High School Police Issue

     A person will never have an honest view of themselves, and no one in the media will ever have an honest view of anything done by anyone. The girl was in the desk, she moved her arm in a manner that the officer could have considered threatening, he pushed her to the ground. Those are the facts of the incident itself. However, these are not the only facts that need to be considered: if they are, a city court would be much more likely to decide the cop was innocent than a rural court due to the former likely considering teenagers more threatening. So, instead of judging anything about the incident itself or what any articles have to say about it, this post is an examination of the other people in the room, whose firsthand reactions to the incident can be used to determine whether the officer was justified in feeling threatened by the student's actions.
     The first individual to examine was the student seated to the right of and behind the girl in the white, orange, and grey shirt (Note: he is much more visible in the "raw" footage lower in the article). As the person physically closest to the girl at the time of the officer's actions, he remains seated calmly in his desk and does not even appear to flinch. This implies that violence is not a particularly uncommon occurrence in the school the officer was called to, which would mean that a reasonable person would feel at risk of injury when a student made a gesture perceivable as threatening.
     The second person whose reaction is important in the case isn't shown in the video, but (judging from the sound of the individual's voice she sounds female) at the 6~7 second mark in the video, she is heard saying "Ooh" in a tone that sounds quite typical of a teenager witnessing a fight, and not a tone that would imply distress. This lack of worry over the officer's actions can be interpreted to show that a policeman being in the school isn't that uncommon either.
     Going through every other individual at the scene is the job of a lawyer, and I'm not getting paid to be a lawyer, so I'll simply finish by pointing out two specific traits of the rest of class as a whole that imply a lack of distress: multiple students recorded the incident in a manner that was obvious to the officer, which shows they weren't worried about him being angered by the recording; and the class as a whole was fairly quiet without most members looking away from the officer, hinting that this form of interaction is not a one-time incident.
     Overall, the reactions of the students in the class show that there really wasn't anything that unusual about this incident. No one seems worried that the officer will hurt anyone else; they simply seem to be waiting for it to be done so they can tell their friends next period. In Franklin Area High School, a policeman using this type of force against a student would likely never be considered justified, but this event didn't occur in FHS. News companies were quite rapid in formulating their opinions on the incident, but they must remember that while all people are created equal, all schools are not.