The school resource officer in South Carolina who sparked widespread outcry after video of him body slamming a student went viral on social media was uniformly criticized by officials Tuesday.
But several former and current Spring Valley High School students painted a mixed picture of Richland County Sheriff’s Deputy Ben Fields, who during his assignment at the campus had made clear impressions. Some described him as "very nice," others recalled an authority figure who tended to escalate situations.
Jordan Bartley, an 18-year-old Spring Valley alum, described Fields as hostile, adding that anytime there was a disturbance on campus “he would take it to another level.”
At a track meet last year, a friend of Bartley’s got into a verbal altercation with a student from another school. The two were going back and forth when Fields charged in and told the students to move out of the way, Bartley told BuzzFeed News.
“He grabbed my friend,” he said. “I told him it wasn’t called for. He grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him.”
South Carolina school and law enforcement officials called the actions of Fields, who was recorded on multiple smartphones jerking a black student out of her desk and then tossing and dragging her on the floor Monday, “reprehensible” and “unforgivable."
But Fields's bombastic reputation was not as uniform among current and former students.
Ashley Howard, 19, went to E.L. Wright Middle School in Columbia while Fields was assigned there as a resource officer. She remembered him as a “very nice” officer who “just did his job.”
While she acknowledged Fields's actions on Monday were “a little extreme" and "not called for at all," she said the unidentified student "should’ve just given up her cell phone and she should’ve just got up and left."
The Justice Department on Tuesday announced that it had opened a civil rights investigation into the incident at the request of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department.
London Harrell, an 18-year-old senior at Spring Valley High, said Fields “makes Spring Valley.” She knows him as goofy, playful and dependable.
Fields has been her school resource officer on and off since she was in pre-kindergarten and he coaches with her father, who is the defense coordinator for the school’s football team.
Harrell expressed compassion for the student in the video, but defended Fields, saying he was simply responding to someone who was disrupting a class.
“I don’t want to say she deserved this,” Harrell said. “She didn’t deserve anything, but she put a lot on herself.”
The video footage capturing Fields, a white male cop, yanking a black female student from her desk highlighted ongoing tensions around the disparate violence faced by black students in schools.
While Spring Valley High School is about 51% black and about 35% white, none of the students interviewed by BuzzFeed News reported that they felt Fields’s aggression was motivated by race.
Many who described him as aggressive said he was forceful with all students, no matter their race. Bartley remembers seeing Fields slam a white student to the ground and arrest him.
“If you were causing a disturbance, he would come and treat you just the same as anybody else," Bartley said.
John Kennedy, a 16-year-old Spring Valley junior, described Fields as a "really cocky dude.”
Last year, Kennedy said Fields threw a pregnant girl to the ground during breakfast in the cafeteria because she was arguing with another student.
Kennedy also recalled a scuffle between his cousin and Field, who discovered him in a gym locker room during a basketball game retrieving something on his behalf.
“All we saw was the boy open the door screaming ‘Help me, help me’ a,” Kennedy said.
However, Kennedy said he doesn't think Fields is “a bad guy.”
“I just don’t think he should be working with high school kids,” he said. “He’s just overly aggressive.”