A Pennsylvania school district police chief defended an officer caught on camera punching a 15-year-old female student in the leg and grabbing her hair while trying to subdue her.
The footage — posted to Facebook on Monday by a student at Hazelton Area High School — shows a chaotic scene in the school’s cafeteria, where one female student is being led away by a school staffer and police officer while screaming, “Let me go!”
Just feet away, another student is seen struggling with two staffers before a school police officer punches her in the left leg at least twice and throws her face-first into a table. The officer then forcefully grabs the girl by her ponytail, pressing her face into the table as at least one other student motions for the officer to relent, video shows.
Several students are seen holding their cellphones in desperate attempts to capture the melee, which ends as the second female student is led away.
“This is wrong on so many levels,” read a caption accompanying the video, which had been viewed more than 156,000 times by Friday.
Others on social media said the officer’s conduct was “unacceptable” and promised to contact district officials. Some viewers were even surprised the footage was taken inside a school rather than a correctional facility.
“Damn I thought it was jail for a second there until I read school and paid attention to the details in the video,” one woman wrote on Facebook. “Sue their a—es back into a Great Depression.”
But Ed Harry, the school district’s police chief, denied accusations that the officer used excessive force, saying the video doesn’t accurately record the entire incident as it unfolded.
“They only saw just a very small portion of what went on, they didn’t see anything about what led up to it,” Harry told WBRE. “And the entire altercation in the cafeteria, I’m going to refer to it as a melee.”
Harry said the unidentified officer and his colleagues reacted properly, saying the incident was “spiraling out of control” and necessitated a swift response.
“At that point, the officers had to get that under control immediately,” Harry told the station. “You could see from that snippet of video there were hundreds of kids in that cafeteria. They were all cheering her on … and they needed to de-escalate that.”
At least four students will be expelled from the school and could face criminal charges in connection with the fight, which broke out following an argument between two female students during lunch, WBRE reports.
The school district’s superintendent, meanwhile, asked that parents and students who watch the video exercise caution before rushing to judgment.
“It’s important to know that there are always two sides to the coin, there’s always two sides to every story,” Hazelton Area School District superintendent Brian Uplinger told WBRE. “And it’s really important for parents and students and community members to get both sides of those stories prior going to social media.”
The wild brawl was actually the result of three separate fights, Uplinger told WNEP, adding that school police officers in the district are trained to employ use of force to de-escalate incidents.
Messages seeking comment Friday from district officials were not immediately returned.
