The principal of a school in Minnesota said that a Wisconsin police officer who was working as a substitute English teacher “reenacted the prone restraint that led to the murder of George Floyd” by putting his knee on the neck of a student in class.
The officer has been put on administrative leave by his department and is not allowed on school grounds.
CBS station WCCO in the area said the event happened Monday at Woodbury High School in front of sophomores and seniors.
Woodbury is near Minneapolis and a neighborhood of St. Paul. Derek Chauvin used to work as a police officer in Minneapolis before he was caught and found guilty of killing Floyd, 46, on May 25, 2020, in the evening.
The teacher was named as Steven Williams by both WCCO and the Associated Press. Williams is a police officer in Wisconsin’s Prescott and was hired as a substitute teacher in Minnesota through the staffing service Teachers on Call.
The news says that Teachers on Call has cut ties with Williams, the school district has banned him from the grounds, and school officials have told his own police department and the Minnesota Department of Education about him.
In a letter to the families of students at Woodbury High School, principal Sarah Sorenson-Wagner and other officials said that Williams not only caused “racial harm” by reenacting the “unprovoked” prone restraint that killed George Floyd, but that he also told the students that “police brutality isn’t real” and that “cops would be the best criminals” because they “know how to get away with stuff.”
The letter also said Williams talked about the “dead bodies” he had seen, made “racially harmful comments” many times, named people he had caught, and said he “once got an A on a paper about how to get away with murder.”
The schools in South Washington County Minnesota Now says that Julie Nielsen said she has “never heard of such poor judgment in a classroom” in her more than 30 years as a teacher.
Nielsen is said to have said, “It was very upsetting to us as a school district that something like that would ever happen in one of our classrooms.”
