University student Tased downtown
The Ol’ Dirty has a story in today about two University students being Tased and arrested for disorderly conduct on Friday.
The police report says that Ian George Van Ornum was standing in the middle of the street on Willamette and Broadway protesting the use of pesticides on highways, and was approached by police because he was disrupting the traffic.
Van Ornum then resisted arrest and was Tased twice. University student Anthony Farley tried to prevent the arrest and was Tased and subdued.
The circumstances for the Tasing aren’t made very clear in the report, and the use of a Taser does not seem necessary. Unfortunately, there is no objective information on the incident, since the accounts given by spectators present were friends of Van Ornum. If anything, though, this is a testament to the effectiveness of Tasers in assisting police officers in arrests.
The Survival Center is organizing a rally in support of the two students that were arrested, most definitely jumping on the anti-Taser issue. This is happening on Thursday at 12 in the EMU Amphitheater. A Eugene community member Planet Glassberg (no joke) weighed in on the issue with an opinion letter in the ODE:
Police already have numerous weapons such as chemical weapons, asps, batons, guns, rubber bullets, voice control and physical restraints. Aren’t there MANY better uses for our limited tax dollars than another violent weapon to be used against citizens? Let’s support better training and oversight for police, rather than the electrocution of our citizens.
So maybe Planet would have been happier if Van Ornum was beaten instead? I suppose having a broken nose or arm is better than being shocked without bodily injury, as long as it supports a bandwagon cause. Snarky comments aside, I will say that the deployment of Tasers by police is a hard issue to support fully as a freedom-loving citizen.
