remedial poster wrote:
Give us a break from all the "He shouldn't have done this" and "He should have done that" crap. We've already heard your genius advice about how to act in this situation.
What he should have done is not the issue here. The issue is what he did, and more importantly whether the cop used excessive force in response to what he did.
People bring it up cause it's hard to defend a guilty party. What he DID do had a dramatic impact on the result. No one's debating what he should do now. We can't give him any better advice than he's probably recieving. We're just posting so that in future situations other people don't make the same mistake. Especially some posters who seem to think it's perfectly fine to walk up to an officer busy handling a situation and start heckling him.
Yes you have freedom of speech, to an extent. For the same reason you can't walk into a movie theatre and yell fire, you probably can't stand next to a busy police officer and start asking him questions or distract him. When your freedom of speech compromises the ability to maintain peace and order, then you're not exactly within the right. The police officer probably wasn't within the right either. But you don't fight fire with fire, you wait and help the guy press charges later.
I think everyone understands why he did it, but it's more or less a warning to others not to do the same.