From A British News Paper

[Shuftin]

Jan 15th, 2007

by Bill Bonner

Maybe Americans are getting a little sour…and maybe they aren’t. This war against terror seems to put a strain on their sense of humor. They can’t seem to help themselves; they want to take it seriously.

But we found this little item in the British press yesterday:

“I used an excessive amount of discretion,” a police officer explained to the Atlanta newspaper. At least he must still have a sense of humor. For it wasn’t an excessive amount of discretion that was the problem, but too little discretion and too much brute force.

Poor Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto was the object of the flat-foot’s force. The U.K. history professor was crossing the street in Atlanta, whereupon he discovered the keen desire of the city police to protect U.S. citizens from foreign jaywalkers. The professor either didn’t understand what the policeman was saying to him… or simply ignored him… but a few seconds later the middle-aged scholar was on the pavement… his hands wrenched behind his back, with cuffs on. Five cops wrestled the bespectacled intellectual to the ground… and locked him up for eight hours.

Thank God for the vigilance of the Atlanta police.

www.dailyreckoning.com.au/atlanta-police/2007/01/15/

[Shuftin]

January 12, 2007

A DISTINGUISHED British historian who tried to cross a road in Atlanta, Georgia, has complained of being wrestled to the ground, pinioned by five police officers and imprisoned.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, 56, visiting professor of global environmental history at the University of London, was at the conference of the American Historical Association when he was caught jaywalking.

"I'm a mass of contusions and grazes," he said, in an interview shown on website YouTube.

"I come from a country where you can cross the road where you like.

"It hadn't occurred to me that I wasn't allowed to cross the road between the two main conference venues."

He was not the only historian to do so. Policeman Kevin Leonpacher cracked down on the scholars, cautioning several before confronting the British professor, whose work has been compared to that of 18th-century greats Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and French philosopher Montesquieu.

"I didn't appreciate the gravity of the offence," Professor Fernandez-Armesto said. "And I didn't recognise him as a policeman. He was wearing ... a bomber jacket, like a jerkin."

The officer asked the professor for identification. The professor asked the officer for identification. Officer Leonpacher then told him he was under arrest and subjected him to "terrible, terrible violence", the professor said.

"This young man kicked my legs from under me, wrenched me round, pinned me to the ground, wrenched my arms behind my back, handcuffed me." The officer sought help and "I had five burly policemen pinioning me to the ground".

It was "like he was Osama bin Laden or something", said Lisa Kazmier, a Philadelphia historian.

The professor had hoped to spend the afternoon listening to discourse on arcane topics. Instead, he was handcuffed to another suspect and fingerprinted in a detention centre, where his peppermints were confiscated, "presumably on the suspicion that they might be some kind of narcotic".

His bail was set at £ 720 ($1800) and he remained behind bars for eight hours, "becoming guide, philosopher, and friend to the down-and-outs and sad, degraded or deranged people who were my fellow inmates". When he told a judge his side of the story in court the next morning, the case was dropped.

But Officer Leonpacher was unrepentant, saying: "He chose to ignore a uniformed officer. At what point can anyone say I overreacted?"

The professor's wife, Lesley, said: "I suppose it's lucky he wasn't shot." As for the professor, his colleagues see him "as a combination of Rambo, because it took five cops to pin me down, and Perry Mason, because my eloquence before a judge obtained my immediate release".

www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21045057-401,00.html