Tag: police brutality

Categories
crime and punishment

Bottled-Water Buyers: Threat or Menace?

Gone are the happy-go-lucky days of buying water and then going home as though it were no big deal.

Elizabeth Daly learned the hard way. As she and her roommates walked toward her car in a dark parking lot, she was accosted by a crew of Virginia state Alcohol Beverage Control agents. One jumped on her car, another drew a gun. They thought she was lugging beer instead of LaCroix sparkling water.

You must be 21 to buy alcohol in Virginia. Daly is 20.

“They were showing unidentifiable badges . . . but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform,” she recalled. “I couldn’t put my windows down unless I started my car. . . . They began trying to break the windows. My roommates and I were . . . terrified.”

As they made their escape, the women dialed 911.

The ABC agents charged Daly with counts of assaulting and eluding enforcement officers. (“Assault” because the car brushed past agents as Daly drove away.) She had to spend a night in jail.

We hear so many stories of government-empowered bullies using the feeblest of excuses to terrify luckless innocents. Renegade T-shirt-wearers, estranged husbands of financial-aid scofflaws, barbers . . . and now water-buyers?

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, says the ABC agents should be fired.

Yes. But when “law enforcement” thugs blatantly violate the rights of innocent persons they should be more than fired. They should be prosecuted. Let’s also shut down agencies that consistently threaten innocent people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights

We Protest

You don’t need to commit violence to conduct a large, effective public protest of perceived injustice. The many Tea Party demonstrations against our federal government’s latest socialist excesses prove that.

But what if violent and nonviolent protests are equated in the minds of peace keepers?

In Reason magazine, journalist Radly Balko reports on several disturbing examples of crackdowns of persons assembled in a public place. In one incident, motivated by the occasionally violent protests of last fall’s G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, police ordered students gathered in public to disperse forthwith, though they had broken no laws. Anyone who moved too slowly was subject to arrest. Apparently, a few violent protesters hit town for the summit, but they were a distinct minority.

Balko isn’t impressed by a university official’s claim that the gatherings had to be busted up because of the “potential” for trouble. That’s a dangerous standard to apply to peaceful assembly that is not only constitutionally protected but also an important bulwark against tyranny.

Police can make honest mistakes like anybody else, especially when in charged and confusing situations. No doubt there’s sometimes a fuzzy line between a peaceful if rowdy protest and one that’s turning violent. But Balko suggests that police are increasingly harassing and handcuffing people only because they are peacefully dissenting.

Not only is that not right, it demands protest.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.