He’s standing in front of her desk. She’s sitting in silence, her head propped up on one elbow.

“C’mon,” he says. “Let’s go.”

Two seconds later, his arm is wrapped around her neck.

Four seconds later, the back of her desk smacks the classroom floor.

Six seconds later, he’s dragged her by her knees and flipped her out of her chair. Her empty desk topples over. She’s rolled out of view.

“Hands behind your back!” he barks. “Gimme the hands. Gimme the hands. Gimme the hands.”

This is how Ben Fields, a white sheriff’s deputy assigned to Spring Valley High School in Columbia, arrested a black teenage girl, who was caught texting in math class Monday and refused to leave her seat.

Two days after the arrest, captured in 15 seconds of video on a classmate’s cellphone that went viral, Fields was fired and banned from Richland County District 2 schools. The violent encounter triggered national outrage as the video spread over social media, prompting a federal civil rights investigation and thrusting Field’s checkered past of excessive-force lawsuits under scrutiny. The episode also reignited debate around the country about the presence of law enforcement in public schools and their increasing role disciplining students, particularly young African-Americans.

South Carolina law gives school resource officers, as Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott noted, broad leeway to criminalize textbook teenage insolence. Both the girl Fields threw and the classmate who filmed the encounter were charged with “disturbing schools” — a misdemeanor that carries a $1,000 fine and a 90-day jail sentence.

The state’s “disturbing schools” statute prohibits interfering with students or teachers, loitering on school grounds without permission, or acting in “an obnoxious manner.”

The law, enacted in the 1990s during an era of “zero tolerance” and “tough-on-crime” policies, survived a constitutional challenge nine years ago, but attorneys and some lawmakers argue the statute is so vague, it allows authorities to arrest students for almost anything.

“If you apply criminal law strictly, then students around the country are breaking the law all the time,” said Seth Stoughton, an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina and former police officer. “When one student takes chocolate milk from another student at lunch, when a student throws a wad of paper and hits another in the back of the head, when a student acts out in class, when a student refuses to obey a teacher’s instructions — all of those might be criminal infractions in the technical sense. But, except in rare instances, we shouldn’t treat them as criminal infractions. We should treat them as school discipline issues.”

“Just because the officer has the legal authority to do something,” he added, “doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.”

The rise of SROs

Nearly 20,000 law enforcement officers across the country are assigned to work as “school resource officers,” or SROs, according to a Congressional Research Service report. Their ranks rose in the wake of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. Their primary responsibility, Stoughton said, was understood as “one of public safety — to protect students, faculty and staff in school from those sort of high-risk, very dangerous, but thankfully very rare incidents.”

Yet there’s little evidence showing that the prevalence of SROs has made schools safer. According to a 2009 University of Tennessee study, schools with SROs had almost five times the number of arrests for disorderly conduct as schools without them, even when controlling for school poverty.

The U.S. Department of Education recommends that schools “carefully ensure that these officers’ roles are focused on protecting the physical safety of the school or preventing the criminal conduct of persons other than students, while reducing inappropriate student referrals to law enforcement,” according to school discipline guidelines, but teachers and administrators often use them more broadly.

“Imagine when you were in middle or high school and a student is being mouthy, is sassing a teacher, is talking back. This is something we expect the teacher to deal with in class, or perhaps to involve a school administrator,” Stoughton said. “One of the risks about SROs having a more expansive role is they come in and they view that scene not in the context of school discipline, but in the context of a criminal violation.”

In an incident that grabbed national headlines, a Summerville High School student was arrested at the start of the school year in 2014 after he wrote a fictional story about getting a gun and killing a neighbor’s pet dinosaur. It wasn’t supposed to be seen as a threat, the boy’s attorney later said, but officers took him into custody on the charge of disturbing a school.

David Aylor, his attorney, said recently that the case was still pending, but it highlighted the wide latitude the law gives to police in deciding whether to charge students.

“When you look at that obnoxious term, you don’t know where that line is drawn,” Aylor said. “And it’s a line that moves depending on the person and situation. It couldn’t get much more vague than that.”

In Greenwood County in 2004, a boy was convicted of disturbing a school after a teacher accused him of throwing papers and acting “rude and disrespectful.” His attorneys argued in courts that the law was so vague it could have a chilling effect on free speech. But the S.C. Supreme Court justices rejected the claim in a 2006 ruling, saying the law’s intent was to stop disruptions of schools. Speech that causes such a commotion, they said, is not protected.

The consequences to school zero-tolerance policies aren’t meted out equally. In South Carolina, black students are almost twice as likely as white students to be referred to law enforcement, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights data.

“Disturbing schools” is now the third most common offense associated with delinquency referrals, according to the state Department of Juvenile Justice, after third-degree assault and battery and shoplifting. In the past five years, roughly 6,300 kids have been routed to the state’s juvenile justice system on the charge of disturbing schools and the vast majority of them — 69 percent — have been black.

These vague policies have “criminalized childhood,” said state Rep. Joe Neal, D-Hopkins, who has vowed to introduce a law that either amends or kills the disturbing schools statute.

“They tend to be the students who are more difficult to teach,” he said. “And as a result there is no cry for helping them.”

Training standards

Under South Carolina law, officers aren’t required to undergo special training on dealing with students before they go to work in a school.

Although state code defines SROs as those who have completed a basic course from the National Association of School Resource Officers or the S.C. Criminal Justice Academy, that designation simply allows them to travel with school groups to events statewide without ceding their law enforcement powers, said Maj. Florence McCants, a spokeswoman for the academy.

“You don’t have to (go through the class),” she said. “It’s just a good idea. It acclimates you to some of the things you’ll be addressing.”

Fields finished a 40-hour SRO class at the academy in July 2010, according to paperwork on file there.

A 262-page lesson plan taught during the course doesn’t mention the statute on disturbing schools, but it covers such topics as gangs, drugs, child abuse, bullying and sexting. The final 43-page section delves into officers’ response to active shooters.

It recommends that SROs act as educators and counselors, as well as law enforcers.

They’re encouraged to use their own skills to get involved in classroom work. They could draw from their skills at writing incident reports while helping out in English classes, the plan suggests, or they could take the concepts used in reconstructing traffic crashes to math and physics classes.

The whole point is to become an integral part of the educational process, the lesson plan reads, “not just another security guard waiting to arrest the next student who steps out of line.”

SROs also are not given special instructions on when and how to use force in the classroom, McCants said.

That arises, she said, from the 400 hours of training they get while being certified as regular law enforcement officers in the state.

Officers are not expected to make different decisions about the use of force in the classroom than they would on the street, she said. That decision-making process on whether to charge someone also is unlikely to vary depending on the setting, McCants added.

“You’re using the same tactics,” she said. “All officers are taught the same thing, but then their judgment comes in. Each case isn’t treated the same. What you do in a high school is probably going to be a lot different from what you do in an elementary school. But it’s the officer’s judgment.”

State Rep. Wendell Gilliard, D-Charleston, who led the effort to create a system to outfit all South Carolina officers with body-worn cameras in the wake of Walter Scott’s death, plans to introduce legislation requiring background checks for prospective SROs. Scott, a black man, was shot to death by a white police officer while fleeing a traffic stop in North Charleston.

Under laws already in place, no one can be a police officer in South Carolina with a rap sheet that includes convictions carrying at least a year in prison. But a system should be created, Gilliard argues, to examine any complaints of abuse and excessive force dating back 10 years into an officer’s past.

Gilliard thinks proper training and a different mindset for SROs could have helped prevent the incident involving Fields.

“It’s a hodgepodge of problems,” he said. “We can talk about training. But I think it’s a cultural thing, too. We have to solve the problem on the law enforcement side and the parenting side. There’s enough blame to go around for everybody.”

The alternative

We don’t know what happened in the moments leading up to a classmate’s decision to hit record on her cellphone during a math class Monday at Spring Valley High.

But beyond yanking an ornery student from her desk, Stoughton said he would expect an SRO to calmly approach her and encourage “cooperation rather than compliance.”

“There’s an old saying that you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar,” he said. “That’s especially true with teens in front of their peers, friends and classmates, who often react badly to being pressured into things, to being commanded.”

If she still refuses to move, pick up the conversation after class. But if it’s necessary for the student to leave class, the more appropriate physical response would have been to carry the desk out of the room — with the student still in it.

Even that option, Stoughton said, would have been “not nearly as disruptive as what we saw.”

“I do think there is a valuable role for officers in schools. The possibility for positive interactions with students can offer tremendous benefits to community policing,” he said. “In the school context ... you’re interacting with people who are perhaps the most important for officers to have positive interactions with, and that’s young people.”

Cynthia Roldan contributed to this report. Reach Deanna Pan at (843) 937-5764. Reach Andrew Knapp at (843) 937-5414 or twitter.com/offlede.