Often, more fascinating than the news itself are the reactions. Criminal defense lawyers win or lose based on their ability to gage the reactions of others, barely known to them. While we may feel or react in a certain way to events around us, and even trying to gage our reactions is akin to cat-herding, it is critical that we have a feel for the reactions of others. On the tasing (tasering?) of Andrew Meyer, 21 year old journalism student at the University of Florida, how far did I miss the mark?
Yesterday’s post, with videos included, expressed my outrage at the use of force. Not because this is the most heinous use of force that I’ve ever known about, or even because it was so unusual that police use force to subdue a person for convenience (indeed, tasers are used for that purpose with relative frequency), but because we rarely get a videotaped view of what happened from 32 different angles. Capturing the actual event makes it so much more vivid and indisputable that we get to live it rather than hear about it.
But that’s just me. How did others react? Apparently, not everyone thought this was such a horrible thing. In fact, some people not only thought that the police were right, but took too long to nail the kid and should have taken him down a lot earlier. Why would they think this? Because, as expressly stated, he was a “jerk”.
My angst comes from some of the comments at Concurring Opinions to this story. My impression was that readers of Co-Op are a more academically oriented bunch. They reflect law professors and students, interested in the law from the learned perspective rather than the practical. I often rag on Co-Op for that reason, but the truth is that I admire the academic view most of the time and think that it brings additional dimension to the practical world that is often missing.
So, it was shocking to find in the comments to the Co-Op post two basic trains of thought. First, they were disinclined to question police decisions. Second, they simply accepted the general proposition that if the speaker was a jerk, there was no issue with using extreme force against him. Both of these propositions strike me as so fundamentally wrong, and ignorant, that I can only pray that these commenters are not law professors in whose hands rest students’ minds. Indeed, I would be comfortable knowing that these were chronically unemployed former police officers who are now duly incarcerated with occasional access to the internet. Anything else just plain scares me.
So in turn, let’s take a gander at the ‘tudes. The reluctance to challenge police decisions comes first. Why? What possible explanation exists for putting the power of life and death, harm and safety, freedom and imprisonment, into the hands of a hundred thousand individuals that are above scrutiny?
Police have a difficult job. They are called upon to make decisions about many things, the use of force among them, as part of their job. It’s not an easy job, and even harder when one expects them to do it right. So who are we to play Monday morning quarterback?
Police officers know, from the minute they enter the Academy, that it’s a tough job with high expectations. They are taught to make difficult decisions, and are made to understand that the power they are given by society will be under constant scrutiny. If they can’t handle the job, then they ought to be something else (like lawyers?). But to suggest that they get a “free pass” because they hold a position of enormous responsibility is to entirely miss the point.
Police, like doctors and lawyers and engineers, should be subject to constant scrutiny. No one should hold the power to do harm to others without scrutiny. Who better to oversee than men and women with guns, shields and the right to use them on the citizens of the United States. The very concept that they are above “second-guessing” is a wholesale abdication of responsibility. They are precisely why such a thing as second-guessing exists. No society can place the power to strike, shoot, seize, or even taser, another person above reproach.
And then we come to the jerk factor. It is universally acknowledged that Andrew Meyer behaved poorly, although there are few opportunities for the public to ask truly uncomfortable questions of high office holders these days, and there is nothing more American that holding a politician’s feet to the fire. But that aside, there are a myriad of allegations of rude behavior, pushing to the front of the line, interrupting another questioner, pedantic speechifying, refusing to yield the floor, and of course the most curious complaint of all, failing to comply with a directive from the police. While some of the anti-Meyer allegations did not appear on any video that I saw, I can accept the idea that Andrew Meyer behaved like a jerk.
Now that the jerk factor is established (or at least accepted), what does that mean? Is behaving poorly an invitation to violence? Does it give the police the right to arrest? What about beat with clubs? Pushing to the front of the line allegation seems to have upset many. In my experience, this happens with relative frequency in school lunch lines. Should these third graders be arrested? Tackled to the ground and handcuffed for pushing? And if they yell out loud as five cops take them down, is pushing to the front enough justification for a good tasering?
But it’s not just pushing to the front, you say. He also interrupted another speaker. Fair enough. So how much violence does that invite? If we have a push plus an interruption, is that worthy of a sound thrashing? And what about the rude questioning? Push plus interruption plus rude questioning equals a forcible arrest, right? But we’re not done yet, you note. Andrew Meyer was TOLD to stop and didn’t. He did not comply.
There we have the crux of the matter. Andy had it in his hands to avoid the violence. All he had to do was comply. Compliance to authority is the difference between an unsatisfying political rant and a tasering. Finally, we arrive at the bottom line. The commenters have chosen the path of least resistance, compliance, and have elevated it above all other reactions.
The docile response to police assertion of authority is almost always the smartest path. The only time it doesn’t work out too well is when the police are about to put a bullet between your eyes and, despite the fact that compliance will make the police infinitely happier, you will end up dead no matter what you do. Then, resistance seems the better route. But otherwise, do not resist authority and all will be well.
This idea, that we must not resist authority, is the only proper course of action when faced with an order by police is perhaps the singular most unAmerican concept there can be. If accepted, we become a nation of lapdogs, compliant to a fault and submissive to the very powers that our nation was formed to fight. If one respects the Constitution and the ideals that our founding fathers sought to instill in a nascent country, then one cannot possible accept submission to authority as the only viable course.
Mind you, one points has been left out of the discussion about Andrew Meyer. He was exercising his first amendment right of free speech to express himself in a fashion that was clearly unpopular in that room and to the police who were charged with maintaining order. What hap
pened that day, up until the moment that Meyer was unceremoniously tasered, was the classic clash of law and order. This situation should be presented to every law student for the next 50 years to reflect how the 1st Amendment creates a conflict with orderly process, and what it means to have a government that cannot stop unpopular political speech. The very discomfort of Andrew Meyer’s handling of his time in front of the microphone was precisely what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when challenging the new government, like the old of King George, to put a muzzle on speech it didn’t like. And then we watched as the police, with the power given them by society, did exactly that.
And when it was over, and he was on the ground, and he was handcuffed, a female police officer calmly and deliberately placed a semi-non-lethal device, that causes great pain, against Andrew Meyer and, without any further ado, inflicted that great pain. And then the only sound to be heard was Andrew Meyer’s screams of pain and the gasps of the audience.
I wonder how many U of F students will remember what happened 20 years from now. And when confronted with the choice of whether to submit to authority or resist, will think of the screams of pain of Andrew Meyer, and decide not to exercise their right to express their disagreement with a high office holder in the United States government. But for the commenters at Co-Op, it’s all worth it. After all, the guy was a jerk.
Yesterday’s post, with videos included, expressed my outrage at the use of force. Not because this is the most heinous use of force that I’ve ever known about, or even because it was so unusual that police use force to subdue a person for convenience (indeed, tasers are used for that purpose with relative frequency), but because we rarely get a videotaped view of what happened from 32 different angles. Capturing the actual event makes it so much more vivid and indisputable that we get to live it rather than hear about it.
But that’s just me. How did others react? Apparently, not everyone thought this was such a horrible thing. In fact, some people not only thought that the police were right, but took too long to nail the kid and should have taken him down a lot earlier. Why would they think this? Because, as expressly stated, he was a “jerk”.
My angst comes from some of the comments at Concurring Opinions to this story. My impression was that readers of Co-Op are a more academically oriented bunch. They reflect law professors and students, interested in the law from the learned perspective rather than the practical. I often rag on Co-Op for that reason, but the truth is that I admire the academic view most of the time and think that it brings additional dimension to the practical world that is often missing.
So, it was shocking to find in the comments to the Co-Op post two basic trains of thought. First, they were disinclined to question police decisions. Second, they simply accepted the general proposition that if the speaker was a jerk, there was no issue with using extreme force against him. Both of these propositions strike me as so fundamentally wrong, and ignorant, that I can only pray that these commenters are not law professors in whose hands rest students’ minds. Indeed, I would be comfortable knowing that these were chronically unemployed former police officers who are now duly incarcerated with occasional access to the internet. Anything else just plain scares me.
So in turn, let’s take a gander at the ‘tudes. The reluctance to challenge police decisions comes first. Why? What possible explanation exists for putting the power of life and death, harm and safety, freedom and imprisonment, into the hands of a hundred thousand individuals that are above scrutiny?
Police have a difficult job. They are called upon to make decisions about many things, the use of force among them, as part of their job. It’s not an easy job, and even harder when one expects them to do it right. So who are we to play Monday morning quarterback?
Police officers know, from the minute they enter the Academy, that it’s a tough job with high expectations. They are taught to make difficult decisions, and are made to understand that the power they are given by society will be under constant scrutiny. If they can’t handle the job, then they ought to be something else (like lawyers?). But to suggest that they get a “free pass” because they hold a position of enormous responsibility is to entirely miss the point.
Police, like doctors and lawyers and engineers, should be subject to constant scrutiny. No one should hold the power to do harm to others without scrutiny. Who better to oversee than men and women with guns, shields and the right to use them on the citizens of the United States. The very concept that they are above “second-guessing” is a wholesale abdication of responsibility. They are precisely why such a thing as second-guessing exists. No society can place the power to strike, shoot, seize, or even taser, another person above reproach.
And then we come to the jerk factor. It is universally acknowledged that Andrew Meyer behaved poorly, although there are few opportunities for the public to ask truly uncomfortable questions of high office holders these days, and there is nothing more American that holding a politician’s feet to the fire. But that aside, there are a myriad of allegations of rude behavior, pushing to the front of the line, interrupting another questioner, pedantic speechifying, refusing to yield the floor, and of course the most curious complaint of all, failing to comply with a directive from the police. While some of the anti-Meyer allegations did not appear on any video that I saw, I can accept the idea that Andrew Meyer behaved like a jerk.
Now that the jerk factor is established (or at least accepted), what does that mean? Is behaving poorly an invitation to violence? Does it give the police the right to arrest? What about beat with clubs? Pushing to the front of the line allegation seems to have upset many. In my experience, this happens with relative frequency in school lunch lines. Should these third graders be arrested? Tackled to the ground and handcuffed for pushing? And if they yell out loud as five cops take them down, is pushing to the front enough justification for a good tasering?
But it’s not just pushing to the front, you say. He also interrupted another speaker. Fair enough. So how much violence does that invite? If we have a push plus an interruption, is that worthy of a sound thrashing? And what about the rude questioning? Push plus interruption plus rude questioning equals a forcible arrest, right? But we’re not done yet, you note. Andrew Meyer was TOLD to stop and didn’t. He did not comply.
There we have the crux of the matter. Andy had it in his hands to avoid the violence. All he had to do was comply. Compliance to authority is the difference between an unsatisfying political rant and a tasering. Finally, we arrive at the bottom line. The commenters have chosen the path of least resistance, compliance, and have elevated it above all other reactions.
The docile response to police assertion of authority is almost always the smartest path. The only time it doesn’t work out too well is when the police are about to put a bullet between your eyes and, despite the fact that compliance will make the police infinitely happier, you will end up dead no matter what you do. Then, resistance seems the better route. But otherwise, do not resist authority and all will be well.
This idea, that we must not resist authority, is the only proper course of action when faced with an order by police is perhaps the singular most unAmerican concept there can be. If accepted, we become a nation of lapdogs, compliant to a fault and submissive to the very powers that our nation was formed to fight. If one respects the Constitution and the ideals that our founding fathers sought to instill in a nascent country, then one cannot possible accept submission to authority as the only viable course.
Mind you, one points has been left out of the discussion about Andrew Meyer. He was exercising his first amendment right of free speech to express himself in a fashion that was clearly unpopular in that room and to the police who were charged with maintaining order. What hap
pened that day, up until the moment that Meyer was unceremoniously tasered, was the classic clash of law and order. This situation should be presented to every law student for the next 50 years to reflect how the 1st Amendment creates a conflict with orderly process, and what it means to have a government that cannot stop unpopular political speech. The very discomfort of Andrew Meyer’s handling of his time in front of the microphone was precisely what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when challenging the new government, like the old of King George, to put a muzzle on speech it didn’t like. And then we watched as the police, with the power given them by society, did exactly that.
And when it was over, and he was on the ground, and he was handcuffed, a female police officer calmly and deliberately placed a semi-non-lethal device, that causes great pain, against Andrew Meyer and, without any further ado, inflicted that great pain. And then the only sound to be heard was Andrew Meyer’s screams of pain and the gasps of the audience.
I wonder how many U of F students will remember what happened 20 years from now. And when confronted with the choice of whether to submit to authority or resist, will think of the screams of pain of Andrew Meyer, and decide not to exercise their right to express their disagreement with a high office holder in the United States government. But for the commenters at Co-Op, it’s all worth it. After all, the guy was a jerk.
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Well-written. I have nothing concrete to add, but you put that very well.
Thanks, Windy.
In the beginning of the taser movement police repeatedly claimed tasers would only be used as an alternative to avoid the use of deadly force. Begs the question – is ‘being a jerk’ now grounds for using deadly force?
It seems that way to me. If they didn’t happen to have a taser on them, then what? Club or gun? After all, if there is a reason to use force to subdue the perp, then you use whatever you have.
1. One does not have a 1st Amendment right to do what this young man did. The first Amendment does not guarantee you the right to say whatever you want *whenever* and *wherever* you want. In meetings such as this, if you are disruptive you can be removed.
2.The idea that people should be given some sort of sporting chance at resisting police is silly. The reason that people are tased early on is because it decreases the rate of injury *both* to the police and to the subject tremendously. For instance, a recent study in Arizona revealed that the introduction of TASER use decreased the rate of officer-involved shootings by 54%.
The choice is simply whether or not a person should be subdued in situations like these. If they should, then it is best to use a method that minimizes injury. If not, then don’t call the police. But don’t call the police and then bitch because they use the safest method available to subdue a person that is supposed to be subdued.
3. The statement “In the beginning of the taser movement police repeatedly claimed tasers would only be used as an alternative to avoid the use of deadly force.” is false. It is to be used as an alternative to lethals force, and it is. The position that it should be used in the continuum of force beneath only lethal force is proposed by Amnesty International and the ACLU, but not by law enforcement. I am not sure why AI and the ACLU prefer that people be beaten and that both officers and subjects suffer long-lasting traumatic injury rather than suffer the use of a safe and effective device, but that’s their call. Me, I’d prefer being TASER’d to a dislocated shoulder, broken arm or skull fracture (and yes, I have been subjected to a TASER discharge).
Fascinating comment. Wrong, but fasinating.
First, this happened at the University of Florida, which I believe is a government funded institution, and hence the 1st Amendment may well apply.
But even if it didn’t, you blindly leap from the speaker having no right to be an annoyance to the police having authority to either tase (assuming that’s a word today) or beat him (pick ’em). The speaker may well be annoying, but he didn’t threaten anyone with violence or the use of physical force, yet you obviously believe that being annoying is reason enough to use force.
Lot’s of people annoy me. It’s just the way I feel. Does this mean that I can carry around a taser and nail the sucker whenever I want? If it’s okay for the cops to do it, why not me?
The mere fact that it occurred at a University does not give people the right to disrupt. For instance, if I am teaching a math class and someone walks in and decides that they want to pre-empt my lesson in order to opine about George Bush, I certainly *can* have them removed. There is no First Amendment right to that. Your blanket assertion that anybody can use any venue to say anything at any time just because it’s a university is simply wrong.
As to your second point, the question is not one of merely being “annoying.” The question is whether or not they can be removed. If someone comes into my class and decides that they want to use it for performance theater, I can have them removed. If they resist, they can be removed by force. Reframing it in terms of “annoying,” is dissembling.
Lots of people may annoy you, but that’s not the issue. It depends on how, when, and where they annoy you. If they annoy you by breaking into your house at night and attempting to rape your daughter, you have different options than if they annoy you by cutting in front of you in traffic.
In the case of disrupting a meeting in the way it was done here, the person was correctly removed from the scene. If he resists, then it is better to use the least amount of force necessary to remove him safely.
Your statement that he did not “threaten violence” is misleading. Resisting arrest by struggling (as opposed to passive resistance) *is* violence, and *does* lead to injury. It is better to minimize that injury by use of a TASER than to maximize it by engaging a wrestling match.
Further, of course, it is in exactly those situations that danger can arise — where the person has a concealed weapon, manages to get a weapon from the officer, etc.
The bottom line remains — if the police are called to arrest or remove someone and that person resists by struggling and/or fighting, then that person will be subdued. It is better to use a method of subdual that results in a low rate of injury than one that results in a high rate of injury.
Was this a class, or was this a “town meeting” forum?
Did the speaker initiate violence or react to protect himself from it?
Is burglary and rape an “annoyance”, or crimes?
You still jump to the conclusion that the police command, rather than serve, the public.
Well, at least we’ve gotten past the idea that just because it happened at a university, people can disrupt anything as a protected free speech right. The same limitation occurs in meetings such as this one. People do not have the right to be disruptive in these meetings. This has been repeatedly recognized, at least in my state.
And it’s not to *limit* speech but to *protect* it. If an unpopular person comes to a campus to speak, the First Amendment does not give opponents the right to deny others the right to speak by simply shouting them down. It is not protection of free speech when people shout down others, it is the destruction of it.
If a person is lawfully detained and arrested, then he is not “protecting” himself from violence by violently resisting arrest. He is causing violence. This idea that it’s OK to hurt people by violently resisting arrest simply because you don’t like being arrested is not only silly, but it gets people killed.
If the police were rightly called to remove this person, then he also was committing a crime. Almost certainly only a misdemeanor, but a crime nonetheless. I don’t know what the laws are in New York, but there are plethora of things that cover this in my state.
No, the police do not “command” the public. They “serve” the public, as they were doing when they were called on to remove this person. They served the public exactly as they are supposed to do, and they did it in exactly the manner they should have done it — one that minimized injury.
It was a politically themed Q&A session at a public University. This is a learning environment and about as an appropriate venue as I could imagine to pose such a question. How was he lawfully detained and arrested? What crime did he commit? Although it was later changed to Disorderly Conduct, at the scene the most any of the officers could muster after minutes of silence was “Inciting a Riot.” Tasers are now used for convenience rather than as protection like you would suggest.
Unfortunately those most responsible for the direct interpretation of our constitution are a bunch of uneducated heathens. Here in Florida the most intelligent of the bunch graduated from Florida State, which any reasonable person who graduated from that institution would tell you, is barely a step above high school.
William, I think you’re ignoring this part of the story: “when it was over, and he was on the ground, and he was handcuffed, a female police officer calmly and deliberately placed a semi-non-lethal device, that causes great pain, against Andrew Meyer and, without any further ado, inflicted that great pain.”
There’s simply no justification for tasering him after he’s handcuffed, certainly not that it “minimized injury.” He was the only one injured! I agree 100% police had a right to arrest him. I disagree strongly that the use of a Taser under that circumstance can be justified.
And the reason ACLU and Amnesty want use of force higher on the continuum is that it’s not actually “non-lethal.” There are a variety of circumstances where people who are sick, have heart problems, or are amped up on drugs have died after Taser attacks. Given that, Tasering someone in handcuffs on the ground takes an unnecessary risk that can’t be justified on safety grounds.
Bottom line: Police were within their rights to remove a disruptive protester, but the Tasering IMO was excessive force.
Well, we watched a different video. In the video I saw, the man was still struggling. Putting handcuffs on people does not make them stop struggling. I am a forensic pathologist, and have seen people killed by people in handcuffs. If the police were right to arrest him, then they were right to subdue him, and the TASER is an apprpiate tool for that.
You statements about the safety of the TASER are simply false. There is a difference between dying after being hit by a TASER an being killed by a TASER.
Recent studies at the University of Wisconsin showed that it is possible to induce ventricular fibrillation if the probes are surgically implanted within 5mm of the myocardium. The functional significance of this is that it is possible to kill a skinny naked person by inducing ventricular fibrillation if and only if you shoot the probes into the anterior chest immediately adjacent to the sternum between ribs 5&6 or 6&7. It is *impossible* to directly induce ventricular fibrillation by placing it the way it was placed in this case.
The deaths associated with lethal drug intoxication are due to lethal drug intoxication. In fact, the use of TASERs in these situations are probably life-saving, not life-threatening. The most dangerous issue in these kinds of manic delirium cases is malignant hyperthermia. In these cases, the one chance the person has is to be quickly subdued with minimum struggle, have the body cooled, and be sedated. Using a TASER in these situations makes that possible. *Fighting* with these people in the traditional manner increases the likelihood of death.
Similarly, though I doubt that you are suggesting that this *young* man had significant ischemic heart disease, the likelihood of an ischemic event is increased with struggle more than it is increased with the use of TASER, since it is due to the adrenergic effect of the confrontation. In such cases, it is *lifesaving* to decrease the duration of the confrontation, rather than lengthen it and causing more significant trauma.
The fact is that the number of true TASER-caused deaths is extraordinarily low. I know the literature very well, and the number of demonstrated cases is less than 10. It is profoundly lower than would be found if the TASER were not deployed in these circumstances, which is why injury and death rates fall so precipitously when police departments deploy them on a large scale. If the TASER were as dangerous as you claim, injury and death rates would not drop so dramatically when they are used. If the man were that fragile, then his likelihood of death would *also* be high if the struggle persisted.
Not only can it be *justified* on safety grounds, it should be *encouraged* on safety grounds.
Bottom line: Police were doing exactly the right thing by removing a disruptive protester, and they did it in exactly the right way.
Disrupting a Q&A session so that it cannot *be* a Q&A session is not an expression of free speech, it is an abrogation of it.
Can we abrogate the silly idea that one individual can violate another’s right to free speech?
I feel bad for anyone who has the misfortune of knowing you in real life and is forced to listen to your bullshit on a daily basis.