Coulter Heckler Gets Arrested
From The Smoking Gun, a copy of the arresting officer’s affadavit in the case of Ajai Prasad Raj, who attended an Ann Coulter lecture at the University of Texas, Austin, and during the “audience question” phase asked her a lewd question about conservatives’ sexual practices, then ran back to his seat making a rude gesture, thereby inciting the pro- and anti-Coulter forces in attendance to get uppity, and in turn inciting said arresting officer to live up to his title: Another Counter-Coulter Bust – May 4, 2005.
May 5th, 2005 at 8:22 pm
Why doesn’t she just shut her mouth and pose for playboy?
May 6th, 2005 at 5:34 pm
And we can find out whether or not she has a penis.
May 10th, 2005 at 5:38 pm
Did they have to arrest the kid? Why not just throw him out? I could see doing the latter in a situation where he had caused a ‘breach of peace’, but why charge the kid? I suppose that there were kids in the room…but I don’t see saying “fuck them in the ass” near kids as an arrestable offense. If so, I’ve probably used similar words enough times in front of kids to get locked up for a long time (instead of simply getting dirty looks from friends within earshot of my burger fumble at the BBQ).
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! ;)
May 10th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
Heh. For me, I thought the cop was making the point in his report that after Raj did his thing, the anti-Coulter people in the back of the auditorium were whooping and hollering, and the pro-Coulter people in the front of the auditorium were standing and yelling and making like they were going to go after Raj. Which to me kind of sounds like an okay situation for him to have stepped in and arrested the guy.
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.
May 11th, 2005 at 12:58 pm
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.
May 20th, 2005 at 12:13 am
[…] case of Ajai Raj, who disrupted an Ann Coulter appearance at the University of Texas (see Coulter heckler gets arrested). Now I’ve finally come across something t […]