Brass knuckles are illegal in NY state. The dress code had a strict rule about haircuts. There is a

...curfew in the town. There are rules about allowing people who are drunk onto the plane. There are rules you are supposed to follow in a Q&A forum.

When are rules OK and when are they not? When is it GOOD to break the rules and when is it BAD? Are all rules wrong? How do you decide that it is OK for this rule to be broken, but not that one? If you teach the police to follow procedure strictly because that is what saves their and others lives, when do you give them the discretion to decide for themselves how to handle something? How does a security officer/policeman/soldier know for sure that the fourteen year old girl breaking curfew and walking down the street at 2 am on a school night carrying a shopping bag in an area where a crime has been reported is just a fourteen year old kid?

Carol Gottbaum SHOULD have been treated differently. The system failed her. I agree with that. The haircut situation should have been treated differently. I agree with that. The little girl walking down the street could have been handled differently. I agree with that. Andrew Meyers was being a jerk, but he shouldn't have been tasered for it. I agree with that.

But I also think that rules play a role in society. Especially on a planet with over six billion people on it. So, we have to have rules and we have to have people to enforce the rules and they have to be trained to follow a certain procedure. There has to be a solution here that will diminish the number of Carol Gottbaum incidents that occur, but that still allows for safety and the smooth running of the airport and, in a larger sense, society.

How do we get there?

THAT IS FASCISM OR TYRANY..whichever I do not want to live in it...brass knuckles on an 80 year old man who is willing to just give them up is not a threat and COMMON SENSE tells me to take them into custody, get his identification and let the old many alone!

been allowed to board the plane. And in this case, you would have been right. The rule forbidding brass knuckles is not draconian, BTW. Brass knuckles have only one real use and it isn't as paperweight. BUT...I can also see that an 81 year old guy whose brass knuckles have been taken away probably doesn't pose a threat.

Then you also have to think that the TSA agent and the airport security are responsible to the other 10,000 people who are going to pass through that airport that day. While they need to use discretion and common sense with the older gentleman, they also need to be sure that he really IS just a harmless older man.

I can see both sides. I am not arguing one or the other. My only wish with this thread is to try to understand both sides. I do believe in law and in rules and I understand that security and police officers are oftentimes put into damned if you do and damned if you don't situations. But I also know that people are getting abused and that needs to be examined and fixed.

It's called due process. You can't have authority figures abusing people who break the rule, that's against the rules.

The problem is, the authority figures get away with it. You've got powerful police unions acting more like a crime mob than a labor union, protecting cops that they should be arresting. You've got private citizens who think that cops can do know wrong.

It really is that simple. The police and other authority figures need to treat each person they interact with as if it were there own sister, or mother, or son.

The police are taught to view the citizens they protect and serve as scum, as cattle. They do not think of them as fellow human beings, to be treated with respect and dignity. Do you really think they would ever, in their personal lives, say "Mom, I want you to stop talking and listen to me. If you don't I am going to tase you"? Of course not.

Now, I recognize that this isn't always easy. There are people who will try your patience to it's maximum. But isn't that the role of police to begin with? To BE authority figures who act the part? I am an authority figure as well, in my role as father. My girls have all occasionally acted as bad or worse than any of the people in the incidents you mentioned. If I had reacted with anything approaching the force the police used I would be in jail today. And yet we discuss the actions of the police as if there are two sides to the story, as if they can be understood and forgiven.

The authority figures in our society function best when they command a certain measure of respect it is true. What is lost though is that you cannot FORCE that respect. It must be earned. You can force fear, but respect is a subtly different animal. To earn that police must be more patient, more fair, more honest, more JUST than the rest of us. Only the best of us should be qualified to even attempt to fill this role, and that should be the starting point only, to be reinforced through training.

We must hold those who are responsible for enforcing rules to a higher standard than the rest of us. If we do not they will certainly not take it upon themselves to do so.

and I respect that. But, to play devil's advocate, police are put into situations where their life is in danger occasionally. And the problem for them is not being able to distinuish that routine traffic stop from the rare instance when someone is going to pull a gun out and kill them. So, I can see where they tend to want to err on the side of being alive tomorrow. Now, I can also VERY well see that this becomes their excuse. Carol Gottbaum was unlikely to hurt any of her arresting officers. The 81 year old man with the brass knuckles wasn't likely to need handcuffs. In THOSE instances, common sense, humanity and personal discretion should be applied, I would think. The problem being that we have all heard the story about the cop who used his own judgement and let the bad guy go/got killed.

I am not sure what the solution is. I tend to think it is going to involve more training and more screening for officers. It seems to me that a lot of these situations turn bad because the cops involved have some personality and control issues.

you wsnt a fucking black and white world...you got it...just move to mars first!

in GD. Does "zero-tolerance" adherence to the rules make sense? Never? Always? Sometimes? And if sometimes, then when, precisely? I'm thoroughly unprepared to answer, except that I don't think "never" or "always" are gonna be the right choice. It's the follow-up question to the "sometimes" response that stymies.

it requires zero thought, which means it doesn't tax the IQ's of those enforcing it.

When I was coming home from Zurich in 1998 there was a neat little stand on the way to the plane where they sold Swiss Army knives. I got 2 of those little tiny ones for the kids. A 1 inch blade, nail file and cute little scissors. All around handy tool to add to the keychain. There was no problem taking these on the plane of course. Luckily my Daughter was aware of the zero tolerance rules and did not take hers to school. My Son (in one of his better decisions of the time) followed suit. They probably would still be in jail if they had.

It's detention, and the steps taken to get people to detention, that are a big part of the problem in some instances. Tasering, handcuffs, they're all rather brutal and uncomfortable.

But in order to assess any situation, the cop needs time, and he buys that time by putting the accused in cuffs or in a holding cell while he figures out who the person is, if they are a threat, and what to do about them.

I dunno what the answer is--ya can't roll everyone who needs to be halted up in a rug, like the cartoons, with their head and feet sticking out...