

Police Response to School Water Balloon Fight: Violence and Arrests - MayankGoyal
http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/19/police-response-to-school-water-balloon

======
obviouslygreen
Coming from a law enforcement family, it's really hard to see things like
this. It becomes very hard to tell people their negative preconceptions about
police are unjustified in the face of apparently stupid and violent things
like this.

It's just like anything else: Most cops are not bad or stupid people, but
sometimes bad or stupid people are cops. Unfortunately, when bad or stupid
people are cops, it's a bigger problem than in most other occupations.

~~~
wnight
No, that's not the problem. It's not that there are bad police, or that they
can cause more damage, it's that the "good" police protect and enable them.

When the thin blue line works the other way and expels anyone who _ever_ hurts
those in their power, police as whole can start to mend their reputation.

------
DocG
original story with video about incident [http://www.wral.com/parents-
question-police-response-to-enlo...](http://www.wral.com/parents-question-
police-response-to-enloe-high-prank/12459772/)

I wonder why it was posted as reason.com link, this article is half the thing
only.

~~~
MayankGoyal
Thank you for posting that link. I don't know how I missed that even though
"WRAL television" was mentioned in reason.com story. I did perform a quick
google search to find the original article but the top few looked like copied
off reason.com so I pegged it to be the best one available.

------
NathanKP
It certainly sounds like an over reaction by the school and police, but
instead of jumping on the police hating bandwagon I'd encourage everyone to
realize that this article only tells one side of the story, like so many other
of these internet stories.

------
sukuriant
Reading through the comments on DocG's link, it looks like there MAY be a lot
more to this scenario that might even warrant the behavior of the police and
the school. Some speculation is saying the balloons may have been full of
bleach, for example, which turns the game from harmless fun to actual danger.

That said, this, again, is an instance, as other people have said here, of
only telling one side of the story. Honestly, we're not going to hear a
complete instance of the other side of the story. Police officer's aren't
Spock, and won't produce a perfect replication of the events either. And
honestly, in some circles, if the police are called in to something, their
mission is to de-escalate the situation as quickly as possible, and that means
rather emotionlessly immobilizing anyone who might be seen as a threat.
Assuming this was just a harmless water balloon fight, the police shouldn't
have needed to have been called in, and then this wouldn't have happened.

That said, police are still humans, and at some level, their mind and emotions
do need to come into play; so, if this was a harmless water balloon fight,
they could have come in and seen it as such, and handled it differently.

But we don't know the whole story, and so on and so on. We need more
information.

Edit: Okay, I also saw the video now. That brief bit of the video, it looks
more like the results of being banged against concrete. It doesn't take much
to get some pretty substantial scrapes from concrete. I can't tell intensity
of force from that brief video, though; nor can I tell if the detained kid was
struggling to the point that handcuffing was difficult or impossible.

I do wonder why the man witnessing the altercation was charged with
trespassing, though. I liken it to a person coming up to a house on fire as
police and firefighters are doing their job. I suppose if they were getting in
the way of the police doing their job, they would get a similar charge. We
need more information here, too. So much more information..

