By now, you’ve no doubt seen the video of Durwin Jones getting tossed ‘n’ tasered all over an Old City street corner last weekend. We’re pretty sure we broke the story, but from the outset, we also knew that this one would go straight to local TV news, since local TV news was pretty much made for clips of cops beating the shit out of people. (Something about this, we believe, dovetails with the local TV news business model, which fuses fearmongering with a “but you’re safe with us” sensibility that is designed to keep people not so much “fat and happy” as “obese, ready to buy whatever products we throw at ‘em and woefully, ridiculously undereducated.”) Anyway, as you can imagine, a few days in, and damage control abounds. The police say they can’t say anything because of an internal investigation. Jones, it turns out, is an upstanding citizen. But the police report then counters that when Jones went down, he allegedly said, “You’re gonna have to taser me,” which, outside of the bedroom, seems like an unlikely thing to say, especially when one is being roughed up by a gaggle of grandstanding cops. Meanwhile, everyone has their own opinion about whether or not Jones was resisting arrest. But in any case, it seems like everyone agrees that even if he was, the force was excessive and that the cops have an overall ‘roid-rage vibe, which is never a good thing when dealing with a crowd of drunk people. Below, we’ve got some links to how the story has been advancing. One is missing, and we’ve been looking for it desperately. It’s from a TV news report the other night that says that this isn’t the first time the arresting officer in particular has been in hot water for going a little over the line ‚Äî yes, the same officer who we believe wrote on his police report that Jones said, “You’re gonna have to taser me.” If anyone’s got a link or a YouTube of that one, please send it along.
NBC10: Taser Surgery
DN: Bad Boys Of YouTube

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 11:19 am.