Letters to the Editor
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Fear "Non-Lethal" Force
I don't think this is a free speech issue.
The guy was speaking, sure, but four cops were pulling him out of the room and he was resisting. The only real "problem" here is that the cops abused their powers when they tasered him.
I think this is far more indicative of the increased use of "non-lethal" (or, more appropriately called "less-lethal") force by the police.
The simpleminded view of protecting and serving the public safety holds that, ethically, it is only appropriate and justified to use force at the MINIMUM level to achieve the security objectives. If someone has a knife and is standing alone, surrounded by police at a radius of 20 feet, he shouldn't be shot--he's not a "threat." If someone is unarmed and being held down by the police, he shouldn't be tasered--he's not a threat.
If someone has a firearm in a roomful of people, BY ALL MEANS lay down lead on the guy when it appears he may hurt someone.
So what's this got to do with "non-lethal" weapons?
Basically, the police these days are very well armed with a wide array of weapons of varying degrees of lethality. They know that they aren't statistically likely to kill someone with a taser, or pepper spray, or bean-bag cannons, or a goo-gun.
Because of that, the moral reasoning (or perhaps the fear of consequences for the psychopaths) which still needs to be rigorously applied when using firearms and batons gets confused.
"Well, if I only had my gun on me, I'd have to talk this guy down or we'd all have to overpower him to get him out of here, but hey, I've got this nifty gadget that won't _really_ hurt him, so I'll try that."
That's the "problem."
As a bit of an odd anecdote--I worked for a magazine not long ago, and it received tons of unsolicited DVDs submitted for review. Most of them were ignored by the editors (for good reason--does anyone want to review a DVD entitled, "Street Fights: New Orleans"?), so I took a lot of them home to check them out.
I was positively shocked by a lot the police activity I saw on these videos.
My absolute favorite moment, in terms of being such a perfect crystallization of what I perceive to be a serious problem, was some aftermath of a bar-brawl.
About ten cops had shown up in front of the bar and dragged away the brawlers. There was a crowd of spectators yelling at the police about the arrests. Just yelling--there was no apparent threat of harm against the police. One woman, perhaps a friend of one of the arrested parties had walked after the last two police to leave, getting about 20 feet away from the crowd of patrons, and she was screaming at the cops about something.
A cop not involved in the subdual of the brawlers was walking past this woman, and when she screamed again, he paused, pulled out his pepper spray, and sprayed her in the face with a 1-second blast at a range of about 3 feet. Then he kept walking.
Amazing.
It was a perfect demonstration of the arbitrary and completely unjustifiable use of force which may be far more prevalent than we'll ever know.
If you're not afraid of the cops, you probably should be. _Some_ of their conceptions of justifiable violence seems at odds with both their purported goals and basic human common sense.
I agree completely with a few of the right-wing trolls here that this is definitely not a result of Dubya Bush. It was the Clinton administration that killed 80 people in Waco for no real reason. And while I liked Clinton a great deal as President, I didn't care much for a lot of the folks he delegated.