and the bride wore handcuffs

i had to read the alternet article twice to get past my knee-jerk incredulity: lovely wedding ends with bride and groom getting tasered. earlier this week, writing about rachel hoffman’s murder by police, i asked whether the PD has lost all sense of perspective. when a nonviolent wedding ends with the father of the bride handcuffed in the back of a squad car and the bride pinned on the floor by half a dozen cops (see the sick-making photo at the bottom of the alternet post) the answer is clearly Yes.

cops were called because some glasses had been broken and liquor spilled on the floor. i haven’t been to many weddings where, along about 11pm (when this confrontation started) this wasn’t the case. people are drinking, they get a little sloppy, they get a little loud. perhaps the owner, Burnison Galleries in Michigan, shouldn’t rent their space to wedding parties if they find this so offensive.

a friend of mine was a civil rights lawyer in LA for a number of years, prosecuting several death-by-taser cases against the LAPD. here’s what he said about this case:

These Taser incidents really trouble me. By the way, the business about arresting the groom’s father: this is a common police tactic sometimes used to provoke violence so they can make a felony arrest. A similar technique is to kill the family dog or frighten a baby in its crib into crying and screaming and bar the parents from going to it. Shooting the dog is what led to Ruby Ridge as I recall. A federal agent did it in front of a 16 year old boy carrying a rifle, who shot the agent dead on the spot. Of course they killed the kid.

it’s hard to get statistics on death by taser, though a 2006 article (about the florida tasering death of thomas tipton) puts the number at 150 nationwide at that time. 21-year-old baron pikes, who was tasered 9 times in 14 minutes, the last two times WHILE HE WAS ALREADY UNCONSCIOUS, died on january 17th in LA. 20-year-old jarrel gray was tasered to death in maryland last november by cops trying to break up a fight between him and another guy. i bet if the police just let them finish their fight, nobody would’ve ended up dead. it’s happening all over the country and even in canada, as in the famous case of robert dziekanski, tasered to death in the vancouver airport by the royal canadian mounted police.

theoretically, the taser is supposed to be used instead of a gun. in other words, you should only taser someone in order to avoid shooting them. but police seem to view their tasers as nothing more than upgrades to the nightsticks that they are no longer supposed to beat people with, and taser use has become extremely casual, despite the many deaths that have occurred and the widely publicized fact that invisible pre-existing medical conditions can render even low-dose tasering lethal. to the police, it seems, tasering is no big deal.

although the tasering of andrew myers at the university of florida has been pshawed far and wide as the just results of an obnoxious publicity stunt, i see it differently. i watch the video, and see all these other students sitting quietly while myers is dragged off the podium onto the floor and out of the room for the crime of speaking out of turn. however obnoxious and tiresome this student may be, were his 350 peers really OK with the way the police handled this situation? EVEN WHEN THE TASER CAME OUT HIS FELLOW STUDENTS SAT THERE AND SAID NOTHING. i wonder how they would have felt, the next day, if andrew turned out to have one of those invisible pre-existing conditions and died on the way to the stationhouse. would they have recognized their silence, their scaredy-pants sheeplike acquiesence to the bullying tactics of the police, for what it was: an accessory to murder.

here’s the video. it’s short. what do YOU think? would you have taken a risk, said something, gotten involved, spoken out for free speech?

a comment left on the alternet post is excruciatingly true: “For what reason would you ever call the police if you have a problem?” wrote raymond emerson, “when the police get there, you have two.”

or fourteen problems and a laundry list of trumped-up charges, as newlyweds andy and ania somora learned on what should have been their honeymoon night.

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