They're in a tough position: They bought that stock with non-par currency, and are now eating the cost of the rising CAD to keep customers happy. As a small business, they don't have a lot of cash reserves to wait out the inventory turns until they're purchasing at par as well.
If you want to support them, thank them for the offer, and then pay the full CAD price, at least for the next couple months.
Imagine a jeep mounted pleasure ray. Imagine it parked at one end of a square, pointing at a crowd. Imagine the soldier running the ray gun saying "watch this." He turns the gun to the right--the crowd races to stay in the beam. He pans left, and the crowd shuffles left. He jerks it back right, and the crowd runs facefirst into the building on that side of the square.
According to wikipedia the only actions shown in the video that would constitue resisting arrest was attempting to elude police officers.
We'll have to disagree on this. Wikipedia also says "Using or threatening to use force against an officer during an arrest". I'd call struggling to escape the use of force against an officer; the fact that he's not trying to punch an officer doesn't mean he's not forcibly opposing the officer's actions, and in court, I bet the video would be a clear demonstration that, from a legal standpoint, he's guilty of resisting arrest.
However, if this site is to be believed, resisting arrest in Florida is simply:
Whoever shall resist, obstruct, or oppose any officer as defined in s. 943.10
Which Meyer was pretty clearly guilty of.
that hardly backs up your origional point of "the crowd didn't rise up in protest, or even complain from their seats "
I've already acknowledged that my original post contained a lot of hyperbole. However, here's another dissenting view:
I was at the Kerry speech today, sitting 2 rows away from all the action. I'll let you know how it really went down.
The forum was going to be over at 2 pm, and Kerry spoke for so long that the Q and A portion had to be shortened. He only got through about 7 of the 50 people who were waiting to ask questions. While the final question was being read, some douchebag ran down the aisle, grabbed the mic from the other side of the room, interrupted the kid who was talking, and started yelling at Kerry, demanding that his questions be heard. He started ranting about how Kerry talks in circles or something, and everyone was getting annoyed. The cops are all over him in no time and try to escort him out, but he starts yelling and resisting. Kerry insists that they let him stay and even agrees to answer his question.
After the interrupted guy's question was answered, Kerry keeps his promise and lets the angry guy talk. This is the point where people started taking their cameras and phones out. All the videos floating around youtube start around here. You can see in the videos that his questioning gets kind of inappropriate, so somebody cut his mic. Instead of shutting up, he starts yelling and making an even bigger scene. He struggled all the way up the aisle, and started violently trying to free himself. They threatened to taze him and he wouldnt stop fighting, so he got tazed. They only had to arrest him because he was causing a disruption and wouldn't leave peacefully. He wasn't being silenced for asking tough questions, trust me.
Someone else who was present wasn't laughing at a jackass style stunt; they thought he was being disruptive and deserved to be forcibly removed, and when he resisted, was tased (which the author doesn't seem to disapprove of). This anecdote also makes Meyer look more disruptive generally, and long past the point of patient tolerance, given that he'd already seized a mic from someone else.
The tazer was used to inflict pain to obtain compliance on someone already physicaly restrained. That seems a lot like punishment to me.
When I think of punishment, I think of deliberately causing a negative consequence for someone in response to something they've done. In the case of forcing compliance, the subject gets the choice of receiving the negative consequence or complying. Crucial difference, that, I think: All he had to do was stop struggling. And lest this seem bloodyminded, keep in mind that it's less bloody in practice than chokeholds or batons or pepper spray. It looks dramatic, but has far fewer aftereffects. And as the eyewitness above reports, he was still struggling when he got tased, which is what I saw on the
On the video I watched the taser was threatend at 1:20. But he only tried to get free from the (large) officer at 0:50.
In the first linked youtube video, he starts to struggle at 24 seconds, pulling out of their grasp; at 27 seconds he's actually free of their grasp before they grab him again. That's the start of actively resisting the officers carrying out their lawful duties.
At 42 seconds he starts jumping up and down yelling "help". At 52 seconds he's yelling "get away from me man" and trying to pull away. By 1:06 they've got him on the ground and are telling him to put his hands behind his back. 1:17 is the first clearly audible threat of "you will get tased if you don't co-operate." The actual tasing doesn't occur until 1:59, timed as the first audible "ow".
So,you're correct, it was not two minutes. He was threatened after a little less than a minute. He was tased at one minute and 35 seconds after he initially started resisting. The "two minutes" figure came from looking at the timer on the video, seeing 1:59, and thinking that he got away with being a dick for two minutes before the taser was used.
He still actively resisted them for a full minute and a half before the taser was used.
after he was threatend with the taser he said "I'll walk out of here, just let me go" sounds a lot like what you were looking for.
As any cop will tell you, once the cuffs are brought out, you no longer have the option of saying "Okay, okay, let's just forget this whole thing and I'll walk out of here." At that point, his best option was to go limp and wait for instructions from the police.
As soon as he was tased(sp?) you can quite clearly hear the crowd respond with several members yelling "stop" and "why are you doing that?"
I heard one voice clearly protesting. OTOH, at the moment of his tasing, you can see the guy in the orange shirt smiling and laughing. I'd say it's clear that the crowd wasn't all on his side.
I've got a feeling you are a troll given how your points are easily disputable. But if you arn't then I've got to say that I think that you just didn't like him because he was loud,and rude.
I'm guilty of hyperbole, not trolling. You're right, I don't like him because he was a jerk. That's irrelevant to the officer's justification for using the taser on a subject who was clearly, actively resisting arrest.
I think that 6 Cops
It was four cops. Whoops, a factual inaccuracy! There goes all your arguments!
using a weapon on a single student who was on the ground is just obscene.... This was not protection.. this was punishment.
On the ground he continued to squirm and fight them putting the cuffs on. He had a clear choice: comply. Stop resisting, let them put the cuffs on, and walk out with them. He was warned that he would get tased if he didn't, and he chose to continue a useless struggle against them. That's why I have zero sympathy for him. It wasn't protection or punishment, it was forcing compliance from someone being actively non-compliant, someone already being physically restrained to prevent his escape.
What do his rights have to do with it? He actively resisted arrest, which permits the police to use reasonable force to subdue him. They followed their standard force escalation ladder. It wasn't until after he was tased that he stopped resisting.
Violently resisting is not the same as actively resisting.
No difference to me. Actively resisting arrest also justifies a tasering, IMHO. Passive resistance would not justify it; a sit-in broken up by tasering would be excessive force. But using a taser to subdue someone actively struggling against four police? Justified.
There were four officers, not six. And while on the ground, he continued to struggle to prevent them from cuffing him.
Do you think they wanted to use the taser? Do you think every cop is not aware how it looks? Do you honestly think that if they felt like they had full control of him and that he was co-operative, they still would taser him?
You really seem to think that tasers are an appropriate method of coercing a non-violent individual.
There's actually a lot of grey in that general assertion, though I'd generally say that, no, tasers are not appropriate means of coercing non-violent individuals. However, Meyer was not non-violent. He was being walked out--that was non-violent--when he lunged to get away from the cops; from that point on he was violently resisting arrest by struggling. Even that didn't immediately trigger the taser--it was a minute later in the video when they warned him. Note that: warned him first to comply. They didn't start tasering him as they walked; they tasered him after he struggled to get away for more than a minute, and after warning him that they would if he didn't stop struggling.
You yourself were the one pushing that line, when you said things like, "I was pleased to see a self-righteous asshole run smack into reality because his hubris told him that his blather was more important than it was.".... Now that you are changing your story, I guess our disagreement is over.
I never pushed that line, and I'm not changing my story. My pleasure at seeing a jerk suffer the consequences of his own jerk behavior is independent of the cop's justification for tasering him.
What matters is that you didn't like that he was 'blathering.' Now you say that 'blather' does not deserve a "smack into reality." Ok.
See above. I've always said that he deserved tasering because he resisted arrest. My pleasure is just a two-fer.
Taser's own website refers to them as "less lethal"
Taser has to refer to them as less lethal because they can't claim that they're non-lethal when they have caused deaths. The fact remains that deaths by taser are far fewer, per use, than chokehold or beating deaths by police. That's why police have adopted them wholesale.
You call it emotional because you prefer to avoid the issue, I call it simple and to the point.
It's logically irrelevent. It's a non-starter. The police were justified in using force to remove Meyer. No one is ever justified in raping someone.
Lethal force is never justified as a response to non-lethal force. Period.
I agree. Too bad tasers aren't lethal force. The whole point is to avoid lethal force, and they're more successful at that than older police options like batons.
I could be wrong about him twisting his body. It might have been the cops doing it. But my plain view of the video is that he fought the cops up until they tasered him, at which point he got up and walked out under his own power.
Personally, if the cop said "I'm going to tase you if you don't lie still", I'd lie still. That's just me, though. Then again, once the cops asked me to leave, I'd have walked out calmly with them. It would never have gotten to that point with me.
It's easy to call me a sadist and accuse me of trying to spin this. It's harder to imagine that Meyer might have just been a jerk who participated in his own tasering by being stubborn and aggressive and refusing to recognize that it was time for him to leave, and that the cops had a legal obligation to make him do so. He was given every opportunity to avoid tasering; he refused them.
And you can certainly argue that the cops had no business initiating force on him by physically grabbing him in the first place, which is what really set this all off
You can argue it, but you'd be wrong. He was asked to leave by the organizers; he didn't. He initiated force. They cut off his mic; he started yelling to be heard. The police surrounded him and told him to leave with them; he kept yelling. At that point, there were two options: forcibly remove him, or continue with, as you put it, "diplomacy and tact".
Why should they use diplomacy and tact? He didn't stop struggling until they tasered him. Do you really think that 30 or 60 more seconds of "pretty please" would have made any difference except to delay the event that much longer?
by the time he was thrown down on the floor and cuffed they already had him up at the top of the steps and not too far from the exit.
10 feet from the exit of the auditorium, 100 yards from the police car in which they were going to take him away. Carrying a struggling person 100 yards isn't easy and is likely to result in further injury. It wouldn't have been a done deal once he was out of the auditorium.
If he'd fucked up one or more of the cops at that point, it would have been justified as self-defense.
Maybe in your "fight the man" worldview, not in mine. He was in the wrong from the point that the organizers cut his mic, and the police followed a carefully defined escalation procedure that gave him plenty of opportunity to calm down and walk out. Until his lunge at the mic, they probably wouldn't have arrested him at all, and leaving by the doors would have been the end of it.
To put it in libertarian terms, he's the one who initiated force by refusing to leave. If I come and sit in your living room and refuse to leave after you've asked me, am I not initiating force against you? At that point, while it may be nice to try diplomacy and tact for a while, it's by no means incumbent on you to be nice to me in response.
You're right, it is torture. If the videos from Abu Graib included a soldier tasering a innocent Iraqi to tell him all the names of terrorists he knows, it would provoke a hue and cry from the public like nothing the naked pyramid did.
The only sense in which the taser is justifiable as a compliance tool is in comparison to existing police methods like batons, pepper spray, choke holds and the like. All of those would also be easily considered torture when seen in an Abu Graib video--repeated pepper spraying, being beaten with a baton, or constantly choked into submission.
In comparison to those methods, tasering is far less physically harmful, so it's a relative step forward in police use of force. I can only say that we generally view compliance-by-pain as circumstantially justifiable, while interrogation by pain as never justifiable. Until we can figure out a better way to achieve compliance by non-compliant subjects of lawful actions by police, I don't see an alternative. If they'd beaten Meyer with batons until he walked out under his own power, it'd be much, much worse for Meyer, assuming he was able to do so.
Apparently you don't see the contradiction between your first sentence and your second.
There is no contradiction between my two sentences. You and others are pushing the line that he was tasered because he disrupted the event, spoke badly to Kerry or whatever. He wasn't. He was tasered because he resisted arrest. Had he not resisted arrest (i.e., when the cops grabbed him, had we walked peacefully out of the auditorium with them) he wouldn't have been tasered. His tasering was a direct result of his choice to fight the police trying to remove him, at which point the use of force was justified. His words played no part in his tasering; they merely preceded it in the sequence of events, and assigning causality to that precedence is the fallacy known as Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
My pleasure at seeing him get tasered had nothing to do with what he said either--I'm still unsure what point he was trying to make.
It's all her fault that she got raped, did you see what she was wearing? Since when is the use of a lethal weapon justified because someone talked out of line?
An irrelevant analogy, and a really cheap, ham handed attempt to emotionally slant the issue in your favor. Rape is always wrong. The application of force by police, including lethal force, is justified or not depending on the circumstances.
Second, tasers are not lethal weapons. That people have died from them does not make them lethal, either (and in point of fact, tasers have caused far fewer deaths than police choke holds, one of the reasons tasers are favored by police). People have been smothered with pillows--does that make a pillow fight a duel to the death?
Lastly, he wasn't tasered because he talked out of line. Talking out of line got him removed from the event, a circumstance he chose to fight. Had he left at that point, he wouldn't have been tasered.
Why did they have to taser him when he was already down?
Because even down and cuffed, he was continuing to struggle. At the point they threaten the taser, he actually twists his body 90 degrees and raises his torso. They were instructing him to lay down so they could lift him up. He could have done that. Instead, he continued to squirm.
Because that would look better than using a stick/baton, and leave less bruises and blood?
It doesn't look better, but the fact that it does leave less bruises and blood is an argument in favour of the taser. It causes pain that disappears when the button is released, and no injury; by comparison, physical takedowns and subduals leave bruises and stand a good chance of worse injuries, like sprains, dislocations, and torn ligaments. Police favour the taser for exactly that reason.
I'm not sure you can control the length of such a shock
The shock is delivered while the button is depressed. They did go on quite a bit, but from what I could tell, they stopped when he went limp (not limp paralyzed, I mean limp not struggling anymore).
In principle, a taser is violence.
Yes, it is. Much more focussed, effective violence with almost no aftereffects. Far superior, in principle, to batons and fists and pepper spray or mace.
I think the whole taser usage is a bit too easy under the excuse that it's not lethal.
This is the first useful point someone has made when arguing against the cop's actions. I think it's true to a degree. However, this incident does not support that argument in general.
You know what I saw? I saw someone cut to the front of the line, grab the mic, start asking questions, and not stop asking questions. I saw someone refuse to leave when asked by the organizers. I saw them cut off the mic, and cops surround him and tell him it's time to go. I saw him fight with police, and continue fighting after they'd subdued him. I saw the appropriate use of a taser to force compliance, which it did--he got up and walked out under their control, no worse the wear for having been tasered.
It's not technicalities, it's common sense. If you cause a disruption you'll be asked to leave. If you won't leave you'll be forcibly removed. If you resist forcible removal, more force will be applied. Anyone not grandstanding for victimhood would have recognized that he'd made as much of his point as was going to be made, and would have walked out with the police.
You're seeing what you want to see. When the police grab him, it's for the purpose of walking him out, which he could have done. Instead, he walks ten feet, and then lunges back to the microphone.
Tasers kill far fewer people than police choke holds and batons, which is part of the reason that the police prefer them and adopted them so readily. And your example of a frail person is disingenous: If a cop chooses not to baton a frail person, he can also choose not to taser him.
There's also the fact that, while a baton, or a physical takedown, may not kill you, it will certainly cause durable injuries. Bruises, sprains, twists, dislocations, and torn ligaments are all common injuries to both suspects and police following a purely physical subdual.
Yes, the taser hurts like hell. But then it stops. Note that, immediately after his tasering, Meyer is suddenly very compliant to the cop's orders. That's the whole point of it.
BTW, using caps for certain words is a scare tactic, not rational debate.
Actually, I have no clue what he said--I came into the video at the point he was being asked to leave. All I caught was some crap about skull and bones. If it's my politics that are suspect, that's your wrong assumption... If I could, I'd be a Democrat, and the only reason I didn't like Kerry in 2004 was that I thought he was too mainstream a candidate, too DLC. I'd have preferred Dean. I'm looking forward to the 2008 royal rogering of the Republican party, which is richly deserved.
I don't think the police should punish him for what he was saying. I was pleased to see a self-righteous asshole run smack into reality because his hubris told him that his blather was more important than it was.
Perhaps I am giving the police too much leeway to use force to remove an inappropriately disruptive element. If so, it's because I have zero sympathy for someone who had every opportunity to avoid what happened to him. His tasering was a direct result of his choices.
Rodney King *was* repeatedly tasered--that's the reason that the cops gave him the beatdown they did (and the initial jury found the cops not guilty of excessive force). What the video clip of King's beating showed was him knocked down and getting hit--it didn't show him charging out of his car, getting hit with four tasers, and keep coming. The police testified that, because of that, they thought he was on drugs, necessitating a physical takedown.
Personally, I'd rather be tasered than batoned. After multiple baton hits, the hurt last for days or weeks, assuming nothing gets broken or torn inside (not a safe assumption). Tasering hurts like hell, but it's over when the button is released.
They gave him lots of chances to "just leave", before they cut his mic, after they cut his mic, and before they walked him out. Hell, even as they were walking him out, he could have just gone along willingly. He didn't start saying "I'll leave" until they had him on the ground and cuffed, at which point he was saying "let me go and I'll leave." (at which point he was struggling to escape) Sorry, but when you've escalated the situation to the point where the cops have subdued and cuffed you, you're guilty of resisting arrest and you're going to the station. You can't back out at that point by promising to be co-operative.
It may seem like his rights were violated because you're reacting to the drama of the tazering, but what the cops did was textbook and they won't get into any trouble.
Really? Because, when I watched the video, what I saw was him fighting as hard as he could to get out of their grasp and get back to the mic, which is what triggered flooring and cuffing him. And even then, held down by four cops and cuffed, he was still struggling, to the point that he was able to turn his body 90 degrees and lift his torso and head to say "don't tazer me, bro".
Of course, after the tazer, he got up and walked out quite willingly. He could have done that before the tazer and avoided it, but he didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
They're in a tough position: They bought that stock with non-par currency, and are now eating the cost of the rising CAD to keep customers happy. As a small business, they don't have a lot of cash reserves to wait out the inventory turns until they're purchasing at par as well.
If you want to support them, thank them for the offer, and then pay the full CAD price, at least for the next couple months.
Why do you expect that this would have any effect on social strife?
Imagine a jeep mounted pleasure ray. Imagine it parked at one end of a square, pointing at a crowd. Imagine the soldier running the ray gun saying "watch this." He turns the gun to the right--the crowd races to stay in the beam. He pans left, and the crowd shuffles left. He jerks it back right, and the crowd runs facefirst into the building on that side of the square.
And yet still an effective crowd control tool.
Can we use it on that kid in Florida?
"Don't pain ray me, bro!"
We'll have to disagree on this. Wikipedia also says "Using or threatening to use force against an officer during an arrest". I'd call struggling to escape the use of force against an officer; the fact that he's not trying to punch an officer doesn't mean he's not forcibly opposing the officer's actions, and in court, I bet the video would be a clear demonstration that, from a legal standpoint, he's guilty of resisting arrest.
However, if this site is to be believed, resisting arrest in Florida is simply:
Which Meyer was pretty clearly guilty of.
I've already acknowledged that my original post contained a lot of hyperbole. However, here's another dissenting view:
Someone else who was present wasn't laughing at a jackass style stunt; they thought he was being disruptive and deserved to be forcibly removed, and when he resisted, was tased (which the author doesn't seem to disapprove of). This anecdote also makes Meyer look more disruptive generally, and long past the point of patient tolerance, given that he'd already seized a mic from someone else.
When I think of punishment, I think of deliberately causing a negative consequence for someone in response to something they've done. In the case of forcing compliance, the subject gets the choice of receiving the negative consequence or complying. Crucial difference, that, I think: All he had to do was stop struggling. And lest this seem bloodyminded, keep in mind that it's less bloody in practice than chokeholds or batons or pepper spray. It looks dramatic, but has far fewer aftereffects. And as the eyewitness above reports, he was still struggling when he got tased, which is what I saw on the
In the first linked youtube video, he starts to struggle at 24 seconds, pulling out of their grasp; at 27 seconds he's actually free of their grasp before they grab him again. That's the start of actively resisting the officers carrying out their lawful duties.
At 42 seconds he starts jumping up and down yelling "help". At 52 seconds he's yelling "get away from me man" and trying to pull away. By 1:06 they've got him on the ground and are telling him to put his hands behind his back. 1:17 is the first clearly audible threat of "you will get tased if you don't co-operate." The actual tasing doesn't occur until 1:59, timed as the first audible "ow".
So,you're correct, it was not two minutes. He was threatened after a little less than a minute. He was tased at one minute and 35 seconds after he initially started resisting. The "two minutes" figure came from looking at the timer on the video, seeing 1:59, and thinking that he got away with being a dick for two minutes before the taser was used.
He still actively resisted them for a full minute and a half before the taser was used.
As any cop will tell you, once the cuffs are brought out, you no longer have the option of saying "Okay, okay, let's just forget this whole thing and I'll walk out of here." At that point, his best option was to go limp and wait for instructions from the police.
I heard one voice clearly protesting. OTOH, at the moment of his tasing, you can see the guy in the orange shirt smiling and laughing. I'd say it's clear that the crowd wasn't all on his side.
I'm guilty of hyperbole, not trolling. You're right, I don't like him because he was a jerk. That's irrelevant to the officer's justification for using the taser on a subject who was clearly, actively resisting arrest.
It was four cops. Whoops, a factual inaccuracy! There goes all your arguments!
On the ground he continued to squirm and fight them putting the cuffs on. He had a clear choice: comply. Stop resisting, let them put the cuffs on, and walk out with them. He was warned that he would get tased if he didn't, and he chose to continue a useless struggle against them. That's why I have zero sympathy for him. It wasn't protection or punishment, it was forcing compliance from someone being actively non-compliant, someone already being physically restrained to prevent his escape.
What do his rights have to do with it? He actively resisted arrest, which permits the police to use reasonable force to subdue him. They followed their standard force escalation ladder. It wasn't until after he was tased that he stopped resisting.
No difference to me. Actively resisting arrest also justifies a tasering, IMHO. Passive resistance would not justify it; a sit-in broken up by tasering would be excessive force. But using a taser to subdue someone actively struggling against four police? Justified.
There were four officers, not six. And while on the ground, he continued to struggle to prevent them from cuffing him.
Do you think they wanted to use the taser? Do you think every cop is not aware how it looks? Do you honestly think that if they felt like they had full control of him and that he was co-operative, they still would taser him?
There's actually a lot of grey in that general assertion, though I'd generally say that, no, tasers are not appropriate means of coercing non-violent individuals. However, Meyer was not non-violent. He was being walked out--that was non-violent--when he lunged to get away from the cops; from that point on he was violently resisting arrest by struggling. Even that didn't immediately trigger the taser--it was a minute later in the video when they warned him. Note that: warned him first to comply. They didn't start tasering him as they walked; they tasered him after he struggled to get away for more than a minute, and after warning him that they would if he didn't stop struggling.
I never pushed that line, and I'm not changing my story. My pleasure at seeing a jerk suffer the consequences of his own jerk behavior is independent of the cop's justification for tasering him.
See above. I've always said that he deserved tasering because he resisted arrest. My pleasure is just a two-fer.
Taser has to refer to them as less lethal because they can't claim that they're non-lethal when they have caused deaths. The fact remains that deaths by taser are far fewer, per use, than chokehold or beating deaths by police. That's why police have adopted them wholesale.
It's logically irrelevent. It's a non-starter. The police were justified in using force to remove Meyer. No one is ever justified in raping someone.
I agree. Too bad tasers aren't lethal force. The whole point is to avoid lethal force, and they're more successful at that than older police options like batons.
I could be wrong about him twisting his body. It might have been the cops doing it. But my plain view of the video is that he fought the cops up until they tasered him, at which point he got up and walked out under his own power.
Personally, if the cop said "I'm going to tase you if you don't lie still", I'd lie still. That's just me, though. Then again, once the cops asked me to leave, I'd have walked out calmly with them. It would never have gotten to that point with me.
It's easy to call me a sadist and accuse me of trying to spin this. It's harder to imagine that Meyer might have just been a jerk who participated in his own tasering by being stubborn and aggressive and refusing to recognize that it was time for him to leave, and that the cops had a legal obligation to make him do so. He was given every opportunity to avoid tasering; he refused them.
You can argue it, but you'd be wrong. He was asked to leave by the organizers; he didn't. He initiated force. They cut off his mic; he started yelling to be heard. The police surrounded him and told him to leave with them; he kept yelling. At that point, there were two options: forcibly remove him, or continue with, as you put it, "diplomacy and tact".
Why should they use diplomacy and tact? He didn't stop struggling until they tasered him. Do you really think that 30 or 60 more seconds of "pretty please" would have made any difference except to delay the event that much longer?
10 feet from the exit of the auditorium, 100 yards from the police car in which they were going to take him away. Carrying a struggling person 100 yards isn't easy and is likely to result in further injury. It wouldn't have been a done deal once he was out of the auditorium.
Maybe in your "fight the man" worldview, not in mine. He was in the wrong from the point that the organizers cut his mic, and the police followed a carefully defined escalation procedure that gave him plenty of opportunity to calm down and walk out. Until his lunge at the mic, they probably wouldn't have arrested him at all, and leaving by the doors would have been the end of it.
To put it in libertarian terms, he's the one who initiated force by refusing to leave. If I come and sit in your living room and refuse to leave after you've asked me, am I not initiating force against you? At that point, while it may be nice to try diplomacy and tact for a while, it's by no means incumbent on you to be nice to me in response.
You're right, it is torture. If the videos from Abu Graib included a soldier tasering a innocent Iraqi to tell him all the names of terrorists he knows, it would provoke a hue and cry from the public like nothing the naked pyramid did.
The only sense in which the taser is justifiable as a compliance tool is in comparison to existing police methods like batons, pepper spray, choke holds and the like. All of those would also be easily considered torture when seen in an Abu Graib video--repeated pepper spraying, being beaten with a baton, or constantly choked into submission.
In comparison to those methods, tasering is far less physically harmful, so it's a relative step forward in police use of force. I can only say that we generally view compliance-by-pain as circumstantially justifiable, while interrogation by pain as never justifiable. Until we can figure out a better way to achieve compliance by non-compliant subjects of lawful actions by police, I don't see an alternative. If they'd beaten Meyer with batons until he walked out under his own power, it'd be much, much worse for Meyer, assuming he was able to do so.
There is no contradiction between my two sentences. You and others are pushing the line that he was tasered because he disrupted the event, spoke badly to Kerry or whatever. He wasn't. He was tasered because he resisted arrest. Had he not resisted arrest (i.e., when the cops grabbed him, had we walked peacefully out of the auditorium with them) he wouldn't have been tasered. His tasering was a direct result of his choice to fight the police trying to remove him, at which point the use of force was justified. His words played no part in his tasering; they merely preceded it in the sequence of events, and assigning causality to that precedence is the fallacy known as Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
My pleasure at seeing him get tasered had nothing to do with what he said either--I'm still unsure what point he was trying to make.
An irrelevant analogy, and a really cheap, ham handed attempt to emotionally slant the issue in your favor. Rape is always wrong. The application of force by police, including lethal force, is justified or not depending on the circumstances.
Second, tasers are not lethal weapons. That people have died from them does not make them lethal, either (and in point of fact, tasers have caused far fewer deaths than police choke holds, one of the reasons tasers are favored by police). People have been smothered with pillows--does that make a pillow fight a duel to the death?
Lastly, he wasn't tasered because he talked out of line. Talking out of line got him removed from the event, a circumstance he chose to fight. Had he left at that point, he wouldn't have been tasered.
Why did they have to taser him when he was already down?
Because even down and cuffed, he was continuing to struggle. At the point they threaten the taser, he actually twists his body 90 degrees and raises his torso. They were instructing him to lay down so they could lift him up. He could have done that. Instead, he continued to squirm.
Because that would look better than using a stick/baton, and leave less bruises and blood?
It doesn't look better, but the fact that it does leave less bruises and blood is an argument in favour of the taser. It causes pain that disappears when the button is released, and no injury; by comparison, physical takedowns and subduals leave bruises and stand a good chance of worse injuries, like sprains, dislocations, and torn ligaments. Police favour the taser for exactly that reason.
I'm not sure you can control the length of such a shock
The shock is delivered while the button is depressed. They did go on quite a bit, but from what I could tell, they stopped when he went limp (not limp paralyzed, I mean limp not struggling anymore).
In principle, a taser is violence.
Yes, it is. Much more focussed, effective violence with almost no aftereffects. Far superior, in principle, to batons and fists and pepper spray or mace.
I think the whole taser usage is a bit too easy under the excuse that it's not lethal.
This is the first useful point someone has made when arguing against the cop's actions. I think it's true to a degree. However, this incident does not support that argument in general.
Give me a break.
You know what I saw? I saw someone cut to the front of the line, grab the mic, start asking questions, and not stop asking questions. I saw someone refuse to leave when asked by the organizers. I saw them cut off the mic, and cops surround him and tell him it's time to go. I saw him fight with police, and continue fighting after they'd subdued him. I saw the appropriate use of a taser to force compliance, which it did--he got up and walked out under their control, no worse the wear for having been tasered.
It's not technicalities, it's common sense. If you cause a disruption you'll be asked to leave. If you won't leave you'll be forcibly removed. If you resist forcible removal, more force will be applied. Anyone not grandstanding for victimhood would have recognized that he'd made as much of his point as was going to be made, and would have walked out with the police.
You're seeing what you want to see. When the police grab him, it's for the purpose of walking him out, which he could have done. Instead, he walks ten feet, and then lunges back to the microphone.
Tasers kill far fewer people than police choke holds and batons, which is part of the reason that the police prefer them and adopted them so readily. And your example of a frail person is disingenous: If a cop chooses not to baton a frail person, he can also choose not to taser him.
There's also the fact that, while a baton, or a physical takedown, may not kill you, it will certainly cause durable injuries. Bruises, sprains, twists, dislocations, and torn ligaments are all common injuries to both suspects and police following a purely physical subdual.
Yes, the taser hurts like hell. But then it stops. Note that, immediately after his tasering, Meyer is suddenly very compliant to the cop's orders. That's the whole point of it.
BTW, using caps for certain words is a scare tactic, not rational debate.
Actually, I have no clue what he said--I came into the video at the point he was being asked to leave. All I caught was some crap about skull and bones. If it's my politics that are suspect, that's your wrong assumption... If I could, I'd be a Democrat, and the only reason I didn't like Kerry in 2004 was that I thought he was too mainstream a candidate, too DLC. I'd have preferred Dean. I'm looking forward to the 2008 royal rogering of the Republican party, which is richly deserved.
I don't think the police should punish him for what he was saying. I was pleased to see a self-righteous asshole run smack into reality because his hubris told him that his blather was more important than it was.
Perhaps I am giving the police too much leeway to use force to remove an inappropriately disruptive element. If so, it's because I have zero sympathy for someone who had every opportunity to avoid what happened to him. His tasering was a direct result of his choices.
So, in other words, nothing really.
I am impressed, though: you didn't blame this directly on Bill Clinton.
Rodney King *was* repeatedly tasered--that's the reason that the cops gave him the beatdown they did (and the initial jury found the cops not guilty of excessive force). What the video clip of King's beating showed was him knocked down and getting hit--it didn't show him charging out of his car, getting hit with four tasers, and keep coming. The police testified that, because of that, they thought he was on drugs, necessitating a physical takedown.
Personally, I'd rather be tasered than batoned. After multiple baton hits, the hurt last for days or weeks, assuming nothing gets broken or torn inside (not a safe assumption). Tasering hurts like hell, but it's over when the button is released.
They gave him lots of chances to "just leave", before they cut his mic, after they cut his mic, and before they walked him out. Hell, even as they were walking him out, he could have just gone along willingly. He didn't start saying "I'll leave" until they had him on the ground and cuffed, at which point he was saying "let me go and I'll leave." (at which point he was struggling to escape) Sorry, but when you've escalated the situation to the point where the cops have subdued and cuffed you, you're guilty of resisting arrest and you're going to the station. You can't back out at that point by promising to be co-operative.
It may seem like his rights were violated because you're reacting to the drama of the tazering, but what the cops did was textbook and they won't get into any trouble.
Really? Because, when I watched the video, what I saw was him fighting as hard as he could to get out of their grasp and get back to the mic, which is what triggered flooring and cuffing him. And even then, held down by four cops and cuffed, he was still struggling, to the point that he was able to turn his body 90 degrees and lift his torso and head to say "don't tazer me, bro".
Of course, after the tazer, he got up and walked out quite willingly. He could have done that before the tazer and avoided it, but he didn't.