Cops let off hook for assaulting student at Kerry event

It amazes you. It truly does.

You can have a million cameras recording an event, but still the system will stand there and tell you right to your face the cameras are wrong. (This is one of the reasons I wrote a scathing article against a Catholic high school I attended when it became the first school in the nation to install video cameras that transmit directly to police cars. I know that the school just denies stuff no matter how many witnesses there are, because they did it when I was there.)

Last month, I reported on the Andrew Meyer saga. Meyer is a University of Florida student who asked tough but fair questions of John Kerry when he came to speak there. Kerry started to answer Meyer, but Meyer was promptly ambushed and tasered by police because his questions weren't exactly softball ones that the Bush regime expected. Kerry condemned the Bushist cops' attack, but that didn't make the police any less guilty. (Bush still has not condemned it. Surprise, surprise.)

The assault and tasering was captured by several different people with video cameras, all from different angles, and I've viewed these clips online. You'd think that nobody who's actually bothered to watch the clips can deny with a straight face that what the police did wasn't just out of line but also criminal.

But the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has managed to do precisely that. In a 300-page report, the FDLE cleared the university police by claiming they did nothing improper in their struggle with Meyer. Seriously, they actually said that.

This is much like how - in another Florida case I've covered - guards at a youth boot camp who murdered a teenager by shoving ammonia into his nose were acquitted despite their actions being clearly caught on video.

The proof of wrongdoing and combativeness by the police in the Meyer case is just plain as can be, and the FDLE is standing here telling the world it didn't happen. Unbelievable. It boggles the mind to and fro.

Is there any effective check against authorities' misconduct anymore? If I thought the police were right this time, I'd defend them. But I was always told growing up that police weren't immune from getting busted if they did the wrong thing themselves. Maybe it was because back then the police's actions would have been reviewed by a court instead of by themselves. Should any government agency - not just the cops - be investigating themselves if someone alleges misconduct, or should some other agency investigate them instead? In Florida, cops get reviewed by cops, and there's no outside check (until someone dies).

Finally, a note for the Miami Herald: It doesn't exactly do much for your credibility to delete dissenting comments from the page featuring your article, as you've been doing. People might mistake you for Freak Rethuglic. Then again, the bias in your article pretty much leads people to do that anyway. (It was the police that was "rowdy" and "combative", not the student.) And then again still, the Herald's playing up of the Gary Hart story while ignoring similar stories involving Republicans doesn't exactly make the Herald an organ of fairness.

(Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/459/story/282692.html)