Editorial:  The Columbia, S.C., case: Guilty of being a juvenile

A police officer’s job is to protect public safety, not to enforce school discipline. That’s true even in states like South Carolina that, incredibly, elevate classroom disruptions into crimes for which students can be arrested, as was the case with the Columbia, S.C., girl shown in a video Monday being tackled in her chair by a sheriff’s deputy and thrown to the floor. Her criminal offense? She wouldn’t put away her phone when the teacher told her to.

Teachers have tough jobs and sometimes must deal with teenagers who are defiant and disobedient. They deserve some backup — from principals and school administrators. And it’s an unfortunate fact of modern life that some campuses have to deal with crime and may need police to handle situations that place students, teachers or others in physical danger.

But crime and discipline are separate issues that call for different responses. Schools must discipline themselves as well as their students, and that means not encouraging or even allowing teachers who can’t handle unruly but non-dangerous students to react by calling the police.

The South Carolina incident is reigniting a debate about the unequal treatment of students by race, and rightly so. But it points to an even deeper problem: an irrational instinct on the part of the public to criminalize behavior that is undesired or unpleasant but perfectly normal. Too many juveniles are turned over to the criminal justice system for behaving like juveniles. Even among adults, acts that should be infractions are too often made misdemeanors, and too many misdemeanors become felonies.

There may well be a racial element in that kind of escalation as well, and it likely underlies the long-simmering tension between police and the communities they serve.

But it would be dishonest in the extreme for the public to sanctimoniously chide police for doing society’s most difficult work. It is the public that sets the dangerous and difficult agenda for police to follow by adopting and supporting laws that seemingly turn every social challenge into a crime and every possible solution into an arrest. It is the people of South Carolina, and the people of other states and communities across the country, who adopt onerous and unworkable laws and policies and then express outrage when they discover that arrests can be violent.

The Columbia sheriff’s deputy caught on video clearly crossed a line, and his firing seems appropriate, but he never should have been in that position in the first place. Police have a big enough challenge keeping us safe. They shouldn’t be asked to do all of our other difficult jobs as well.

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