Yes this was a very interesting incident, I think there is no doubt that the student reacted so visibly in order to draw a reaction from the security…”the fact that someone is being observed (filmed) changes will definatly change the subject’s behaviour…

A look at the student’s website (www.theandrewmeyer.com) would suggst he’s a keen prankster, as most students can be! (see the you tube clips on his site) So he could have easily staged the event in some ways if he wanted…

Of course NONE of this justifies the tazer’ing I guess, but there is a longer video of the event here in case you haven’t seen it……http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=657_1190085332 which shows the build up….

Either way, makes some of us glad we didn’t go to an American Unisversity!

An unfortunate combination of police over-reaction and what appears to be student douche-baggery.

Two questions arise from this:

Was the student aggressive?

Were the police aggressive?

Police, by the very nature of their profession, will be aggressive. So, the kid knew he was risking arrest or detainment by standing on his soapbox. However, I get the feeling that the officers present got miffed because they felt like they couldn’t “control” the situation. Me, personally, I don’t think there’s much situation to control; the kid was asking questions and making points. Anyone who has been to a university where a marginally controversial speaker comes knows full well that someone is going to flap their gums for a while, and you have to let them do it. He said he was going to ask three questions. He finished asking his last question and they cut his mic and then arrested him, not waiting to see how he would act after asking his final question.

Was the student aggressive? It is absurd to think that taking a long time to ask a question is aggressive; it is normal for someone to provide context for their question, as he did (though maybe toooo much context).

Therefore, if he wasn’t aggressive, then what was the grounds for arresting him. Trespassing? He’s a student at the university. Public disruption? Maybe, though that’s a stretch.

My last thoughts: Kerry is not someone worth getting arrested over. He’s a tool and I’m glad he lost the election in 2004. Though, I witnessed disenfranchisement of voters in Ohio first-hand, so the student’s point was valid.

From the video posted here, it is not possible to see how long Meyer was speaking before he got to the secret societies question, but the police clearly had not intervened at that point. It was only when Meyer’s mike was cut that he gets upset and the cops move in, and even then, it is fair to ask whether there were measures other than the police grabbing him that could have been employed to deal with Meyer’s unhappiness. Kerry himself is heard to say during the scuffling that he has asked a very important question (which question he means is not clear), and that he will answer it.

Major media covered the story very selectively, which is par for the course. CNN showed the scuffling but not the question that was cut off. The local news-face here said only that Meyer was asking “challenging questions” to Kerry at the time.

On the other hand, it would not surprise me to hear that Meyer knew what was coming (as implied in one of the other posts here). One of my colleagues noted rather impatiently that this story, like so many other, functions as a distraction from the real important issue of the day, which is not Kerry and Bush and the 2004 election and their membership in Skull and Bones, but the ongoing killing in Iraq. And let me add that the real important question about the Iraq war may be the twin questions of the influence of Bush and his oil baron friends and the pro-Israel neocon forces which have been practically untouchable in modern day America, in part because of the “Holocaust” holiness factor. Finally, I would also add that the real important question about “secret societies” is not Skull and Bones, it is rather the ongoing influence of and lack of accountability of plain vanilla freemasonic and other secret societies in our local communities and on the national scene day in and day out, which few Christians pay any attention to at all. Mennonites used to, at least to some degree.

The student wasn’t really looking to ask a question, per se, he was there to make a point.

1. The person filming the incident says:
“I couldnt (sic) get to my camera in time to record his entrance, but this guy basically comes running in with 4 or 5 cops in tow and says he has been running around trying to get in to ask a question and the cops are going to arrest him for it.” When he does arrive, the cops do not prevent him from asking the question, but do appear to be guarding him very carefully. I don’t know what sparked their initial distrust of this guy, but obviously there is more that proceeds the filming.

2. After he asks each of the first 2 questions, he twice rebuffs someone in the background saying that he is going to inform the people, and that Kerry has had enough time to talk. The fellow isn’t particularly interested in Kerry’s response. He’s there to get HIS message across. Perfectly valid tactic, but he isn’t there for a respectful Q&A session.

3. While the police get physical unnecessarily quickly, the fellow is clearly “resisting arrest”- non-violently, but actively. And he continues to speak in a way to draw maximum attention. “Is anyone getting this?” He knows the gig is up, but wants to draw out the moment, and the rougher the police get, the longer the moment is drawn out. He calls for help long before the police use the taser of (it appears) use any pain tactics.

To be clear- I’m not saying he went looking for a good tasering that morning, but I think he went to create as big a scene as possible to get his point across and he he used the escalation to further that aim. Minus the tasering, I suspect he had a decent idea how this would play out and went in with his eyes open and clear protest-oriented tactics.

Basically, my only point is that this is a case of clear police overreaction to an intentionally provocative disruption, not just goons attacking someone with an innocent question out of the blue.

Both show the police in a bad light, but they are different. In changing police behavior, I think its important to differentiate between situations. This looks (to me) to be a case of bad training and overly permissive procedures more than rogue cops out for a beat-down. In the first case, there is a decent opportunity to treat the officers with of humanity and reform them and their policies. Far less so with the latter.

I agree with you that it appears that the police escalated the incident, especially when it was because he stayed too long at a microphone and Sen. Kerry was saying something to the effect of, “Stop, I will answer his question.”

Did the student further escalate things? Probably - he did resist when the police used force, which is almost never a winnable situation. But the quick use of force to pull him out of the room, and then the quick use of the taser, is more than disturbing.

I would argue that the use of a taser at all is quite disturbing, as more and more frequently it is causing more physical injuries (and even death) than they are “supposed to” cause.