University of Florida President Responds to Taser Incident

Yesterday, University of Florida President Bernie Machen released a statement regarding the abuse of power at his University witnessed by millions thanks to a few amateur videographers. The most useful portion of his statement is pasted below,

• We plan to assemble a panel of faculty and students to review our police protocols, our management practices and the FDLE report to come up with a series of recommendations for the university.
• Administrators and police officials plan to analyze the incident and conduct an internal review and will consider changing protocols in response to this incident, if necessary.
• Finally, as is standard procedure, the State Attorney's Office will review the charges brought against Mr. Meyer. We have communicated with the State Attorney and understand he plans to expedite his review.

Hopefully, some good will come out of this. The rest of the statement can be found at ufl.edu. Thanks to America for passing the Prez's statement along. Sorry, America, I am not hiring investigative journalists at t his time. That being said, your voluntary work is always appreciated as is the work of any and all others who wish to donate their time by sending me intersting links and videos, stories, etc. Blogging can be hard.

Police Brutality at the University of Florida

At my alma mater, the venerable University of Florida, a college student was harassed and tasered after asking a series of rambling questions to Senator John Kerry who was speaking to a modest sized crowd on campus. This video is not the best quality account of the incident out there but it does capture the majority of the incident, from the beginning of the students questions to the taser action. The students point seemed to be that he felt Kerry should have done more to look into and do something about the alleged election fraud issues in Ohio and beyond on election day in 2004.

Admittedly this guy was there to make a bit of a scene but I think he was doing it to draw attention to genuine issues, even the Skull and Bones question deserves an answer. No matter what, the end result is another in the endless power hungry nature of the police. This isn't the first college taser episode to be caught on video. The other, a far more egregious and disgusting episode involved a student at a computer lab who was manhandled and eventually tasered because he wouldn't show security his student ID while in a campus computer lab. That video can be seen here.

I have been to forums like this at UF with controversial figures and there are always questioners like this guy. The way it is USUALLY handled is the speaker is left alone to finish his or her question, or is shouted down by the crowd, or is disarmed by an intelligent response. I can tell you when Noam Chomsky came to speak at UF there were no conservatives getting tasered for asking him stupid questions. When Bill Clinton came no incidents. Up until seeing this video I thought the campus cops at UF were only trained to stop kids on bikes for running stop signs or sitting around looking cool on their scooters.

More abuse of power. It never ends.

QUICK UPDATE:
John Kerry has condemned the actions of the UPD.