“What I will say is the experience that this young man had yesterday is something that is becoming more prevalent than not with individuals who look like him.”
Hamilton County Board of Education member Karitsa Mosley Jones uttered the above statement to this newspaper Wednesday concerning an incident at East Ridge High School in which a white school resource officer (SRO) was summoned to assist with a situation in which a Black student was described as being aggressive to a coach.
The officer, according to video footage, attempted to restrain the student by pulling his hair and pushing him to the ground. However, the out-of-context footage posted on the Facebook page of the Chattanooga NAACP is only a small segment of what is said to be more than an hour of total footage of the incident.
We won’t speculate about the officer’s actions because we weren’t there, we don’t know what the student did or didn’t do when asked to comply, and we haven’t seen the video.
However, we are shocked that a school board member would make such a judgment without knowing all the facts and, more than that, would intimate with her statement that more than half of all interactions between a white resource officer and a Black student go south.