Maybe I’m biased in my analysis of this story by having worked with the campus police back in the day.

Oh, you worked with the fun police. That explains everything!
(OK, I worked with campus police back in the day, but only as an emergency medical tech. That doesn’t count as consorting with the fun police…you fun police consort!)

In any case, the more professional police officers that I’ve seen (and worked with) usually saw arrest as a last resort. Usually a suggestion like “you can walk out of here now, or I can drag you to the station…what do you think?” is powerful enough to get a kid out the door and defuse a situation. I suppose it depends on the town…I don’t know much about Austin, TX — but in NYC, I’d be shocked at an arrest like that. It reminds me of that somg from The Who “you can go sleep at home tonight if you can get up and walk away”.

On the plus side, I don’t think that anyone has to worry about Ann Coulter’s sensibilities being offended, because we all know that she’s a dirty, dirty girl.

And yeah, just escorting him out might have been sufficient, but in some ways the cop’s got a cleaner course of action to just arrest him. It’s sort of like the policies regarding use of deadly force by cops: The fact is, yeah, there are situations where a cop might be able to achieve a better outcome by pulling his gun out and just winging the bad guy; shooting him in the arm or the leg or something. But cops aren’t trained to do that. They’re trained like this: If you don’t have sufficient grounds to try to kill the guy, you don’t shoot him. And if you _do_ have sufficient grounds to try to kill the guy, that’s what you try to do.

Maybe I’m biased in my analysis of this story by having worked with the campus police back in the day. But there’s a freedom of speech issue here, obviously. If Raj isn’t violating an ordinance, the cop really has no business doing anything at all to him. So the cop pretty much can’t intervene any earlier than that. For him to make Raj leave _without_ arresting him might even be construed as prima facie evidence that the cop was violating Raj’s first amendment rights.

But the image of Raj running back up the aisle making the wanking gesture just continues to crack me up every time I picture it. Way to go, dude. Way to take the spotlight away from that screeching harpy with a totally appropriate bit of symbolic speech.

Of other note, the arresting officer’s got a typo in his police report “…that all they do with there wives is fuck them in the…”. But since the cop put those words in writing in public record (which is available to children), can we arrest him too, or does he need to be of Middle Eastern descent to get arrested for bullshit like that?

In any case, and of greater importance than charging the arresting officer, the kid really could have at least thought of something creative and/or interesting to say (I mean, he could have left the wanking motions in…just found something less meaningless to say).

With the arrest report fresh in my mind, I have to ask: won’t someone think of the children?!?.
I say that we fuck them in there ass! ;)