat to anyone. pic.twitter.com/Rhz6p4rS9Z
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) October 23, 2019
The video also shows the officer continue to push and wrestle with the girl even as school officials tell him that he is using excessive force and should let her stand up.
“She is not a threat to yourself or others at this moment,” a school official says in the video. “You are not going to use excessive force to get this done.”
“We’re not excessive,” Christensen responds as he continues to press down on the girl.
The incident quickly sparked outrage when it first happened, with the Farmington Police Department saying that it would discipline Christensen, who had been with the police department for more than a decade and had been working as a school resource officer at Mesa View for four years, for violating department policies. On Monday, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, said his office would investigate the incident.
In light of the incident, civil rights groups and education advocates have been calling attention to the ways law enforcement presence in schools can negatively affect students, particularly students of color. The video of the Farmington officer also highlights serious concerns about police use of force on minors, concerns that have led some activists to call for police to be removed from schools entirely.
Video shows the school resource officer roughly handling the student — and falsely accusing her of assault
According to the Washington Post, in a longer 77-minute body camera video released by the police department, Christensen can be seen following the 11-year-old-girl around the school as she waits for her mother to pick her up. As he does, he repeatedly points out what he sees as violations of school policy. At one point, he says that the girl took too many cartons of milk from the school cafeteria, and that she “threw a milk on the ground.”
Another time, he admonishes the girl for picking at a sign taped to a door, saying that she could be arrested for damaging the sign. “If you destroy it, it’s called criminal damage to property,” Christensen says, raising his voice. “Yeah, you’re going to go to jail for 50 cents. Yeah, plus resisting, plus disrupting the education process.”
But it was when the girl opens a door that the school principal is standing in front of, brushing against him in the process, that the officer approaches her and begins to use force, claiming that the girl had committed assault as she moved past. Christensen also claimed that the student assaulted him during the encounter, writing in an incident report that “She was very strong, stronger than I was.”
Christensen’s assault claims were later found to be false after an internal investigation. The officer submitted his resignation and left the department on October 1 after the investigation found that he had violated department policy. New Mexico State Police and the San Juan District Attorney’s office both looked into the incident but declined to pursue criminal charges against the officer.
The young girl, who has not been named publicly because she is a minor but has been identified as a sixth-grader at the school, reportedly suffered a “mild concussion and scrapes and bruises,” according to Farmington Police Chief Steve Hebbe. The girl’s family is reportedly considering filing a lawsuit.
Hebbe has described the incident as a “failure,” and the department has also said that it is reviewing department policies to prevent a similar incident from happening again. After the incident, Christensen’s supervisor was demoted and reassigned.
Video of the Farmington incident fits into larger concerns about school discipline and the “school-to-prison pipeline”
In many ways, the Farmington video highlights civil rights groups’ biggest concerns about the ways students from marginalized communities, particularly black and brown students, are often criminalized and exposed to harsh policing in their own schools. Research has shown that students of color are more likely to face harsh discipline in schools and are also more likely to be exposed to police violence.
A related issue is that these students are often the first ones pushed into what is called the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a process that sees students pushed into the criminal justice system for disciplinary infractions that activists argue could be handled in school. The issue disproportionately affects students from marginalized communities, including black, Native American, and Latinx students as well as students from low-income households and students with disabilities.
These students are more likely to be subjected to harsher punishments like suspensions and expulsions when compared to the average white student, and black boys and girls in particular have been more likely to be disciplined due to “adultification,” an incorrect belief that these students are less innocent and older than their actual age, and thus are more deserving of harsh punishment for infractions.
Students in these marginalized groups are also more likely to interact with school resource officers or law enforcement called to campuses, exposing these students to things like arrests, criminal prosecution, and police violence. A 2018 report from the Advancement Project and the Alliance for Educational Justice, for example, found that there have been more than 60 incidents of police violence in schools from November 2010 to March 2018. And a HuffPost analysis on this topic identified more than 80 incidents of students being tasered, assaulted, or pepper-sprayed between 2016 and 2018.
While efforts to fight the issue have taken on a number of forms, in recent months a large amount of attention has focused on reducing the growing number of school resource officers and other law enforcement in schools. Calls to increase the number of police present in public schools have risen since the February 2018 shooting at Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and politicians have argued that more police will improve school safety. The Trump administration has also rescinded Obama-era programs that called for schools to address vast racial disparities in school discipline, arguing that the guidance hampered local school’s abilities to deal with problem students.
These changes have led to concerns that there will be another wave in what has already been a massive growth in policing in schools over the past two decades. As civil rights groups told me last year, part of the issue is that school policing is largely unregulated, and each police department and school system are able to determine their own program for school policing. It’s led to a disjointed system that is difficult for families and students to navigate, with officers adopting different roles and dealing with students in different ways depending on where they are located.
The increase in school police officers, coupled with numerous examples of high-profile uses of force against students, has also prompted some groups to support better training for officers working in schools or interacting with minors. But a growing movement among some civil rights groups calls for police to be removed from schools entirely. These groups argue that school policing is negatively affecting students from marginalized communities and does little to keep them safe. The millions of dollars put into school policing programs, these groups say, would be better spent on student mental health services or on addressing a significant shortage of counselors in schools.
In Farmington, the video has also sparked calls for the officer to face additional punishment and for such an incident to be prevented in the future. “She’s an 11-year-old girl,” Mark Curnutt, an attorney representing the sixth-grader and her mother told local outlet KOB 4. “It’s a shock to the system to see that this is a thing that can occur at a school by a certified peace officer.”