Yeah, this has gotten an enormous amount of coverage here in the last few days, at least on TV.  (There's been surprisingly little in the newspaper press, I gather.)  Unfortunately, most of the coverage has been from right-leaning TV stations and is largely about Sen. Kerry's apparent lack of vocal response and anger about the incident, though I did read this slightly different view, earlier today.

The two police officers were actually just Univ. of Florida campus police, and they've both been suspended and there's an investigation ongoing regarding their actions.

Bah; everyone knows that the USA (as an anthropomorphized entity) has done everything it can possibly do to encourage free speech, taking "free speech zones", for instance.

http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/free_speech_zones.html

Sorry; that's not entirely related.  He was certainly not very well behaved and, if these accounts are to be believed, rather baited the police on.  That's not to say that I understood why the police did what they did; maybe tazers are seen as something rather harmless that can be freely used to keep people in line.  Saying that, I have only seen a snippit of the video (can't watch the whole clip right now).

That the guy was a bit of a twat seems to be clear; that the campus police reacted with an absurd amount of force is similarly clear.


A quick story, for comparison ...  when I was a child, I sang in some program that included a speech by then-VP Dan Quayle.  There was an organized protest about halfway through his speech in which something like 7-8 people stood up at locations all across the balcony seating and started chanting/yelling various anti-Bush/Quayle slogans.  One was 2-3 rows in front of me.  I vividly remember the secret service agents literally leaping over my head (this was at a spot in the auditorium where the seating was at quite a steep angle), grabbing him, lifting him up, and carrying him out of the hall.  The whole thing took, at the most, four seconds -- there was no fighting, no dragging, no tasering.  He was just picked up (more or less instantly) and whisked away.

It seems to me that a huge part of the problem in the U of FL case was that he was initially held to the ground in the auditorium, then dragged to the back of the room, still actually in the hall, and the whole thing involved a huge amount of struggle.

You guys probably don't get the Colbert Report over there (an occasionally brilliant (and sometimes horrible) show on Comedy Central that's a spoof of right-wing TV talk shows) ... anyhow, his show last night included an interesting response here   (under "Solitarity" ... it's the third video in the "recent" section), making fun of the inaction and apparent apathy of all of the other students in the room.

Also on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIYTJ75U4NU

That's a very disturbing video. I take Colbert's wider point, but he's not being entirely fair here, since if it wasn't for at least one person filming the incident and posting it to the web, none of this would have reached the news (and therefore it wouldn't have reached, er, the Colbert Report). And he does overlook the many people screaming at the campus security guys to "leave him alone" as the tasers come out. Isn't it truer to say that the student audience are basically bug-eyed, uncomprehending and vaguely amused at this guy having a bit of a looney rant, until the full horror of what is being done to him emerges - at which point they do (from what little can be made out on the video) at least sound as though they're trying to do something?

Agreed.


It vindicated itself, from my perspective, in its function as eliciting a very public form of what might or might not be considered police brutality.  And that's something worthy of discussion, neh?

(of course, people go nuts as public talks all the time; maybe not to the extent he did, but generally there're usually a few people who don't know/care much about the etiquette of these things).


Ah okay; as I've said I haven't seen the whole video, so.

I found myself wondering how this might have been reported had it happened in my neck-of-the-woods?  Martin Kettle and Nick Cohen are so keen on standards that they keep two sets handy.