Hazleton Area High School Police Assault Video

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Overview

Hazleton Area High School Police Assault Video refers to a viral video of police physically and forcefully restraining a student at Hazleton Area High School in Pennsylva. The video features several white police punching and pulling the hair of a black student, creating a public outrage following the video's spread.

Background

On February 4th, 2019, Facebook ^[1] user Emi Cespedes posted the video. They captioned the video, "This is wrong on so many levels this man violated her patrón talk so much shit when it comes to keeping the school 'safe' wonder how he gonna fix this smh what a school." The post received more than 425 reactions, 625 comments, 2,6000 shares and 153,000 views in one week (shown below).

Developments

Online Response

The following day, Twitter user @iamdejmilann tweeted the video with the caption "this is Hazleton Area High School… 🤔 Twitter do your thing." the tweet received more than 48,000 retweets and 53,000 likes (shown below).

this is Hazleton Area High School… 🤔 Twitter do your thing. pic.twitter.com/mk64frFwyv

— B A B Y D O L L🦋 (@iamdejmilann) February 5, 2019

Many negatively reacted to the video, criticizing the police in question. Twitter^[4] user @SorryAriii tweeted, "The fact that he said there was no further action being taken out on the security officers but an on going investigation against the student? Completely defended their actions slamming her head down/ pulling her hair/etc. This school is trash the people that work there are racist." The tweet received more than 400 retweets and 3,800 likes in two days (shown below, left).

Others responded with outrage in the thread as well.

Replying to @iamdejmilann The fact that he said there was no further action being taken out on the security officers but an on going investigation against the student? Completely defended their actions slamming her head down/ pulling her hair/etc. This school is trash the people that work there are racist

Replying to @TeddyHooks @iamdejmilann @kindanotcrazy Exactly. You know that saying about how "if the only thing you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail." Always think of that when cops show up anywhere in riot gear. If you're wearing riot gear, a group of friends chatting looks like a riot. Similar here,

Replying to @iamdejmilann I just called the school to explain this awful video and the main office reply was "thank you for calling, I'll let security know". is that not school security in the video ??? I need more information

Official Response

On February 5th, WBRE,^[2] a Pennsylvania news station, reported on the incident, asking Police Chief Ed Harry whether the restrained was too "brutal." He responded, "[The video] only saw a very smal portion of what was going on. They haven't seen anything about what led up to it and the entire altercation in the cafeteria."

"At that point, the officer had to get that under control immediately. You can see from the snippet of vide there were hundreds of kids in the cafeteria and they were cheering her on yelling and cheering her on. They needed to deescalate that."

Superintendent Brian Uplinger reiterated Chief Harry's point, believing that those viewing the video had not seen the full incident. He said, "It’s important to know there are always two sides to every story and it's really important for parents and students and community members to get both sides of those stories before going to social media."

That day, several of the students involved in the altercation were suspended from school.^[3]

Uplinger told BuzzFeed,^[5] "The students who were detained were involved in a large altercation with other students in the cafeteria. The security officers and school police officers were within the scope of their training to detain these individuals. Had they not, there would have been additional injuries to other students within the cafeteria."