Left: Convicted murderer Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck on May 25, 2020 (Facebook). Right: a Minnesota cop working as substitute teacher reenacting the prone restraint on a student (WCCO).
A Wisconsin police officer working as a substitute English teacher in Minnesota has reportedly been placed on administrative leave by his department and barred from school grounds after the principal said he “reenacted the prone restraint that resulted in the murder of George Floyd” by placing his knee on the neck of a student in class.
Local CBS affiliate WCCO reported that incident took place Monday at Woodbury High School in front of sophomores and seniors. Woodbury is a suburb of St. Paul and not far from Minneapolis, the city that employed Derek Chauvin as a police officer before he was arrested and convicted of murdering Floyd, 46, on the evening of May 25, 2020.
WCCO and the Associated Press both reported that the teacher was identified as Steven Williams, a member of the Prescott Police Department in Wisconsin who had been hired as a substitute in Minnesota through the staffing agency Teachers on Call.
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According to the reports, Teachers on Call has cut ties with Williams, the school district has banned him from its grounds, and school officials reported him to his own police department and the Minnesota Department of Education.
Woodbury High School’s principal Sarah Sorenson-Wagner and other officials penned a letter to students’ families claiming that Williams not only caused “racial harm” with an “unprovoked” reenactment of the” prone restraint that resulted in the murder of George Floyd,” but that he also told students “police brutality isn’t real” even as he allegedly said “cops would be the best criminals” since they “know how to get away with stuff.”
Williams was also accused of talking about the “dead bodies he had seen,” “repeatedly” making “racially-harmful comments,” naming people he has arrested, and saying he “once got an ‘A’ on a paper about how to away with murder,” according to the letter.
South Washington County Schools Julie Nielsen reportedly told Minnesota Now that in her three decades-plus as an educator she has “never heard of such poor judgment in a classroom.”
“It was very disturbing to us as a school district that something like that would ever occur in one of our classrooms,” Nielsen reportedly said.
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