Every time a moderately controversial speaker comes to UMass, there seems to be no shortage of student protesters to accompany the event. The Republican Club knows that they cannot sponsor a lecture without some group somewhere on campus finding a relatively creative way to disrupt it. Maybe I haven't been paying enough attention, but as far as I know, the protesters have yet to have a major encounter with the UMass cops.
So why is it that University of Florida student Andrew Meyers was arrested and then Tasered for asking too many questions at a Q & A forum with Senator John Kerry? I have seen kids like Meyers at every speech I have gone to on campus. He was annoying, he was obnoxious and he was just a little bit too eager. To UMass students, this should sound like a pretty familiar situation - obnoxious kid won't stop pestering the guest speaker.
I'm sure by now everyone has seen the YouTube.com video of Meyers being arrested. He was asking Kerry some pointless questions about Yale, he was obviously still really upset about Kerry's '04 loss, and then suddenly the cops were forcefully arresting him. Apparently his microphone had been turned off as kind of a way nice way of telling him to shut up.
So the cops tried to arrest Meyers, who was flailing his body around in resistance and was shouting over and over, "What did I do?" Which is exactly what I was wondering. Besides asking too many questions, what did he do?
At this point Kerry had told the cops quite passively that he would answer the student's questions, and he was doing just that. It was really odd. The audience's reaction, on the other hand, was even more embarrassing than Kerry's. They were clapping and cheering like one of their peers wasn't being arrested for no reason.
Apparently they enjoy their rights being ignored by overzealous cops. I'm sure the audience would have been far less enthusiastic about the situation if Meyer's rights to get belligerently drunk at a party had been taken away rather than his rights to free speech.
But I guess he was really annoying, and that completely justifies the cop's actions. Meyers was being arrested for disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. What I don't understand is whether he was disturbing the peace before or after the cops arrested him.
The most terrifying part of the whole event, besides the student body's response (which is more disturbing than terrifying,) is seeing Meyers on the ground with several cops holding him down, screaming that he would get up and walk out as long as he wasn't Tasered. I think the exact quote is, "Don't Tase me, bro."
So he called the cop a "bro." That is really annoying. I understand he was being unnecessarily obnoxious. But I am pretty sure the level of police brutality cannot just rise with the level of student obnoxiousness. Meyers was being held down on the ground by four cops as another cop Tasered him. He was a big kid, but he was not the Hulk.
He was already subdued; there were plenty of cops and just one Andrew Meyers. There was no reason to use that kind of force on him. There is no reason to use that kind of force on anyone who poses no physical threat.
There are reports that this was a prank and that he had brought a video camera to tape the whole event. But I am pretty sure the cops were not in on this. He could not have guessed that asking a lot of questions would get him arrested, much less Tasered.
He probably just wanted to be taped harassing Kerry. Even if he was acting for the cameras as he got arrested, there was no way he knew the situation would escalate to 1,000 jolts of electricity being shot through his body.
Despite what every newspaper seems to be reporting, Meyers' past history of taping his pranks is irrelevant to this situation. His actions did not justify the kind of brute force that was used on him.
Meyers went over his one-minute question limit and was probably engaging in a little self-promotion. That was his crime. His resistance to the cops involved him squirming around a lot. He was not armed and he was not aggressive. It was five cops versus one kid. Where does the need for a Taser factor in?
Melissa Garber is a Collegian editor. She can be reached at mhgarber@student.umass.edu.
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