Riots last night at the University of Arizona in Tucson were totally expected, totally prepared for. Win or lose a game, drunk students hit the bars and then hit the streets.
Scroll down for their selfies of police trying to protect property from them.
UA already has Rick Rodriguez and football players who punch women full in the face. Riots are icing on the cake for this … uh… [trails off, unable to find a word for it]…
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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March 30th, 2014 at 12:50PM
“Police were prepared in riot gear, then forced to use pepper grenades after certain sections of the aggravated horde began to verbally oppose the presence of law enforcement.”
Looks to me like it was the police who were spoiling for the fight. And who forced the police to do anything? They chose to use gas on the citizenry because it made life easier on them.
Verbally opposing the presence of law enforcement? What? The 1st Amendment doesn’t apply in AZ?
Police declared it an “unlawful assembly”? The 1st Amendment STILL doesn’t apply in AZ? Who made them God to decide, in advance, that it was unlawful? If I’m standing there exercising my rights and if the moron next to me suddenly throws something at a cop, is MY assembly no longer peaceful?
Thought question: If the police had just stayed in the donut shops and just let people gather on the street, would the outcome have been worse?
Drunk students are pigs. I just don’t think it merits this reaction from law enforcement.
March 30th, 2014 at 1:00PM
JND: I take your point, but here are a couple of things to consider:
There’s a nasty history of university student rioting all over the state of Arizona, some of it very high-profile stuff involving guns. Citizens are upset and have given the police hell about it. More modestly, there’s constant citizen complaint about obnoxious students in their neighborhoods.
If the police don’t prepare for what they know will be violence after any big game, they catch hell for doing nothing while cars and businesses burn. If they do prepare, they catch hell for being nazis.
As to your thought question: Things would have been far worse, in my opinion, had the police done nothing. People in those crowds have guns; they are drunk; they are spoiling for a fight. It’s really dangerous.