tasering free speech away

[frandroid]

Many people have been posting the Don't Tase Me Bro MC Hammer/Tasered student mix. Maybe the weird students idly standing by bugged you a little bit. Maybe, if you got more curious and offended, you went and checked out the disturbing unmixed, original video clip of the event, where you can see that the guy got taken away by four cops for basically hugging the mike, and then he got handcuffed and tasered for resisting being taken away (they can't call it resisting arrest, since they weren't arresting him, unless I missed the Miranda reading). Aren't tasers meant for hyperviolent but unarmed suspects that cops can't plausibly shoot a gun at but are too clumsily to arrest with their own bare hands, even if they over power him four to one?

Heather Mallick wrote about the incident.

Comments

[theoria.livejournal.com]

Evidence has also emerged suggestion that the student in question attempted to engineer the event.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

linky?

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Although the majority of the responses to the arrest, especially the tasering, of student Meyer, have protested the use of what seems to them like excessive force, some feel that Meyer engineered the entire incident.

Meyer had a history of public pranks which he often videotaped, and some see his handing a camera to someone right before his questions as suspicious. [source]

The problem with this theory is that I fail to understand how him being on camera makes him suddenly more ripe for a tasering than any regular kook hugging the mike. I mean, I can accept that he was looking for attention and got someone to film him for that purpose, but he couldn't have engineered being tasered. So it's irrelevant to the reason of my outrage. And even if he had even engineered the whole thing, the crowd response, which is pretty apathetic if not hostile (people applauding when he gets taken away by cops, people smiling when he gets tasered), is downright scary, it's what really bothered me in the beginning, an emotion that Mallick successfully translated into words.

Hmmm.