YouTube - Student Tasered At Kerry Speech: Longer Version
TV news videos are cutting off the finish, when the student is repeatedly tasered, to the horror of the watching crowd.
I presume this is to minimize the impact of the police actions.
I may disapprove of what he says, but I defend to the death his right….well, you know the rest. Or maybe you don’t, if you’re a product of what the leftist academy intends for all American education. Yes, the irony is rich. But the principle remains.
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Bill, in my post below I wasn’t defending the idea of students being zapped by the cops (the kid almost certainly has good grounds to sue, and good luck to him), but rather noting that for all the shrieking of the Kossacks about crushing dissent and the dark night of fascism descending over America, the one place someone’s dissent actually is crushed is at a Kerry rally. Had someone been tasered at a Giuliani rally, the coverage would be non-stop.
Oh, I agree with you, David. That’s why I nodded at the irony. And some will point to what appears to be a different response from me here versus my refusal to defend Erwin Chemerinsky.
Apples and oranges. Chemerinsky is involved in an employment dispute and is invoking a concept - academic freedom - that has no basis constitutionally, and is pretty shaky conceptually - except to academics whose ox is being barbecued, of course.
This incident involves two First Amendment rights - Freedom of speech (this is political speech, by the way, the most protected speech of all) and Freedom of Petition - Kerry is a government official, and the student obviously has some grievances he’d like redressed.
Yes, the irony is rich, and if this happened at a Giuliana -or, heaven forfend, a Thompson - get together, the hue and cry would be deafening. That said, this is getting a fair amount of play, in large part because significant segments of the media are considerably further to the left than even John Kerry, and regard this as an assault on them.
I regard it as an assault on liberty.
David has an excellent point, but them, we already know this.
More interesting –amazing, even — is the rich spectrum of behavior this video displays:
1. The “questioner” is a prime example of someone we all know — a jerk who hijacks someone else’s forum to promote their own crackpot ideas.
2. The defenders of “free speech” sit idly by while the gestapo tortures a dissenter. His dissent is not their dissent; he has no standing or rights.
3. Kerry just stands there while all this is going down.
4. The cops didn;t rush him until he mentioned “Skull and Bones.” A coincidence? I think not. Haw.
It’s hard to feel sympathy for the victim, but that is not inconsistent with feeling outrage at the whole episode.
Canaries. Coal mines.
Fondness for canaries is not required.
You heartless bastard. You probably rooted for Sylvester when you were a kid.
You’ve just described every politician that ever existed, depending upon what point they’re viewed from.
The part I really like is that he’s tasered when he’s handcuffed. I think they did it so he wouldn’t interrupt Kerry…who kept droning on throughout the entire thing. Beautiful!
Actually, one of the things Kerry was droning was for the cops to leave the guy alone, he’d like to answer his questions.
Look, I’m not saying this beanbag was any sort of genius. But the way he was treated was outrageous. We have to get away from the notion that just because the cops do it, it must be right. Social conservatives may think that way, but libertarians don’t. And the social conservatives are wrong.
What was the crime here that merited such a massive and forceful response?
I’d like this video to be required viewing for all those who mock libertarian slippery slope fears. What would the cops do next, if Mayer kept on “resisting?”
Shoot him?
Imagine what would happen if Mayer tried to make a speech on the street in front of a Wal-Mart about employee benefits, and store security did the same thing to him - on video.
We give the sort of power to the state we give to nobody else - and with good reason. But along with that is the responsibility not to misuse that power. And when it is misused, we call that misuse a tyrannical action. Or we should.
Well, we already know the answer to the kid’s question -
“I was for contesting the election before I was against it”.
And one point that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere (probably because it’s oh-so-politically-incorrect to bring this up) - one of the two officers dragging him away from the microphone was female, and in situations where physical force is needed to subdue someone, females are generally at a genetic disadvantage. I’d really be curious to see some kind of study about female police officers and force escalation - whether female officers are quicker to escalate force because they’re outmatched physically by the suspect.
No, he still had one hand free.
No, it was right because he cut the line, he babbled nonstop and wouldn’t let Kerry answer his questions, he refused the officers’ orders to leave, and he resisted them when they escorted him out. He kept trying to take control of the situation, which was not his to control.
Why the quotes around “resisting,” BTW? What would you call it? He certainly wasn’t complying.
So what was the appropriate level of force to ensure his compliance, Jim? Multiple electroshocks seems fine with you. How about fists and clubs? How about shooting him?
All of these have been done to people who didn’t meet cop standards of proper compliance. Some of them were entirely innocent. Some were simply victims of outrageous over-reaction by cops accustomed to instant obedience from people who once acted like Americans, but are slowly being educated to the European viewpoint of the ruled and the rulers.
Here’s a clue, Mother: What law was violated that demanded such a high level of police force to ensure compliance?
And here’s a question: Is the American way now, in your opinon, instant, blind, and unthinking submission to anything a policeman demands?
Considering his behavior? Under the circumstances, yeah. They could have tried reading him a bedtime story until he went nite-nite, I suppose, but Kerry was already talking so it might have been redundant.
Fortunately, it didn’t come to that because they had a taser. There’s another clip of him outside the hall after the arrest, and he seemed to be just fine. Certainly didn’t affect his speech center, although any ill effects on his reasoning capacity might be more difficult to gauge, considering the very low base level.
But if it had, it would have been a-okay with you, Jim?
Oh, “Mother” means me. Well, isn’t it against the law to refuse the instructions of a police officer? If it’s not, it probably should be.
No to your leading question, but when you’re making an spectacle of yourself during a John Kerry Q&A and the police tell you to take a hike, you should probably take the hint. Unless you want to be a YouTube star, I guess.
Really? So if I don’t like your behavior, I get to taser you into compliance with my preferences? Cool. When can I start?
Once again - what law did this guy break by blabbering on? Remember, “breaking the rules” is not the same as “breaking the law.”
Well sure, they should have blown his head off. There’s no middle ground between that and “Could you pretty-please sit down now? If you want to, I mean.” Absolutely.
When I go to your Q&A session and start screaming like a nut and resisting arrest, I guess.
He didn’t break any law by blabbering on. (If that were the case, it’d have been Kerry on the ground!) He broke a law by flailing around and shrieking like a madman when the cops escorted him out.
When did you stop beating your wife?
We’re posting on top of each other, so I’ll try to wait it out a bit.
Sarcasm is not an argument. Especially sarcasm that ignores the other alternative, fists and clubs, which have a long and rich history in police confontations in this country, and which do, indeed, fall into the middle ground between “pretty please” and “blowing his head off.”
There is a long legal history dealing with your question. Start here. Short answer: not always. And more often not always than you might think.
That’s a really good point. [rolls eyes]
Which they didn’t have to resort to, because they had a taser. That’s part of the point of the taser, isn’t it, to avoid having to use greater force?
How about in this case?
Why?
Actually no. A cop cannot make me mow his lawn.
I suspect that you are going to find out that yes, he was within his rights to refuse to comply with the police officers’ orders. And somebody is going to pay him a lot of money in the process.
Um…sarcasm is not an argument.
Why not?
Your Right of Defense Against Unlawful Arrest
Could be. He seems like a very special person.
But it’s fun!
What was unlawful about his arrest?
Now in this situation, a guy was at an open mike, at the invitation of the speaker, and he was speaking. The speaker was conversing with him, and further, stated that he would answer his questions when, abruptly, police officers physically accosted him, dragged him away, and tasers him for refusing to “comply.”
I see a few problems with this.
Whoops. That’s kind of the sticking point, innit? I’m sure a lot of people who get arrested think they’re without fault. Most of them, even.
Have those points been established?
Being arrested for resisting arrest?
Clayton, I just listed a few facts that might well establish exactly that.
After cutting to the front of the line, yes.
Really? Seemed pretty one-way to me.
True, they should have taken him away as soon as he ran to the microphone ahead of the people who’d waited in line to speak.
There are those scare quotes again. Is there some definition of the word “comply” that I don’t know about?
How about assaulting a police officer? Disturbing the peace? Trespassing? I dunno, you know how those pigs are, always making up stupid rules.
You mean the bit about being at an open mike at the invitation of the speaker? But it’s neither Kerry’s mike nor Kerry’s hall. Again: At whose behest was this idiot being ejected? Does anyone know?
Robert Heinlein to the contrary notwithstanding, this is not a capital offense.
Well, I was just kidding about blowing his head off. But the point is, he wasn’t just minding his own business, and they didn’t just start picking on him because they like the smell of burning hair.
On the other hand, you haven’t set out yet why they did start picking on him. None of the points you’ve mentioned gives the police officers any authority to act: They are not matters for law enforcement. Which gets back to my question.
If “not just minding his own business” were grounds for arrest, there’d be very few lefty moonbats unincarcerated.
Either A) Because he cut the line, refused to sit down when his time was up, and became hostile to the police when they instructed him to leave, disrupting the event for everybody else, or B) Because they’re pigs and therefore big meanies.
Having seen all the various video clips and read about what he was doing before he appeared on any of them, I’ll tentatively go with A).
You’re not listening. None of his acts, by themselves, gave the police any authority to instruct him to leave.
My goodness.
What would he have to do before they had that authority, then? And what about all the other people who had questions for Kerry, or just wanted to hear his answers? I can’t imagine why, but there they were.
What would he have to do? Commit a wrong in their presence. Which did not happen, unless we suppose that the owner of the hall, or the proper agent thereof, first requested of him that he leave, which being refused, his continued presence would be trespass. Which again gets back to my question.
What do you call the show he put on? It sure wasn’t right.
They weren’t proper agents of the university? Did the dean need to come down personally and give him the 86?
Ummm, yes, actually.
Okay then, and in the meantime, what about everybody else who came to see Kerry? What about the people who waited in line to ask him questions, before this Meyer fellow decided he was more important than them?
But I can see your point… Why have security for an appearance by a former presidential candidate? What could go wrong?
Annoying others is not a crime, Jim. If it were, you’d be doing big time.
And so would I.
So your contention now is that they were protecting Kerry?
Never said it was. But he was disrupting the event and was asked to leave, and he escalated things, and then the bad people shocked him with the lightning stick.
Of course not. This guy was completely calm and rational, and the officers must have known for a fact that he wouldn’t try to hurt Kerry or anybody else. But I was just pointing out why there would be security at an event with a national figure like that. Silly me, though, because the dean is the only one allowed to eject anybody from a campus facility.
You just don’t seem to get it. He was asked to leave by whom?
Do you remember when the Code Pink moonbats disrupted the Petraeus hearings the other day? Do you recall that the chairman of the committee asked the police to eject them?
Cops are empowered to react to a criminal act when they see one. But as has been repeatedly pointed out here, what criminal act brought them to lay hands on him in the first place?
Clayton wants to know who with the authority to do so ordered him to leave (no, the cops did not, on their own, have that authority).
CNN reports:
Florida campus cops on leave after Taser incident - CNN.com
Now, if somebody with proper authority to do so did order him to leave, then the element sof the crime of trespassing would seem to be in place, and the authority would be legally correct to ask the officers to respond to the crime in progress. Note I didn’t say “justified.” I think the whole reaction was unjustified, despite your handwaving about the personal security of John Kerry - who seemed remarkably unfrightened and unworried about his personal safety. But then, of course, he’s a war hero….
Granted.
The event being open to the public, until the jerk is asked to leave by the owner of the hall or his agent (in neither of which categories we find the police, without more), his presence there does not amount to trespass.
The people in charge of the event’s security. If they can’t eject people who are disrupting the event, what’s the point of having security at all? I mean, kicking the seat of the person in front of you is annoying. Talking loudly on your cell is annoying. This guy went way beyond annoying.
John Kerry would appear unfrightened and unworried if you poured a bucket of molten lava on his crotch. But anyway, the point is that his presence was probably the reason so many campus police were there in the first place.
I’d further add that “relinquish the microphone” is not the same thing as “you are trespassing and I order you to leave this property.”
Holding onto the mike might be a breach of the university rules for the occasion, but that is not a crime, either, and would be handled by whatever policies and procedures the university had put into place for rules infractions.
I think what annoys me most about this whole contretemps is the attitude some are expressing that seems to boil down to “Whatever authority, in the form of armed employees of the state wearing blue, want, they should be given without hesitation or question.”
That may (although I suspect it is not quite as clear-cut as Beldar thinks it is) be the law, but it is not good law, and it is not anything for an American to be proud of.
The ultimate expression of that attitude is when people are gunned down trying to defend themselves in erroneous no-knock raids with no penalties for the police. Such things may be legally excusable, but they are an abomination nonetheless.
So he should just be allowed to cut to the front of the line, talk past the allotted time he stole in the first place, and generally make a spectacle of himself, and everybody else just has to let him. Could the police at least give him a dirty look, or would that be overstepping their authority?
Actually, he did not. Kicking the seat of the person in front of him comes far closer to having the elements of a crime than speaking into an open mike.
On that question, this account, scraped from Michelle Malkin’s post, is all I could find:
For what it’s worth. As Beldar noted elsewhere, some, at least, of the details are wrong. Nowhere do I see a request, from a person competent to make it in the first instance, that Meyer leave. Which is not to say, of course, that there was no such request.
I hope you’re not including me in that, because that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that in this case, I think their actions were justified. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that police power has been and continues to be abused. I just don’t think it was in this case.
Not sure what’s actual about that opinion, but it looked beyond annoying to me.
The Case of the Savage Seat-Kicker! Okay, so they’d have been within their rights to eject him for that? But not for hijacking the whole event and ruining everybody else’s… I was about to say “good time,” but it’s a Kerry Q&A we’re talking about here.
And maybe we’re getting “ejected” and “under arrest” mixed up? Are there any circumstances where they’d be within their rights to merely eject him? Presumably that was what they were trying to do before he threw a fit. It’s not like they just strolled up and zapped him. They tried to eject him because he was disruptive, and he didn’t like that because he has a lot of important ideas, and he threw his fit. Then they started trying to handcuff him. He didn’t like that either because he uses his hands a lot when he talks, so they told him he’d be tased if he didn’t let them cuff him. None of which would have happened if he’d just left as requested.
But wait, campus security isn’t allowed to ask him to leave for being disruptive, I forgot. What are they allowed to do?
What you’re confused on, Jim, is, there is no such offense as “second-degree assholery.”
Okay. But seriously, are there any possible circumstances where they’d be within their rights to eject him? If so, what are they?
I was trying to get at that when I said kicking the back of somebody’s chair comes closer to being a criminal act then what I watched.
It has the necessary elements of assault and battery: a kick, applying force to the back of somebody else’s chair, which could result in injury to the person sitting in the chair. An officer has the power of arrest when witnessing a crime, and assault and battery would certainly be a crime.
As it is, though, I have a lot of trouble seeing what this whackjob did as rising to the criminal level that required or even justified the initial laying on of hands by the officers.
I’ve always had a lot of trouble with the logic that goes, “Well, we went to arrest him and he resisted us so we arrested him for resisting arrest.”
Arrest for what?
Here’s some more news:
ABC News: Student Arrested, Tasered at Kerry Event
And from the same report:
So the cops are saying they witnessed him committing the crimes of disturbing the peace and interfering with administrative functions.
They may end up having a few problems with that.
Quick question to break up the Jim Treacher Fails Reading Comprehension Hour:
It is my understanding that stun weapons are considered an escalation over batons, and have been renamed from ‘non-lethal’ to ‘less than lethal’ because they can kill pretty much anyone, the just usually don’t.
Is this not the case?
If so, that’s as much of a problem as the whole “arrested for resisting arrest” line of reasoning. He might have injured himself or an officer, so a response like a baton that might injure him would be warranted, not one that might kill him.
After watching this video that includes his ranting and raving after they took him out of the auditorium - “Somebody please do something! They’re going to kill me!”, I think it’s pretty clear that he was trying to provoke a confrontation all along - which would explain why there were so many video cameras suddenly filming when he started talking.
Bill’s position that we shouldn’t meekly comply with any and all police demands is valid, but at the same time going out of your way to deliberately provoke the police is wrong.
If that was ‘with violence’, what does resisting arrest without violence look like? Just verbal?
Here.
Within their authority, you mean? Not unless those grounds would suffice also for his arrest. If they were acting as police, they require proper grounds to act, which grounds I have not yet seen. If they were acting merely as agents of the university, they were, in that capacity, private persons with no special claim, either upon obedience from others, or upon protections for their use of force in exacting that obedience. And if they were conflating the two, they are guilty of criminal offenses under color of law.
At least, that is how I would have it. I note, for what it’s worth, the courts have lately carved out a special niche for campus police, and half-filled it with a confused, and in my opinion unjustified, body of law.
Thanks for the link, but I don’t find it too illuminating. I guess I should ask what the legal definition of violence is. I didn’t see, and haven’t seen it suggested really, that he was throwing punches or kicks, just squirming and trying to pull away.
That doesn’t seem like a violent act to me, but it does seem like he’s resisting.
So they’re not even allowed to put their hands on him? How about leading him out with a trail of breadcrumbs? (Or, perhaps more appropriately, granola?)
They didn’t go to arrest him, they went to eject him from the auditorium. He reacted rather poorly to their effrontery, and then they arrested him. Do you really think they would have tased him if he’d said “Okay, fine” and left with them? In a room full of cameras?
:)
I have no idea. Are you saying they should have beaten him instead? That YouTube video might have melted their servers!
So his reaction to being led out was just fine. He didn’t have to comply because he didn’t feel like it, and the yelling and flailing and jumping around was just innocent horseplay. It sounds fishy to me, but I’m no lawyer.
I’m honestly trying to understand this: You guys don’t think Meyer did anything to warrant so much as a hand on his elbow. And everybody else who assembled there peacefully, well, too bad for them, it’s the Andrew Meyer Show.
Why is this so difficult to understand, Jim? What the police can do of their own initiative, and what they can do in effecting the expressed desire of the owner of the hall, are two different things. And no, the police do not own the hall.
If they can’t eject people who are disrupting the event, why are they there?
I’m also unfamiliar with any crime called “Event Disrupting, Class C.”
So unless he’s committing a crime, they can’t escort him from the premises. Not arrest him, but just make him leave. Are you sure about that?
If the hall owner is willing to endure his presence, the police have no business making him leave.
So you keep saying. How about a stern finger-wagging, would that have been too harsh?
For me, Beldar sums it up: “If you don’t think this guy went over the line into impermissible public behavior, you are blind to the possibility of there being lines.”
That depends. Is this finger-wagging under color of law?
Maybe!
Speaking of Beldar, in that other DP thread he does a much better job of saying what I’ve been trying to say. So, what he said.
Have a good one, fellers!
The cops were, most likely, given instructions on how to react to this sort of thing BEFORE the event. I say this because I have a friend who’s in the sheriffs’ department who frequently does details like this. He’s instructed prior to the event and does, in fact, represent those putting on the event.
And they are, subject to stated conditions, within their rights to eject people for failing to meet those conditions.
It is very clear that Meyer was being EJECTED, not arrested. The arrest began after he refused to be ejected.
Sadly, I expect that this will fall on the cops. I expect the university and the organizers–and even possibly Kerry– to attack the people they hired to protect themselves.
The venue instructs the security about what they are to do, with occasional input from or based on the talent.