I absolutely agree. Show me what point in the video that he threw a punch at any of the officers, and I will withdraw my statement.
But, I didn’t see any physical threat to any officer. I saw a man on the ground “piled-on” but for the officers’ CONVENIENCE tased him so they didn’t have to carry him.
That is my problem. A potentially lethal alternative should not be used on someone who posed no physical threat to the officers…
You’re trying to inject something else as a qualifier in the debate when it’s not part of the argument. He was clearly resisting arrest in a physical manner. He was not tased at this point but was forced to the floor. He continued to physically resist and was tased at that point.
This was not a shoot-from-the-hip tasering.
He went out of his way to bring this on himself…
I would have liked to hear Kerry answer the kid’s question: “How could you concede so quickly?” Been wondering that for almost three years now.
The kid was clearly a jackass. That said, if that many cops couldn’t escort him from the room, they need to go back to the academy.
The problem with any less-than-lethal technology is that everyone thinks of them like Star Trek phasers set on “stun.” They’re not. And the bigger problem is that, they’re so new to the scene, we’ve never, as a country, had a really good debate about their proper (and improper) usage, as we have had with firearms.
Personally, I don’t think that a taser, or pepper spray, should be used as a tool of compliance. It should be used when the officer is actually at risk of serious physical harm. A suspect who has been restrained by several officers does not fall into that category. (And, esp. for the sake of this case—when to escalate force—we should really define two different types of “resisting arrest”; maybe a first degree charge where the suspect is actively harming/trying to harm the officers/bystanders, and a second degree charge where the dope is just trying to flee—as was the case here.)
Would it have been acceptable to have held this struggling doofus’s head in place as he writhed and filibustered so that an officer could spray pepper spray directly into his eyes from an inch away? If not, why not?
The guy was an idiot, yes. He should have been removed, yes. And when I was in college, I could have found you several dozen people, bouncers and amateur martial artists alike, who could have removed him from the hall without having to electrocute him. I’m sure this college has a similar complement of folks. The school should look to that pool of people to form their police force.
Eyewitness reports are now coming in that seems to make the police action more understandable.
From the Daily Kos:
*The forum was going to be over at 2 pm, and Kerry spoke for so long that the Q and A portion had to be shortened. He only got through about 7 of the 50 people who were waiting to ask questions. While the final question was being read, some douchebag ran down the aisle, grabbed the mic from the other side of the room, interrupted the kid who was talking, and started yelling at Kerry, demanding that his questions be heard. He started ranting about how Kerry talks in circles or something, and everyone was getting annoyed. The cops are all over him in no time and try to escort him out, but he starts yelling and resisting. Kerry insists that they let him stay and even agrees to answer his question.
After the interrupted guy’s question was answered, Kerry keeps his promise and lets the angry guy talk. This is the point where people started taking their cameras and phones out. All the videos floating around youtube start around here. You can see in the videos that his questioning gets kind of inappropriate, so somebody cut his mic. Instead of shutting up, he starts yelling and making an even bigger scene. He struggled all the way up the aisle, and started violently trying to free himself. They threatened to taze him and he wouldnt stop fighting, so he got tazed. They only had to arrest him because he was causing a disruption and wouldn’t leave peacefully. He wasn’t being silenced for asking tough questions, trust me.
It’s a shame that they had to taze the guy, but he had a chance to calm down and didn’t take it. He probably didn’t pose a physical threat to anybody in the room, but someone can’t just hijack the floor of a forum like that and expect not to get kicked out. This wasn’t some poor guy who was brutalized for trying to ask some tough questions. He’s just an obnoxious guy who had a fit when there wasn’t time for his questions and refused to be calm even when he was given the chance to speak. He was looking for trouble, and everyone applauded when he was forced to leave. *
So if the action started long before the tape, the police may have done all sorts of polite and well-trained things. Seeing is not always believing.
Why? The alternative is to use physical force, and when you do that to make someone comply, people get hurt. Badly often. You are far less likely to get hurt from a shot of pepper spray in the face or a tasering than you are just flat out having the cops beat you down into submission
And if you dont think it works like that, you have watched way to many episodes of chips where the suspects arm just magically goes behind their back. In real life even with 6 cops its a pretty brutal thing. I’ve had to do it, I was good at it, and I would rather be pepper sprayed or tased than just flat out tackled and subdued.
You’ve got it completely backwards. The relevant question is: How could the cops have known he was there to deliberately start a fight with the cops (which view the evidence strongly points toward), such that they could deny him that wish and save face?
The legitimate authority instructed the cops to remove him. When they tried, he fought them, exactly according to what the evidence strongly suggested was his goal all along. If they had just relaxed and waited him out, (1) they would not have been following their instructions, and (2) Meyer would have eventually forced the confrontation anyway.
Whoever ordered the cops to remove him prematurely is the one to blame for this. But the thing is, we don’t know that he would have eventually forced the confrontation. Maybe, you don’t act on maybes though.
If they had waited (and by they I mean whoever ordered this nonsense) then people would be saying today “they gave him every opportunity” They wouldn’t be holding protests in his honor. If he forced the issue…really forced it, then most who witnessed it would be praising the cops (there will be a few desenters).
Why couldn’t the douchebag just ask his questions?
I don’t see it that way. I’d apportion blame at about 80% on Meyer, 15% on the cops’ haste, and only the remaining 5% on the authority in question. In Meyer’s absence, none of this would have happened, so he most emphatically deserves the lion’s share of the blame. Replace him with someone who did not have as his almost certain goal a confrontation with the cops, and none of this would have occurred. Replace the individual cops or the authority giving the instructions, and it would still have happened, so they bear considerably less blame.
Technically true, but the evidence very strongly points that way, between his history of public spectacles, public confrontations, that he was desperate to be taped before he started his questions, and the fact that he was lighthearted and laughing after the cameras were off.
Fortunately, we don’t live on your planet…
“We’d better steer clear of those icebergs, captain! We might hit one!”
You’re right! I say, let 'em speak!
“Senator, we’ve got 300 high-strung, unstable douchebags out here who are blocking and out-shouting the legitimate questioners (who are acting appropriately), who came here for a confrontation who want to be video-taped while shouting crazed, accusative quasi-questions at you without waiting for your answers. What should we do?”
Senator: “Legitimate questioners be damned! Bring on the mentally unstable douchebags! Their concerns must be addressed!”
He did. But even when Kerry said he’d answer the question, the douchbag continued on with two more questions, never giving Kerry a chance to answer. Are we all to be expected to allow ourselves to be held captive to just any asshole’s righteous indignation in the name of free speech?
The idea that Someone in Authority ordered the police to act is wrong. Let’s say the kid died as a result of the tasering. Would Someone in Authority be held legally or morally responsible? Of course not. Each of us is responsible for our own actions.
If Someone in Authority ordered the police to do something illegal, would the fact that SiA told them to do it be any sort of defense? Nope.
So what. The fact that he intended to cause a disruption doesn’t enter into it. At some point if they hadn’t took the bait, he may very well have decided that if he keeps going he’s going to lose support of the crowd…he’s going to not wind up looking like the victim (which was his goal) and start looking like the instigator. At that point these guys often back off. We just dont know because they got suckered in.
Man thats a poor analogy. If you are headed towards an iceberg, there is no loss in avoiding them and every thing to lose by not.
In this case…there were two options.
Let the idiot stay a few more minutes and let Kerry answer…as Kerry requested. Worse case scenario, he continues to be a jerk and you have to bodily haul him out but at least you look like you gave him every chance in the world. Best case scenario, Kerry who has had a ton of experiance with these things gets things under control and answers.
Or
Haul him out before he really has made it an issue and then look like jackbooted thugs…no best case scenario only the worst.
See, you do live in my world, where physical intervention is always supposed to be a last measure. any decently trained cop or security person will tell you the same thing. You don’t take action against a person because of a maybe…the consequences are too extreme. You let things play out until you know that inaction will cause more harm than the action, and this situation just plain wasn’t there yet.
What do you mean by “wrong” in this context? Do you mean factually incorrect, or are you making a personal moral judgment? Because the authority did in fact instruct the cops to remove Meyer.
Possibly so, especially if the cops wouldn’t have acted at all without any instructions from him. IANAL, so I can’t provide an authoritative answer, but my guess would be that if the authority had ordered that the taser be used, he would have been held at least partially legally culpable. So your argument that this person cannot or should not be held legally or morally responsible under any circumstances is of little or no merit.
Objection: hypothetical and irrelevant. Neither the authority nor the cops did anything illegal.
Putting aside the legal aspects, if we focus on the moral issues, moral responsbility must be apportioned out, since all of the parties possess some moral culpability for what happened. And there I stick with my earlier analysis:
I think the point of mentioning SiA is that he has the legal right to request that a person leave the premises. For instance, you would be SiA inside your home, where a random party guest would not be.
SiA can ask a person to leave, at which time refusal to leave represents a crime, not just being a jerk, and we expect police to handle those situations. The SiA doesn’t order the police to do anything, and the police should flat out refuse any illegal requests.
Like hell. If, as I contend, he went there specifically to get publicity from a pseudo-political fight with the cops, he would never have left until he got one! Nothing is more critically important in this case, except, perhaps, the fact that the proper authority instructed the cops to remove him and remove him right then. Your logic is fatally flawed.
Wha…?? He had no support from the crowd. Allow me to quote from the report of a participant in Paul of Saudi’s post above
Furthermore, no one “took the bait”, and no one “got suckered in”. The cops were explicitly instructed by the appropriate authority to remove Meyer right then and there.
It wasn’t an analogy, it was a sarcastic object lesson intended to warn about the pitfalls of making reckless assertions such as, for example, “you don’t act on maybes”.
Your ship has hit quite an iceberg, but I commend Your brave Captainship for going down with his leaking vessel.
::: taps playing in background :::
I wrote that poorly. Forgive me.
The fact that someone else tells you to do something is not a defense, morally. (Or as your Mom always said, “If someone told you to jump off a cliff, would you?”) We are all responsible for own actions. It is not a legal nor a moral defense to say Someone in Authority told you to do something.
It most certainly is, as long as what you do is not itself immoral to the best of your knowledge and moral reasoning ability.
As for the “jump off a cliff” scenario, let me offer the following counterexample:
Say you’re an executioner by profession (so, we’re in Texas or Saudi Arabia), and your superior orders you in the regular course of things to execute an individual, so you go ahead and do it. Afterwards, a legal investigation finds that you executed an innocent man whom your superior simply wanted dead for his own, immoral reasons. According to your premise, in which “it is not a legal nor a moral defense to say Someone in Authority told you to do something”, he’d be morally and legally guilty of murder.
That ain’t right.
Far more relevant to this debate is the fact that it would be immoral not to do something that is not in itself immoral that you are instructed to do as a legitimate part of your employment, as in this case.
Yep, if you were to kill an innocent man you ought to be tried. I would presume your defense was ignorance that this execution was in fact a murder. Also, I would presume the cloak of the state would cover you as a “state actor.”
That being said, I would suppose God would judge you as a murderer.
If we allow the “Good German” defense, we find ourselves on a very slippery slope.