SC residents split on Spring Valley deputy’s firing but say videoing police is good
South Carolina residents are split along racial lines as to whether former deputy Ben Fields should have been fired after a video posted online showed him forcibly removing a girl from her seat at Spring Valley High School and sliding her across the room.
That’s according to a phone survey recently released by the Institute for Public Service and Policy Research at the University of South Carolina, where interviewers talked with 334 randomly selected state residents. The margin of error for the survey was 5.4 percent.
“I think if anything, we want to look at these situations and ask ourselves, ‘What can we learn from them?’” said Monique Lyle, director of the institute.
While 35.5 percent of white respondents said the sheriff’s department did the right thing in firing the deputy involved, that number jumped sharply for black respondents – 80.8 percent of whom said it was the right thing to do.
Was firing Ben Fields after Spring Valley the right thing to do?
Right Thing | Wrong Thing | Don't Know | Refused to Answer | Total Respondents | |
Total Percent | 48.1 | 34.6 | 10.8 | 6.6 | 334 |
Black | 80.8 | 11.5 | 2.2 | 5.5 | 89 |
White | 35.5 | 43.2 | 14.2 | 7.1 | 236 |
Other Race | 52.1 | 36.4 | 8 | 3.5 | 9 |
There was also a split on a question about whether police are typically too quick to use force. Only 24.6 percent of whites said that’s the case – contrasted with 73 percent of black respondents.
This is consistent with a Winthrop Poll released earlier this year, which showed that black South Carolinians are more fearful than white residents of unfair treatment by police and racial discrimination. In that poll, more than half of black respondents said they were very or somewhat worried about being unfairly treated by the police – and almost half said they feared being victims of racial discrimination.
Are cops too quick to use force?
Too Quick to Use Force | Force Used Only When Necessary | Don't Know | Refused To Answer | Total Respondents | |
Total Percent | 38.2 | 53.2 | 3.1 | 5.5 | 334 |
Black | 73 | 20.7 | 1.1 | 5.3 | 89 |
White | 24.6 | 65.9 | 3.9 | 5.6 | 236 |
Other Race | 48.8 | 44.2 | 3.5 | 3.5 | 9 |
Despite these splits, Lyle said there’s some consensus. A majority of those responding to the survey, both black and white, said it’s a good thing that more interactions between law enforcement and the public are being recorded on video – and disapproval of what happened at Spring Valley is noticeable.
“Many of the respondents in this survey make it pretty clear that what we all saw in the widely circulated video of former deputy Fields forcibly removing the student from her classroom is not appropriate conduct in the classroom,” she said.
This story was originally published August 24, 2016 at 6:36 PM with the headline "SC residents split on Spring Valley deputy’s firing but say videoing police is good."