Most Americans think the South Carolina police officer who violently arrested a high school student last week acted inappropriately, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.
Ben Fields, formerly a sheriff's deputy, was fired after he was filmed flipping a black 16-year-old student (who had refused to leave her classroom) out of her chair. He had faced previous complaints for excessive force.
Some students at the school protested the firing, and media personalities including Glenn Beck came to Fields' defense.
But 57 percent of the Americans who've heard about the story agree the officer acted inappropriately, while just 24 percent think he was in the right. Black Americans were especially united, with 90 percent of those who heard about the incident, compared to just 48 percent of white Americans, saying the officer acted inappropriately.
More broadly, 82 percent of Americans, including the vast majority of black people, white people and members of both political parties, say that officers bear more responsibility than students to keep any conflicts from escalating. That's even more overwhelming than 75 percent who said last year that it's officers' primary responsibility to deescalate conflicts when any unarmed citizen is involved.
Still, 51 percent of parents say they'd feel safer with an armed police officer station at their child's school. Twenty-nine percent say they'd feel neither more or less safe, while just 3 percent say they'd feel less safe.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Oct. 31-Nov. 2 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls' methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov's reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.