You’re completely right – one should have the right to dance like a fool in front of riot cops in a tense situation.

You also have the right to walk alone at night in bad parts of town, voice frank views about the IRA while drunk in an Irish bar, and, for that matter, backpack through countries on the State Department’s warnings lists. (What were those idiots doing hiking on the Iran/Iraq border?)

And while I’d be all for punishing anyone who visited consequences upon you for making those decisions, I also would keep in mind that my own kids hopefully won’t be in a hospital bed like yours because I’ll be sure to teach them some common sense.

I don’t mean in any way to say that the cops in this video shouldn’t be held accountable for crossing a line. They should be.

But common sense says you don’t dance like a fool towards riot cops. Watch the video again. Like you, I can imagine the kid’s moves as completely innocent expressions of his happiness. I can as well imagine them as a provocative testing of limits, where we can’t hear whatever taunts the kid may have included. He may, for example, have had friends watching and he was dancing to demonstrate for them how little respect they needed to show the cops.

I think, too, that you may underrate how tense crowd control must be. I’m not a cop, but I’ve got a lot of sympathy for someone asked to confront a disorderly crowd.

I also have, tucked away, a lesson I remember my father explicitly teaching me: that cops were people like anyone else, but that they had guns and were allowed to use them. Therefore, he taught me that I should never run from, or mouth off to, a cop. There was no act I could commit for which he would not forgive me if he ever had to come get me from the police but that if I provoked a cop there could be consequences.

And I grew up in a nice peaceful suburb.

This kid’s Dad ought to have taught him the same.

Those do not look like cops on high alert and in a “tense position.”

Were we watching the same video??? There were people milling about, but they weren’t rocking cars or setting them on fire, they weren’t looting or breaking windows. The situation looked pretty calm to me.

It’s supposed to be a free country. If you want to dance like a fool on the street, go right ahead. I don’t care if the guy looked cross eyed at the cops, that is no reason to go ape shit and beat the crap out of him.

Thank goodness for the person with the video camera.

But the video shows him dancing like a fool towards riot cops who were in the tense position of trying to control a crowd, and he was probably not following their directions. So I’m not surprised that he found a bad outcome from that.

Cops should face consequences for this. But then it’s easy NOT to be this guy. Don’t behave like a fool when confronted by riot cops in a tense situation.

“God hates idiots.” – Clint Eastwood in The G, B, & the U

It looks like we have 3 nominees for the 2010 Ramos-Campeon Medal of Valor.

Disgusting.

Mis-conduct? We need to stop tip-toeing around the truth. This kind of behavior is assault just as much as what priests are doing to kids is rape. These thugs need to be behind prison bars.