There are so many fallacies in your statement, I have to take them one at a time: The officers and security at the ballpark are obligated to protect the employees of the organization (i.e. - the players) and maintain order. This man was committing criminal trespass with premeditation, and was resisting arrest from a uniformed police officer. When you do that, you take your chances. If I broke into Microsoft headquarters, and started running through the halls yelling, dodging police officers, and getting anywhere even close to an employee of the company, where I could inflict harm, the police have every right to subdue me with any means necesssary. Not at all. We just see this as what it is: a criminal act that has the potential to cause great harm, and must be curtailed. Which it is. Statistically proven. Which is why they didn't shoot him. Because it's the best way to subue a suspect at a safe distance. The man entered, without permission, into someone elses workplace and reisisted arrest from a uniformed police officer, all while acting in an erratic and disruptive manner. I can't blame the police officers for handling him as if was dangerous. Because, for all they knew, he was.
If I were one of the players, I would be scared for my life. The field is not public domain, and I would feel threatened if some jackass was running around the field during a game. Good for idiots, bad for players and fans.
They used to do it all the time. I doubt any of these players are scared of the fans running on the field. Still, I fully approve of the cop tasering the guy. If nothing else, as a fan it pisses me off when the baseball games are delayed while fat cops chase down some drunk idiot who jumps on the field.
The Phillies LF started moving away when the kid started coming towards him. Mostly the players laugh, but there is fear when they come towards you. Hank Aaron has said the guys that ran with him on the field scared him at first because he didn't know what to expect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCtp62vCwfc Luckily, this was a tennis court where the nutjob only has about 2000 sq ft of space. If I was Federer, I would've swung my racket at him. Who knows what his intentions were when he started towards Federer.
I think it would have been hard for anyone, whether they were in shape or not, to catch him because he had a lot of open space and he is young and wiry. And as mentioned in previous posts, his act was ruining the flow of the game and there was no reason for that. BetterThanI had a great example with him, theoretically of course, breaking into Microsoft and running and dodging around like an idiot. They, MS, are going to do whatever it takes, short of killing him to get him out of there. Only in the US, do we have people who are more worried about the well-being of a person who has commited a felony than the fact that a felony was being committed! That right there is what's wrong with this country, but I am not going to go there any further..
At Cal vs Stanford games and Cal vs USC games there are always people running out on the field and I can't recally a case where security hasn't been able to catch them. These are college age in shape kids running around on a football field. I think you are giving way way too much credit to the kid and if anything giving even less credit to the cop and security personel. As far as us being the only country where we worry abou the well-being of someone committing a felony yeah the Bill of Rights kind of mandates that. Anyway this is just the same strawman as has been brought up before. No one has said that the kid shouldn't have been aprehended or charged.
