I agree with you 78.7%, though it's the powers that be that put those officers in that position. Regardless of their reasoning behind what they were doing, all they were doing was dancing quietly. They weren't moshing or having a hootenanny.

I realize that and don't agree with the reasoning behind the arrests in the first place. But be realistic and smart if you are in that situation, you know what I mean? It's like, if you are one of those people you basically have two choices after you have danced and they are gonna arrest you. Either go quietly, or resist. If you resist, you're only risking more harm to yourself and giving the police a justification for using more force on you.

They're doing whatever they felt was right to them. They knew they were probably going to get arrested before they even went there. They were testing "the system", to see if it was dumb enough to arrest someone that was doing something non violent and non disrupting. The disruption didn't happen until the officers starting the arrests. The only resisting I saw was when the one protester grabbed the arm of the other one while he was being arrested.

It's unconstitutional.

Like the guy said he couldn't believe they were acting like that at the Jefferson Memorial. Jefferson himself would have vomited watching that.

Plain and simple, agreed.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

- Thomas Jefferson

everyday, what we see on tv/media are violence, fighting, UFC/boxing sports, movies about wars, and you expect the people to be kind?

We have the same problems in Canada. It's not just American cops.

Students accuse cops of brutality

Also, Toronto police have a very bad reputation after their behaviour towards peaceful protesters at the G20 global summit last year. They also blocked an entire intersection for 4 or 5 hours straight during this time, mostly filled with innocent bystanders.



Another account of police brutality during the summit:

A second look at G20 police assault - thestar.com

Although I respect the good cops who don't engage in this type of behaviour, it's the bad cops who bully people that make me question that. Some people are just outright bullies, and those are the people who are going to abuse their authority and beat people and whatever if they get hired as a cop.

I understand that, from an outside perspective, it's easy to view police in the US as one monolithic thing but an important thing to keep in mind is that police vary a lot from region to region here. Different municipalities and different states train their police differently from each other and have different standards for who they hire. The city I live in, Philadelphia, no doubt 100% conforms to your view of American police. Here they are often corrupt, out of shape, power-tripping beneficiaries of nepotism. In other parts of the country, however, that is not the case. My wife, for example, used to live in Raleigh where, apparently, the police are required to have a certain level of education, to stay physically fit and overall are the kinds of community servants that you describe.

People who seek power are most often those who should never possess it. Case in point, I know someone who is desperately working at becoming a police officer, who has a short temper and an attitude and who I know for a fact would abuse his power in any instance where he felt the person he was dealing with was incompetent or had an attitude.

When you rely on a fascist, para-military force to implement law what else would you expect to see but violence? Is it really not that well known outside of North America that the United States has and will continue to develop, endorse, and implement campaigns of domestic terrorism through its agencies?

I see no positives, benefits, or justification for the continued existence of such a thinly-veiled police state that currently plagues the U.S.