How many adults does it take to tackle a girl standing only 4’10” tall and weighing just 100 pounds? Well, at Sam Houston High School the answer appears to be three.
Ixel Perez is that girl. She is a 10th grade student at Sam Houston High School in Texas who claims three school resource officers with the Houston Independent School District slammed her to the ground and pinned her head against the floor after she refused to hand over her cell phone.
The incident began when Perez received a message from her father who was concerned when he could not find her mother who suffers from kidney problems and receives dialysis treatment. He became worried and called Perez, asking her if she could contact her mother.
“I checked my phone, that’s the only reason I got sent out of class by my reading teacher,” Perez stated. When the assistant principal noticed her talking in the hallway, she demanded that the young girl hand her the phone. “I did not want to give her my phone because I was still worried about my mama,” Perez explained to Click2Houston.com.
“It hurt a lot and the other cop had his knee on my head, all his weight on me, and I was screaming because it hurt so much.”
Instead of handling the matter on her own, the assistant principal asked the police to intervene.
Perez admitted she refused to hand over her phone, but was shocked by the amount of force used to detain her after she did not comply. “One of them was behind me, like on my legs and trying to put the handcuffs on,” Perez recalled. “It hurt a lot and the other cop had his knee on my head, all his weight on me, and I was screaming because it hurt so much.”
The video of the event, captured by fellow students who heard her screams, seems to corroborate her account. Three officers surround Perez while one of them uses his knee to pin her head down against the floor. There has been no report that Perez acted violently or attacked the officers – she simply refused to hand over her cellphone
“It was way too much, everybody knows that. I’m only 4 foot 10 and it took three cops just because I did not want to give up my phone,” Perez said. “One day it’s going to be like an accident where they hurt somebody or they really do kill somebody and say it was an accident, and then, they are not going to tell the real side of the story.”
The response by Sam Houston High School simply stated:
The safety of our students at Sam Houston High School and of all our schools is always our absolute top priority. The HISD police department and the school’s administration are continuing their investigations of what led to the detainment of a female student yesterday.
As a result of the incident, Perez said she has been suspended from school, where officials are reportedly holding her cellphone until she pays a $15 fine.
The controversy here stems not from Perez’s initial misbehavior, but rather the response by the authorities. The young woman admitted she violated school policy by not handing over her cell phone; the question is whether the force used by the police to detain her crossed a line.
Ordering the police to pin her down on the ground with a knee in her face exceeds all bounds of proper behavior.
Student misbehavior should be handled in an appropriate manner, involving the parents and using a disciplinary approach, rather than treating a young student as if she was a dangerous criminal. While there may be times when such a response might be appropriate, such as if a student is acting in a violent or threatening manner, when school officials respond in this manner to commonplace acts of student misbehavior, negative outcomes will become rule, rather than the exception.
I. India Geronimo, a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, has previously observed that heavy police presence in schools can lead to unfavorable results:
When arresting kids for misbehaving becomes the primary mode of discipline, some of our most vulnerable populations end up being unnecessarily criminalized at very young ages before alternatives that could lead to academic success are exhausted.
The school should have called Perez’s parents, not the authorities, to calm their daughter down, and treated this as simply an instance of disciplinary concern. Ironically, if the school authorities had done that, they would have learned precisely why Perez was on the phone and why her conduct was, if not warranted under the circumstances, at least understandable.
Ordering the police to pin her down on the ground with a knee in her face exceeds all bounds of proper behavior.
Perhaps the next phone call Perez should be making is to a lawyer.
