RICHARDSON: What would you do?

I don't know how many times I've watched the video. To say it went viral is an understatement.

School Resource Officer (a highfalutin title for a campus police officer) Ben Fields entered a classroom at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. There sat a female student who had refused to stop using her cellphone and refused to leave the class when asked — first by her teacher then an administrator and finally by Fields.

The officer dumped her to the floor and dragged her to the front of the classroom in full view of the other students. Fields has been fired, but I would like to ask: What do you do when a child does not comply with authority? Certainly, the teacher and administrator didn't know how to handle her defiance, so they called in reinforcement and it didn't end well.

Did Fields handle it right? No, but what do you do? I have asked myself that question and can't come up with a good answer.

Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, was quoted by The State newspaper as saying, "The officer could have used other methods to remove the student, starting with trying to reason with her verbally. (I think the teacher and administrator tried that.) Alpert also said "Officers are trained in pressure points and come-along holds, and they're basically using pressure points and twisting the arms. It's called pain compliance. If I give enough pain, you're going to do what I want you to do."

That sounds good, but I can hear the lawyers lining up on that one, too. Here's what I think happened. If you look at the video, you'll see the other students looking on with no surprise. They just sat there.

Only one came to the student's defense. Both she and the student shown in the video are being charged with the misdemeanor of disturbing schools, which carries a penalty of up to 90 days in county jail and a fine of up to $1,000. Did the other students know the girl who defied the officer was a ticking time bomb?

So what do you do? Who's running the school?

We don't have to go four hours up Interstate 20 to Columbia to see this occur. A few years back I wrote a column about a Bibb County resource officer who was fired for simply defending himself when attacked by a student who had been in serious trouble dozens of times. What do you do?

Last week at Florin High School in Sacramento, California, a student threw the principal, Don Ross, to the ground when he tried to stop a fight. According to the Sacramento Bee newspaper, a 13-year-old and two 15-year-old students were arrested, charged with battery on school staff, but there was another casualty. The incident was also caught on video and the student videographer was suspended for three days for not turning in the video and for posting it you-know-where and making the school "look" bad. The district has a policy, according to the principal, to delete the video. I won't go into that problematic policy.

Here's the solution. Parents need to sit down and watch this video with their children and here's the script: "If you ever disobey your teacher, a principal or a resource officer and I have to come to school to deal with your stubborn-headed foolishness, it will be you and me and it will end badly for you."

I'm not advocating a beat down, but children need to know who's boss and parents can't wait until the child is a teenager to have that conversation. A child's first authority figure is the parent (hopefully parents). If parents don't require obedience, how can they expect their children to obey teachers or other authority figures?

So what punishment should the South Carolina student receive for her actions? Spring Valley looks to be a pretty nice high school. I wonder if she'll ever see another day there? If I were principal, I would not want her back in my building. The Richland School District Two has a couple of alternative schools she could possibly attend. Maybe she would do better in a different environment. Then again, maybe there are other issues we aren't privy to. Still, the officer has to deal with the consequences of his actions and so does she.

The bottom line is quite simple. None of this would have happened if the student had just done as she was told. Instead of learning, she disrupted class. She decided the rules were not meant for her for whatever reasons. Now she's on a video and her 15 minutes of infamy will live forever.

Charles E. Richardson is The Telegraph's editorial page editor. He can be reached at 478-744-4342 or via email at crichardson@macon.com. Tweet @crichard1020.

This story was originally published October 31, 2015 at 7:44 PM with the headline "RICHARDSON: What would you do? ."