P.'s Soup

Tasering a student committing no crime is never a good thing, however, it's possible that good may come out of that incident.

Police brutality has existed for a long time, not just in the United States but all over the world. It breaks out nearly every time there is a G8 summit (Rostock and Genoa for example.) Amnesty International has reports on it for many countries that tout their human rights records, and many others that don't. Germany, the UK, France, Austria, Italy, Russia...the list goes on. Look on youtube and you can find police in the UK beating guys on the street and police in Germany beating the crap out of a guy whose crime was to run across a fottball field with a banner. A documentary on police brutality in the UK has been banned by many organizations (It's title: Injustice - http://www.guardian.co.uk/celldeaths/article/0,,465301,00.html).

The BBC reports on abuse in Germany: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3395593.stm

The European voice says, "URGENT action is needed to stamp out the "appalling" level of alleged police brutality in the European Union, said speakers at a conference in Brussels." http://www.europeanvoice.com/archive/article.asp?id=14747

Wikipedia maintains a List of cases of police brutality. The US has suffered from it for years. Now however, the arming of police with tasers (which has been done in both the US and the UK) has done what I'm sure the police didn't want, and that is draw new attention to an old issue. This new technology has increased public scrutiny, and combined with the power of the dissemination of the internet, and cell phone videos, abuse can no longer be covered up. It can't be confined to back rooms and local rumour. The people can see it and one can only hope that the people will protest. So far that's been the result of the tasering incident and this is the power of free press in the digital age.

The US is in no more of a crisis with police brutality than it was before (remember Rodney King?), but tasers get more press than fists and truncheons and for our civil liberties, this is a good thing.