
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
–Footage of Vandegrift High School student rushing the field Saturday after a winning championship soccer game in Austin, Texas, shows a uniformed police officer tripping and shoving several students. That was probaly not what his assignment was! A local Georgetown police officer—seen at the top of the frame in television footage—was seen more clearly in cell phone video taken by15-year-old Rohan Gupta, who told local news station KXAN that “[The cop] should’ve used better judgement. We’re high schoolers just trying to have some fun after our team won.” The department is going to forward the video to internal affairs for investigation, but you gotta wonder how much “investigating” needs to be done in the case of a cop knocking over kids.–Masslive’s Garrett Quinn (a friend of mine) reported on April 21 on some of the arguably excessive security measures instituted at the Boston Marathon one year after the Tsarnaev brothers killed three people and injured 260 with their pressure cooker bombs. These controversial measures will include bag searches for race watchers, a ban on backpacks for runners, bomb dogs, 3,000 police officers, and 400 military police officers. Quinn interviewed a 27-year veteran of the Boston police department whose civil liberties–savvy concerns about all this tough stuff makes him our Good Cop of the Week, even if he is retired. Tom Nolan, now a criminal justice professor at SUNY-Plattsburgh in New York, told Quinn that bag searches in public without a warrant are a violation of the Fourth Amendment. “This is a public place, these are public streets,” he said. “People have the absolute right to travel them without being stopped and searched by police.” Nolan also criticized the psychic effect that this kind of security theater has—people accept it so they can feel safer, and their rights get stripped away in the process. Hopefully other cops are paying attention to what Nolan is saying—some of them might consider taking his classes.Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.
