A favorite, colorful, larger-than-life uncle of mine once advised me, “Bobby, don’t ever get in a fight with the cops. You don’t ever win.” Wisdom that endures to this day.
I remember battle of the bands stuff in high school. If the other team brought their band, we’d trade off playing songs after the game. Everyone else would be leaving, but the bands were occupied.
And we were all playing or preparing to play, and we were on opposite sides of the field, so there wasn’t any opportunity for any sort of fight. Plus the other band had to get home, so the “battle” wouldn’t ever go on too long.
These days, you never know what kind of weaponry can be concealed in band instruments!
~VOW
I see a lot of videos where the cops yell, “Stop resisting!” although the person is not resisting. Why? Even if the cop arrests you on a BS charge they made up and it gets thrown out, the resisting the BS charge does not get thrown out.
Hidden? They just use the expensive instruments as weapons.
No description of the alleged “physical altercation” is given until this bit:
I have no difficulty seeing a scenario in this vagueness where the “physical altercation” is the cop grabbing Mims’s arm and trying to yank it behind his back, causing Mims to stumble (or even fall off a step he’s standing on) into the cop. The cop takes this as an excuse to yell, “Stop resisting!” and zap him. And frankly, that scenario is more believable to me than a director–who was presumably engaged with his actively playing band–suddenly deciding to start a brawl with a bunch of rent-a-cops.
The whole thing smells like a shovelful of “respect mah authoritah”, possibly with nuggets of racism mixed in.
That aside, while I’ve seen plenty of people arrested for disorderly conduct, I think this is the first arrest I’ve heard of for disorderly conducting.
Also, “You can’t outrun a radio.” Well, phones these days but you get it.
I’ve watched, from afar, after-game Battles of the Band.
I generally went to the band stand and grabbed my child at the last minutes of the game.
Those battles, around here, never end well. If, IF the police and auxiliary cops clear the stadium the personal animosity continues in the parking lot.
Finally the visiting band does leave on a bus. To a local fast food joint and the locals follow and more fights occur.
It’s a right mess.
When grown adult band directors can’t control their anger how can we expect juveniles to control themselves?
Nice.
ISWYDT
and I love it
And I’ve watched completely peaceful “battles of the band” after games.
From the description, I’m suspecting it’s something like what @Balance described. The conductor might not even have noticed the police, if they approached him from the rear.
I always thought that a taser was supposed to be used only if a life is in danger or an officer is threatened, not just to encourage compliance.
Maybe the officers are music critics?
I can’t be the only person who wonders if the bands were violating some kind of late-night noise ordinance.
Or he heard them and thought, “Okay, we’ll wrap up this song, then pack up” and continued conducting. Then maybe they yelled at him to stop, and maybe he replied that they were wrapping up and it would only take another minute, and they didn’t hear him–because, y’know, he was standing in front of a marching band at full volume–so the Birmingham cop grabbed his arm.
I’m not saying that it necessarily did happen that way, just that I find it a plausible sequence of events. Cynical of me, perhaps, but I have no trouble imagining a cop unnecessarily escalating into violence an encounter that could have been resolved with a minute or two of patience.
He was charged with disturbing the peace, harassment (huh?), and resisting arrest. At a guess, that “disturbing the peace” charge is possibly under the “Offenses Against the Peace and Quiet” chapter of the town’s code (PDF), which includes anti-noise regulations.
However, leaving aside the fact that school sporting events and performances are generally not treated as “unreasonably loud, disturbing, and unnecessary”, a quick look at a map shows that the only thing near the stadium besides the school itself is a Wal-Mart. It appears to be separated from the nearest residential area by about half a mile of other sports fields and a strip of forest; in other directions, there’s more forest between the stadium and a couple of churches. I find it unlikely that the band’s performance would constitute “unreasonably loud” noise at any nearby location, let alone trigger a noise complaint, so I suspect the charge is an after-the-fact rationalization.
This is in the South. Peeps go crazy when the Friday Night lights come on.
Seen it. Ran from it.
It’s terrible. I think the culture around highschool football is really out of control.
I can almost, without being there, guarantee this Band director had a problem with the other school over some perceived dissing. Maybe from past years. Maybe personally.
It looks that simple to me.
IMO
If that’s the case, then you arrest him when he actually starts engaging in disorderly conduct. Not when he’s just doing his job, i.e., conducting the band.
I’m in the South. Grew up here, performed in a band here. And I do agree with you that high-school football culture here is out of hand and damaging. However, I would need a lot more supporting evidence to buy your “almost guarantee” scenario. First off, while I have sometimes known football players and spectators from rival schools to harass band members, in my experience, physical aggression between rival band members themselves is rare. Rivalries tend to be expressed through performance and one-upping.
I found a video which, while definitely advocating for Mims’s side of the situation, also provides some more details of the incident. Notably, the posts where my link starts include one from a parent saying that the drumlines had had a mini-battle during the third quarter and taken pictures together. Other posts say that the post-game battle was coordinated between the bands in advance. There’s a clip of the incident itself at the end, but the quality is not great and it doesn’t capture the beginning of the encounter; I will leave it to others to make what they can of it.
I’m more convinced after seeing video. Something is going on that we have no knowledge of.