After having an unpleasant encounter with UMaine library staff and later, UMaine police, I read of a UCLA student who received unfair treatment. In his case, he was repeatedly taisered by campus police (I think) for failing to show his student ID when he was using one of the library computers. Apparently, he was on his way out of the library when the police arrived and was subsequently taisered, cuffed, and arrested. But not before a mob of fellow students descended, protesting the police brutality. After the taising, one kid asked for a cop's badge number and was threatened with a taising himself.
I have to say this is symptomatic of a larger societal problem of overzealous and power-hungry cops... not to mention librarians. I was reflecting on the few encounters I've had with uniformed officers in my lifetime -- either directly or indirectly. Aside from one occasion, I'm genuinely pressed to remember a time when their intervention made a situation better. I find their presence on college campuses to be especially unnecessary. Scanning through the weekly Maine Campus police logs, I would say somewhere around 90 percent of reported incidents involved underage drinking or marijuana. It's always a good thing when they set up a road block and catch a drunk driver or arrest a kid who struck a female, but these incidents seem to be few and far between.
