No outrage here about the UF taser incident at the Kerry speach?

Great Debates
61

Then who enforces the rules? Rules are meaningless unless someone, somewhere, has the ability to enforce them.

People put in a lot of effort to make an event like this happen, under your scenario, a single malcontent with a bullhorn can ruin the event entirely, and nobody has the right to actually stop him from doing so. Incidents like this have to happen to remind everyone that you DO have to follow the rules if you want to participate in our society. So, your college student who’s mulling over disrupting the next nearby political event has to ask himself “Is it worth it?” because there ARE consequences. Remove the consequences, and it’s just a way to kill your afternoon.

If you violate the rules, the people in charge of the event/locale have the right to ask you to leave, and the police have the right to enforce that request. Anything else is anarchy, and every public political event will be disrupted to the point of irrelevance by political opponents.

62

Polite, well-trained policemen? Just throwing out crazy ideas here.

63

Your polite well trained policemen will do what, exactly, when your malcontent refuses to comply with their polite requests to leave and their well trained attempts to gently lead him away?

Sometimes, like in this case, people are not going to comply unless you make them. There is no polite way to make someone leave a building if they don’t want to leave. Ultimately, you have to pick their asses up and physically drag them away, kicking and screaming like a 2 year old, or you’re not actually enforcing anything.

Only they’re not 2, they’re 20, and strong enough to put a major hurt on a cop who’s just trying to do his damn job without getting kicked in the face. If a quick (if very painful) shock gets Mr. 20 year old tantrum to quit being an asshole, I’m OK with it.

64

As I said, the people who run the event themselves, or the attendees, unarmed and without the authority to officially detain or lay criminal charges.

On the other hand, a group that is hosting a public event at which public officials discuss matters of public import should have to deal with some level of “disruption.” Public discourse should not be expected to be smooth, uneventful processes in which the whole world marches lockstep to the “rules.”

At some point, yes, it might be necessary to use some degree of force (like a bouncer) in order to get things moving again. But, from what I’ve seen in the video, the level of “disruption” caused by this guy was a mere hiccough and once over should have been forgotten.

“Ruin the event entirely”? Yeah, okay, sometimes someone needs to be escorted out. But if this guy “ruined the event entirely” then someone needs to get some perspective.

I didn’t say nobody has the right to stop him. I’m saying that armed officials of the government who hold criminal law authority shouldn’t be involved in a mere “disruption.”

They should also remind you that in a free society that guarantees free expression, there is a limit to how orderly things can be and how strictly rules can be enforced against the whole world.

65

We really don’t know what would have happened had the police been polite and well-trained. After all they started shoving the guy from behind for some reason. Not a polite thing to do.

66

Damn it, spoilerbox your Harry Potter crap!

67

Um…cough…

[spoiler]Y’all can chill–Harry does NOT die. So now you have to read HP7 anyway to find out who DOES die. Bwahahahahaha!!

Just goes to show what a total jerk this guy is. [/spoiler]

The 5’ 7" Better Half’s take on the whole thing, after I directed his attention to the unedited Youtube version: “That guy’s big. If I were one of those cops, I’d be happier with him down on the ground, too. Some nutcase shows up at a political forum and starts ranting–what price he pulls a gun and starts shooting? Better for all concerned if he’s out of the action ASAP.”

68

No, this guy didn’t, but similar to Paul in Saudi’s last post, we don’t know what would have happened if the police didn’t intervene. It’s not like this guy finished, and was tased after the fact, he was forced to stop.

This is a much larger issue than one guy getting loud and getting tased. It’s about how we deal with public safety and exercising control over a large group of people with a small group of people. You suggest unarmed bouncers instead of cops, I think that reducing the level of training and authority in security is going to make situations like this far worse, not better. If anything, Paul in Saudi has the right idea, better training and methods for the police, not hiring the football team’s scrubs to ‘take out the trash’.

It also deals with property rights. If I own or manage a property, I have the right to ask a person to leave. Refusal to leave is trespassing, a criminal offense where it is entirely appropriate for the police to act. I don’t think it’s right to have the police refuse to enforce those laws, and make me hire my own police force.

69

You guys might have a point if this wasn’t a fairly formal event on university property. Did none of you go to college? I went to grad school at a pretty big university and every weekend it was common for campus police to have to escort people who were acting inappropriately out of campus buildings. For example it wasn’t entirely uncommon for me to see people escorted out of the student center late on a Friday night when they’d show up drunk and acting disorderly.

College campuses have different rules from society outside of them, anyone who went to college, should realize this. For example, some colleges, you can’t bring guests into the dorms after a certain hour, or you can’t bring in guests of the opposite gender.

I agree that “inciting a riot” seems like a bullshit charge, the charge that is usually levied against people who make trouble on campus buildings and refuse to leave is trespassing. Because you are trespassing once the people responsible for managing said buildings decide you are violating the rules.

For example, one night in particular three guys where hanging out in a closed dining room on campus that was connected to a building that was left open 24/7 (and where drunk students were even tolerated on weekends as long as they weren’t making a scene.) The facilities people went in and told them they weren’t allowed to be in there, as the dining room was closed. The students response? “Fuck off, you can’t tell us what to do.” That is when they became trespassers, that is when the campus police were called in, and that is when they left. Luckily for those guys all it took was an order to “get out” from the cops to get them to leave. I have no doubt the police would have used physical force to remove them if they had refused to leave, I also have no doubt that the police would have arrested them if they had made it so they had to use said physical force.

Maybe the university should put up with some level of disruption, but this isn’t a public park or something, they don’t have to put up with any level of disruption. Just ask the hundreds of college students every Saturday who get escorted out of football games whether or not the campus police have the authority to remove them for causing a disruption, even if it is not criminal in nature. The simple fact of the matter is yes, they do. The police most certainly have the right to make you leave a building even if you aren’t doing anything criminally.

I agree that the student in question didn’t commit any criminal offenses at first, but the second he started physically resisting that was a crime, period. You don’t get to push the police or try to run through them or et cetera. That’s against the law and it is against the law for some very good, sensible reasons.

Imagine a university convocation, where the school President is talking to a (silent) audience of incoming freshman. What if one of the freshmen gets up out of his seat and starts screaming questions to the President, demanding answers? Does he just have to sit there and deal with it? What if he is physically intimidating and the people who work at the facility (who are not trained police or security) don’t feel comfortable removing him and ending his disturbance? Would it not be appropriate to call in the police? University events have university rules, and students know that, these rules aren’t kept secret. It’s known that if you break the rules at an event you can be asked to leave, and that if you refuse to leave you become a trespasser and can be physically forced to leave by law enforcement. It doesn’t matter if your initial act is criminal, the university has the right to set up rules of behavior at its events and has the right to eject you from said event from breaking said rules. I definitely agree that breaking those rules is not a crime, but refusing to leave makes you a trespasser and resisting arrest is itself a second crime.

It’s really not that much different from being told you have to leave a bar or any other private business. Sure, university buildings are “publicly funded” (at least in theory), but the university officials have the same right to set up rules of conduct within in them as judges have the right to manage conduct in their courtrooms (which are also public buildings.) While breaking the “rules” in a bar isn’t a crime, refusing to leave becomes a crime and resisting arrest if they call the police is likewise a crime.

70

Yeah, lets keep in mind this was a structured event, not an “open mic” as it was described upthread. Students were waiting in line to get a chance to ask questions at the mic, if you’ve ever been to any sort of political meeting with a politician (I went to a few town hall Q&A sessions with Senator McCain in 2000), you would understand that the politician usually has an itinerary and doesn’t have the time to answer every single question that could be asked. So eventually they come to the point where they have to say “thanks for your support blah blah blah, but we can’t answer anymore questions right now.” When this Meyer guy heard that, he got mad and skipped line, jumping through students and alerting police to his presence. The descriptions I have read suggest that people were surprised about why he was running through the crowd, and personally I think it’s damn good the cops moved over to see what he was doing, as having some random person charging towards an elected official isn’t something to sit on your hands about. He broke the “rules” of the event by skipping line and asking a question out of turn. It’s not really any different from say, a college professor who has his students raise their hands, and, when he chooses one person over another to hear their question, the other person jumps up and belts out his question anyway. A lot of profs would probably let it slide, some would admonish the student and move on, but some might simply get mad and kick the student out of their class for the day–which they have the right to do.

Kerry, decided he would answer the person who was in front of Meyer, and then address Meyer’s questions. I have a feeling Kerry realized Meyer was probably going to make a scene if he did not do this, and that’s why he agreed to do it. FWIW, at this stage it seemed like everyone involved was going to let Meyer have his way, even though he had engaged in jerkish behavior and shouldn’t have gotten his question answered over the people who had properly waited their turns as per the rules of the vent.

They didn’t cut Meyer’s mic off until after he went into a tangent about Bill Clinton getting a blow job and the Skull & Bones fraternity, I think at that point it was evident Meyer was using the mic as his own platform and was not genuinely interested in hearing what Kerry had to say.

I doubt the police turned off the mic, I have a feeling who ever was running the event turned off the mic and they probably instructed the police to remove Meyer at this point.

71

Yes, while he was talking the level of the crowd was at groans and eye rolling. When the cops got involved it moved to people milling about aimlessly, clearly agitated, people laughing raucously and other people pleading with the cops not to do this. The man shows no evidence of being a threat of any kind.

Believing that the cops will taser you because you say something unpopular isn’t the same as going there to be tased.

The kid showed no signs of being a threat. I think allowing Kerry to answer his questions unsatisfactorily would have been the best way to diffuse the situation.

72

I think the police should have given the guy a bit more time to leave on his own accord, although I doubt he would have. Still, they should at least have followed that procedure, unless they have some written code that says they have to jump in and manhandle the guy for the get-go, which seems unlikely. Once they started to physically remove him, though, he was an absolute idiot for fighting back. You don’t fight with 5 cops, and when they say put your hands behind your back or we will taser you, you put your hands behind your back. Period. You do not sit up and say “Don’t tase me, bro.”

73

You do not have to be a threat to anyone to be ejected from a given piece of property. If you’re too drunk a bar can remove you, regardless of whether or not you are a threat. If you refuse to leave, they can call the police who will remove you. The university buildings may be public buildings, but they are managed by the university administration who sets up rules for their use and rules for the events that happen within them, they have the authority to eject people for violating said rules and to use university police to do so if they wish.

The issue of whether or not he should have been TASERed is a different one. I’m undecided on that, I think if their departmental policy allows the use of the TASER as a pain compliance tool, then what they did was acceptable and they should not be punished. If it does not, then they were clearly in the wrong and should be sanctioned in some way (for the record, I do not think that would absolve the student of his actions, it would just mean both the police and the student acted improperly.) But as for the general lawful authority to remove him from the building, the police had that, the university had that authority and they exercised it through the police. It doesn’t matter if he was a threat or not, you do not have to be a threat to anyone to be lawfully removed from a given building.

74

Which, it turns out, is exactly what did happen.

75

Led. L-e-d. A simple spellcheck won’t catch that one.

Were they real cops or rent-a-cops?

I’ll have to wait 'til I get home and watch the video to see the violence inherent in the system. Actually, I really want to see what the situation was at the time they tasered him. There are very few circumstances in which I’d consider it justified.

76

So, according to me, he was lead away from the speach because he caused a disruptence. Whew boy. I r smrt. (But I really kinda like the word disruptence. It seems to me that it’s a perfectly cromulent word.)

77

Martin Hyde To me the point is about keeping things civilized. The best way to maintain civilized discourse would have been to let Kerry answer his questions. I disagree with their cutting him off, it only feeds into the sort of paranoia that college leftists love to engage in. A little bit more indulgence of rabble-rousers would give them the voice they seek without turning it into a circus. Cutting his mic and allowing Kerry to answer the questions he already asked would probably have been sufficient. It’s not simply about authority, but about the wisdom in exercising that authority.

78

I agree with mswas. Armed cops should become involved only when a situation gets serious. They should not be used as a prophylactic. The situation was needlessly escalated by officials.

79

How is it “keeping things civilized” if jerks push their way to the front of the line, grab the microphone, and refuse to shut up to listen to the answers to their “questions”?

He physically fought the cops when they tried to remove him. He’s the one who escalated the situation, not them. He deserved to be arrested, and when he resisted when the cops tried to handcuff him, he deserved to be tased.

80

Entirely possible, but ultimately the call was made by the university official who was running that facility or running that event. He made said call and asked for the student to be removed, if that call was unwise, that doesn’t excuse Meyer’s behavior in the least. Nor does it mean we live in a “police state” it simply means that we live in a society in which people who manage certain facilities have the right to eject people from said facilities for offenses which are not criminal in nature. I think we can all agree that this is a valid policy. It’s almost like the “Don’t Be a Jerk” rule that we have. Movie theaters, sporting venues, et cetera can eject you from their property even if you’ve committed no crime, but have just behaved in a jerkish manner in a way that is detrimental to the event in question. Without given individuals the authority to do this, every loud-mouthed jerk in the world would make life miserable for everyone else.

So the call to have him removed may have been unwise, but it doesn’t make the police “destroyers of liberty.” Liberty wasn’t at stake, at stake was the fact that the university police are routinely used to remove people from university buildings across the country when said people have been declared not welcome there (whether for criminal or non-criminal reasons.) The decision to actually place him under arrest was almost certainly made after he struggled and resisted, I believe if he had just walked out with the police he would not have been placed under arrest at all.