solely on policy violences. when this was first brought to my attention on monday, even though i was out of up to at a law enforcement conference in chicago, we took action very quickly. deputy fields was placed on suspension without pay. he s been on that until today. i also immediately contacted the fbi and asked them to do the criminal investigation on this. the first was a phone call followed up by a written request. i felt like the fbi was the only agency that needed to be investigating this that did not want anybody to come up with any type of reason to say that this was not properly investigated and handled by the authorities that needed to be handled. the fbi is one of the most trusted and respected law enforcement agencies in this state and probably in the world. and that s why i turned to them and asked them to conduct a full
and now joining us is benjamin franklin who is from that area, and what is your reaction to the news that deputy fields has been fired? well, i believe, wolf, thank you for the opportunity to be here. i believe that the sheriff made the right decision today based on what we saw and millions of people around the world saw. it was a disproportionate response, and use of excessive force on the teenager, and people have to understand that as a former head of the criminal justice agency, that our discussion is about public safety, but it also about public accountability, and public trust, and the ability to police any community recognizing our police force may have 500 or so officers, we have a jurisdictional pop you of well over 100,000 metro area of 1 million, you have to have the trust and the confidence of the
not based on the training or acceptable. our training unit looked at it, they examined it. i have a written report from them, which i ll share with all of you, which goes into details on the force of how we train our officers and what we expect of them in circumstances like this. their recommendation to me was that deputy fields did not follow proper training, did not follow proper procedure when he threw the student across the room. from the very beginning, that s what has caused me to be upset. when i first saw that video and continues to upset me when i see that video is the fact that he picked a student up and threw the student across the room. that is not a proper technique and should not be used in law enforcement. and based on that, that is a violation of our policy and approximately 20 minutes ago school resource officer ben fields was terminated from the richland county sheriff s
his actions, not anything he had to do. reporter: it seems deputy fields had a reputation among the students. they nicknamed him officer slam. was any of that brought to your attention? no. he s been in the school for seven years. he s highly respected as a school resource officer. they wanted him at spring valley. he has tremendous support from faculty and staff at spring valley and from the students. of course, when something like this happens, you do have people that are going to come up to say things they have never said before. we have never heard anything like that. it has never been a complaint. it s been absolutely totally the opposite because the school wouldn t allow them to be a football coach otherwise. he was part of that school and that staff. so there was no sign or indications or anything like that. i ve read and heard some things that students have said, but
department. we have some 87 school resource officers throughout the schools in richland county. every day these deputies do a fantastic job. they work very closely with the students, the faculty and the parents and develop a great relationship. monday s actions by deputy fields was not what the school expects him to do, i expect him to do, the parents expect him to do and the community expects him to do. we get cops grants. we get cops grants to assist us in putting school resource officers in our schools. as a requirement of the cops grant, we recently had an investigative team come down to do a routine examination of the school resource program. they went to various schools to look at the number of incarcerations that we have, the number of discipline actions