Professor Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto has weighed in(registration required) concerning the stories of his alleged abuse during a routine encounter with a police officer in Atlanta. In this opinion piece in the AJC, he outlines his side of the encounter and his opinions about his treatment both by the officer and the rest of the legal process in Atlanta.
Unfortunately, he is relating this incident in what he perceives as a larger context of executive privilege and abuse promulgated by the Bush Administration. I think that he’s going a bit far with his perceived parallels. It would be difficult to discern effects that the Bush Administration would have had on a local city police officer. He’s only been in office 6 years after all. That’s a lot of trickle-down in a short time period, even if Bush believed in that philosophy.
As I noted in previous posts, the british historian was arrested for jaywalking after allegedly refusing to obey police directives. There are two sides to this story, of course, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution finds it just as intriguing as I do.
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