I think the cops should have taken one look and walked away.
Only if there has been deaths should any action be taken on a college campus.
No blood, let them burn it down. They have the answers and if they want the place to be like that, let it be.
It is not worth the risk to a police officer.
Martin Hyde; How easy would you say it was to get up, unassisted, from lying on the floor with your hands cuffed behind your back, when they’ve just been tasered? Do you think this amount of time is granted by the cops between the time they tell him to get up and the time they attempt to force him or taser him?
Do you think that, given he shouted “I said I would get up”, that this was a statement of continuing intent rather than of past intent - that is, he was informing the cops that he still was trying to get up, not that he had in the past but had now changed his mind (assuming he was not lying, which of course he could have been)?
An excellent argument, but one that doesn’t hold up. He apparently DID have the right to leave on his own, because he hasn’t been charged with trespassing, only cited with “obstruction/delay of a peace officer in the performance of duty”.
Incidentally, my “step-by-step summary” was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, rather than serious.
The ‘college boy’ etc. talk is judgmental bullshit. About 50% of people who’ve attended college were ‘college boys’ at one time or another. Whatever the hell this means, I don’t know. If this was a 40 year old and not a youth, would you have the same opinions?
So instead of dealing with the situations they get, they have to make a mountain of a molehill via assault? This is downplaying the fact that the police escalated the situation more than was necessary, and wasted a lot of their own time in bungling the effort and using the taser.
Keeping the peace is the exact opposite of what they were doing. Continuing to tase a screaming, stubborn student while a growing crowd looked on wasn’t getting the job done.
Looking at Bear Nenno’s pg 2 link, I don’t see how something that causes momentary pain can effectively be used to subdue anything. And hell, what did they do in the end? Dragged him out.
Does that give them free rein to treat whomever they choose as a psychopath and do their jobs poorly? Two of them can’t properly deal with one uncooperative prick? Teachers, doctors, nurses, those in customer service, etc. deal with as large a section of the public as the police; are they afforded the same excuses?
Big talk, you fucking coward.
The guy is a lot tougher then I would be.
He still continued to exercise his rights even when being tasered by a fucking nazi bully.
These guys need to be prosecuted for this gross abuse of power.
There was no need whatsoever to resort to this level of violence.
People like you make me sick, you miserable excuse for a living being.
Crawl back under your fucking rock, you pathetic ass.
Then you won’t mind me tasering you for a few minutes, right?
It isn’t the same as getting beaten, my ass.
I would rather have a billyclub to the head then get tasered.
That fucking shit is painful.
OK, I’m just crazy enough to throw in my two cents. FWIW, I’ve been a cop for 20 years.
Listen, people. Being Tasered hurts! But that’s it. It isn’t being electrocuted, it isn’t “crippling pain” or any of the other overwrought descriptions being given by people who have never felt it.
Once the current is turned off, the effects are gone instantly. You aren’t disoriented, you aren’t crippled, you aren’t weakened. It’s over, period.
I’ve been Tasered, and watched most of the officers in my department taking a hit, too (a few didn’t want to be Tased, and there is no requirement that they do so). No one suffered any ill effects at all. But I’ve seen plenty of guys hurt during defensive tactics training.
One other thing - a drive stun (using the probes on the Taser) has far less effect than the darts, because the current path is much shorter.
It appears to me that the officers were taking him out, he went to the ground and refused to walk out, and they applied pain compliance using a Taser in an attempt to get him to get up and walk. Any other pain compliance method is more likely to cause a real injury than the Taser is.
Carrying someone out sounds simple (try it sometime - it isn’t so easy), but even with three officers it is far more likely that either the student or one of the officers could get hurt (it’s very easy to hurt your back dragging someone). They tried the pain compliance, it didn’t work and they ended up having to drag him out anyway. But they couldn’t know it wouldn’t work without trying it.
Personally, I would have spent more time talking him into walking out. I find it much easier than fighting people.
You’re kidding, right? I’d take a Taser over a baton strike or even pepper spray any day of the week! The Taser hurts, but the pain is gone instantly when the current is switched off.
Have you actually been Tasered, Scoundrel Swanswater?
You have said it better then I could.
I just don’t get this level of thick-headed bully attitude that exists among people.
No, I haven’t.
Here in the Netherlands the cops fortunately don’t carry torture tools with them.
Yes, I said torture tools.
The cops were in no danger whatsoever and resorted to violence without any need.
If a cop behaved like that down here, they would be mall security in less time then it takes to press the button, and rightfully so.
It seems that the police force just draws more and more people from the same league of people, not people who want to serve and protect, but people who want to bully and scream “Respect my authoritay !!”.
I think it is sickening.
Now the cops in question are Nazis? That’s a quite a big leap you made there, Moonbeam.
I, for one am withholding judgement until the facts start to come out. You can’t tell shit from the video. Everyone here is just imagining what they want to imagine from the tiny bit of audio we’ve got.
Yeah, I should have used the term “jackbooted thugs” or “fascist bastard”.
Sorry about that. 
With those cops mentality I am surprised they did not shoot him after realising that tasering him did not work. For Christ sake, drag him out, but only use that kind of force if he is resisting arrest in an active or aggressive manner not in any passive manner. What exactly were the police trying to prove? Fine arrest him and charge him with obstructing justice but to mete out that kind of punishment is overboard. The courts should decide his punishment not some police officer who got pissed off at the students childish behaviour and then decided himself to punish him by using his taser.
Seconded. I’m fucking horrified by the pathalogical display of fascist mind-sets here. Jesus Fucking Christ it was a kid without a library card not Osama Bin Laden with a nuke. I’ve not seen such a naked display of blind authority worship, well since the last thread on blatant police brutality caused the fascists to crawl from under their rocks. WTF is wrong with you. You are meant to be Americans, the lovers of freedom and liberty, not friggin, Nazi’s.
People since the dawn of bloody time have managed to remove kids from where they shouldn’t be without using a proven killer tool. Honestly - there really is something wrong with some of you people’s heads. It’s like you get off on seeing police brutality, like you enjoy seeing others act out your sick vigilante fantasies.
Yes, that’s part of the stupidity of this event. Police depend on members of the public for their cooperation in all sorts of ways. So good impressions do count, and not only does the student being tasered have a grudge against polce in general now, but so do all the other students who saw the event.
I understand why the poice officers did it: they needed to be in control of the situation. and someone lying on the ground refusing to move puts you out of control. But if you can only control a nonviolent person by repeatedly inflicting pain on him, then there’s something wrong with your policing methods. And part of what’s wrong is that it stirs up other people.
In this event, they had an unhappy crowd around them, and they were lucky that the crowd was law-abiding: a couple of students who decided to physically intervene, e.g., by trying to take away the taser guns, would have made things a lot worse. But they rewarded the law-abiding students protesting at the treatment and asking for badge numbers with a threat of tasering. And those students – and their friends – will have this experience in their mind when they are on a jury, on a case which may depend in part on police conduct.
Irrelevant.
Correct. It is much, much, much less violent. If you people actually understood the Taser, its effects, and its benefits, you would be ENCOURAGING its use by officers. Use of Tasers dramatically decreases needless injury to suspects. Period.
Beatings decrease. Baton stikes decrease. Violence decrease.
You’re just saying shit now.
Look. A baton stike to the head is DEADLY FORCE. An ASP baton could easily break open a person’s head. You would NOT rather have this. Trust me. A cop cannot swing a club at your head unless you are an immediate threat to life, limb or eyesight. Hitting you in the head with a baton is EQUAL to shooting you with a pistol.
Using the drive stun with a Taser is way down on the use of Force spectrum below pepper spray. It’s equivalent to twisting a person’s wrist a little bit to make him come with you. That’s it. It was used in this situation to prevent the situation from escalating. From preventing violence.
That’s the point.
Cite?
Okay. So you’re a pussy too.
Citizens in this country do not have the right to trespass or the right to resist an officer. Maybe it’s different over there?
No. The use of the Taser in situations like this should be encouraged. If more cops were using it, less cops would need to throw punches or use combative tactics or injur suspects.
It’s the “level of violence” that you’re having trouble comprehending. It’s pretty much the lowest level of violence and officer can use. The only lower level of violence an officer has is presence (just being there), and verbal (telling him to do something). It is not violent. It prevented a potentially injury causing event. Period.
You dont know me, guy. What kind of people am I??
Why am I pathetic? Because I know the difference between deadly force and pain compliance? Go fuck yourself.
Nope, it highlights my point. We do not have enough to conclude. The film does not show enough for any conclusions to rendered, especially with the first use of a tazer.
The subsequent uses, as I pointed out, raise questions that need to be investigated.
Wow, the persuasive power of someone shrilly calling other people “Nazis” never fails to win me over.
I think some of us just don’t see the taser as a brutality tool. It causes pain, like an arm lock, only with a lower risk of injuring the person. It can immobilize a person for a few seconds, so you don’t need to beat him over the head with a stick or wrestle him to the ground to put on handcuffs.
The reality is all of the “non brutal” options put forth involve a significant risk of injury to either the student or the officers. Seems to me the anti-brutality folks don’t really care if the student or officers get seriously injured in the confrontation, as long as this evil tool of oppression doesn’t get used.
Yea - well the slurpy sound of people jerking off to excessive use of force never fails to sicken me.