What is perhaps even more disturbing is the slant that the major media is putting on the story. Compare the AP story, reprinted by CNN here, with the footage shot on-scene by another student here and the eyewitness account here.
It can be a scary and dangerous thing to be a police officer. I actually had some sympathy for the cops in the Rodney King beating because, you know, the jackass did have a knife in his pocket and he kept fucking reaching for it. Where those cops were out of line was that they had more than sufficient manpower on the scene to simply "swarm" and cuff Rodney (a textbook police maneuver where one officer gets each arm and just faceplants the perp and cuffs his hands behind his back) rather than continually smacking him with the nightstick and waiting to see if he'd try it again.
What THESE officers did was considerably worse. They already HAD their "perp" - a slightly built college kid - cuffed and lying motionless on the ground, and they shot him with a Taser over and fucking OVER again for not getting up. They were in ABSOLUTELY no danger at that point. Further, nobody including the police has suggested that the student in question either directly assaulted an officer OR made a move to stick his hands in his pockets. The accounts given state that he initially raised his hands, and subsequently lay - cuffed - on the floor motionlessly.
If you can't figure out, with four officers on scene, how to get a motionless and cuffed (AND scrawny) college kid into a cruiser, you don't belong on the police force. PERIOD.
And yes, this IS our fucking Patriot Act. Right here. And I don't like it.
