non-violent anti war protestors were viciously assaulted by pittsburgh police.
here it is. a completely restrained protestor is then let go while she is tasered.
cruel and unusual punishment. keep telling yourself "land of the free"
and bush-lovers...lets see you try to justify this clip (i'm sure you'll try): http://www.michaelmoore.com/_images...ice_8_20_05.mov
PITTSBURGH - Police charged four people protesting the war in Iraq, two of whom suffered minor injuries from the police response, when 60 people disrupted traffic by marching the wrong way down a busy one-way street toward an Army recruiting station.
The Pittsburgh Organizing Group planned the Saturday morning demonstration. A spokesman for that group, David Meieran, accused police of responding with "inappropriate and excessive force."
Meieran claimed some protesters were pepper sprayed and Tasered; he said a 68-year-old woman who was not resisting was bitten by a police dog.
Police spokeswoman Tammy Ewin initially said no pepper spray was used on protesters, but Sgt. Clint Winkler, a supervisor on duty, told The Associated Press he tried to use pepper spray on one woman who would not leave, but it hit her glasses. She was then subdued with a Taser, Winkler said.
The Taser victim and the dog bite victim were being treated at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital. Winkler confirmed that the older woman was bitten in the leg by a police dog when she refused a police order to disperse.
The names of those charged were not immediately available because they were being readied for arraignment in City Court Saturday afternoon, Winkler said.
Winkler said one teenage female was handcuffed but not arrested when she screamed at and shoved officers. She was cited for disorderly conduct and released.
The recruiting station was not open for business when police responded to reports of the non-permitted march down Forbes Avenue, where the University of Pittsburgh main campus is located.
Winkler said campus police tried to quell the march, and at one point protesters grabbed the camera of a freelance media photographer and broke it. City police tried to help and said some protesters fought the effort to break up the march.
"That's when they were told, due to the violence, that this was no longer a lawful protest," Winkler said. "They were told to disperse, peacefully disperse, and failed to do so we started down the sidewalk - officers in front, K-9's behind us, and started pushing the crowd down the sidewalk."
In addition to the injured women, a man was also arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and failure to disperse.
Winkler said the protest broke up without further incident after the arrests, but Meieran disagreed with the police version of the events.
"The response was way over the top," Meieran said. "Why in the (expletive) were they using Tasers on these nonviolent protesters in the first place? I heard no dispersal order. What they're saying is total (expletive)."
Meieran said the same recruiting station was targeted by marchers two weeks ago, and the office announced beforehand that it would be closed. Meieran said the marchers didn't know if the station would be open when they arrived; it was not.
"Our goal for today was to shut down military recruitment for that station, and to the extent that they may have shut down preemptively, we achieved our goal," Meieran said.
Army officials could not immediately be reached for comment about the march or why that recruiting station was closed.
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Funny we only see the part of the clip where she is getting tazered. Not the part where she didnt listen to police to stop blocking the street. "Non violent" yeah.. ok. Next time she will listen to the police.
when a person is restrained...they are restrained.
a cop has no right to carry out physical punishment on you.
they had her down, then got up off of her to shock her.
cruel and unusual punishment. what happened previous is irrelevant.
try again
first off...nice avatar PVS...the clown from IT...i love it
the footage does seem a severe...i can only assume its because she wasn't obeying police instructions...but they do seem to have had her restrained...seems a bit stupid that they tazer her while other officers are holding onto her...wont they get shocked as well
I'm wondering if we could get a video of the full incident, including before the protestors were "dispersed".
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Although I am one who often states that if you don't listen to the cops, you are just asking for it, this was pathetic.
The woman was on the ground in a position where she posed no threat. There were multiple officers on-scene who are supposed to be trained to physically restrain violent offenders. That training should have been more than enough to be able to have 2 police officers restrain and arrest a woefully out of shape woman lying on the ground.
I'm not sure whether this is an example of brutality, or a cop who is just too f*cking lazy to do his job and too f*cking stupid to realize that if you are going to taser someone who apparently doesn't deserve it, don't do it infront of both a video camera and an audience.
Kidrock, your defense of this cop seems to be just another act of trolling to get liberals all wound up. To be quite honest, that would be more admirable than defending the cop because you think he made a wise judgement of action.
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****ing shit, if this teaches us one thing it's that dumbshit protestors need to keep their slimy hippy asses off of streets and blocking traffic. I have no sympathy for the idiots who do that sort of thing, a bus could plow through them for all I care, serves them right.
Plus, that video is heavily flawed and one sided (made obvious by the fact that it's being hosted from Michealmoore.com). It doesn't show the whole incident, just more propoghanda for hardcore liberals to eat up while spouting falacious arguments relating genocide to the Iraqi War and dimwitted puns on the term "land of the free". It isn't valid evidence for anything.
I'll hold of judgement untill someone releases a full unedited video showing the whole incident, not just what happened once the woman was on the ground.
****ing protestors.
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Last edited by BackFire on Aug 24th, 2005 at 12:52 AM
Or an over-zelous tazer trigger-happy cop, OR a cop paid do 'perform' in front of the camera (i know ; but still a possibilty)
I watched it about 3 times and also noticed that it only shows yoiu what it wants you to see which does make it biased. They should have shown the complete footage if they had nothing to hide.
Commenting on the event:
Failure to disperse is asking for it.
Besides "disrupted traffic by marching the wrong way down a busy one-way street toward an Army recruiting station." could have got Protestors run-over, or up in arms with car drivers.
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the issue is not whether they deserved to be arrested. quite frankly, i think disrupting traffic should be put to an immediate stop.
the issue is the use of a taser on an restrained person. so please spare me the "****ing protestors" and then go on to say the video is bias because of who hosted it. thats irrelivent, and to even think you can just close the case because of your own bias and then lable the video as bias is pretty hypocritical. im sure the lady was an a$$hole and im sure she was causing problems, but again, she was restrained, so it is irrelivent. and yes, i would like to see what she did before the clip starts, but just out of curiosity.
the point, the single POINT is that two officers had her ON THE GROUND and RESTRAINED. she was tased as punishment, not as a method of restraint. it is a cops duty to arrest and detain if necessary, but NEVER to carry out punishment. if you're willing to accept and support such behavior out of hatred for someone, thats just sad.
I'm not biased, in fact I said I would hold off judgement until a valid form of the video was released, not this half of the story type video that's available here.
Keep in mind, the woman is being tasered almost immediately when the video starts, you can't tell what she was doing or if she really was restrained enough. She may have been struggling up untill the very second the video turned on because she saw a man with a taser running up to her. In which case the tasering was a neccessary action needed to subdue her properly. In fact, in the first split second of the video you can see her struggling and flailing just a bit, as if her struggling was just about to come to an end. This suggests that she was struggling against the cops holding her down and that the taser was used to subdue her.
But again, we don't know, you don't, I don't, no one but the people who were there that day. And anyone who's trying to claim this video as some kind of viable evidence for anything (other then obvious bias) has no idea what true, valid evidence is.
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Last edited by BackFire on Aug 24th, 2005 at 02:08 AM
i guess the possability exists that the cops were just a couple of bloated pussies who couldnt hold down a 120 lb woman. who knows. i would certainly like to see the entire video though.
Not to mention that it's far to early to say with any validity whether or not police brutality or cruel and unusual punishment actually took place simply from viewing this particular video, which you did in your intial post at the start of the thread and with the title of the thread.
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i see two cops holding down an unarmed woman who is on her back, on the ground. thats all i need to see. what more do you need?
and halfway decent trained cop would have had her face pinned to the pavement and that would have been the end of it. instead, they backed off of her and tasered her. like i said, ill accept the minute possibility that the cops were bloated pussies...but i will not bank on it.
Ok; so tell you are saying that that woman getting tasered and this pic are "general terms, and dont imply a particular degree of brutallity and force"
right ?
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oh so now we'll play the "STFU and be thankful you dont have to live here" game? well i guess we should all STFU and be thankful we dont live in afghanistan
So in other words you don't need to see the full story before making foolish and flawed assumptions about people and then throw it around as if it's some kind of fact. (In reference to your first paragraph in the initial post of the thread.) -
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Aug 23rd, 2005 06:29 PM
