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Oct 1, 2009 – 10:30 AM
I've never been an X Games fan, but skateboarding strikes me as a rather harmless activity for our nation's youth. Apparently the good people of San Francisco disagree, because they've made skateboarding illegal -- and a San Francisco police officer is shown in the above video profanely explaining that to a young skateboarder.
The skateboarder, 18-year-old Zach Stow, does not appear to be resisting in the video, but as the officer, identified as Noel Schwab, handcuffs him and tells him, "Resist again, and I can break your arm like a twig, and then you can treat me like the a**hole that you think I am." The whole thing was being taped by one of Stow's friends; Schwab apparently did not realize that.
Stow told The San Francisco Examiner he went to court the next morning and got the charges dropped, and he said he's considering filing a complaint against Schwab. Stow also acknowledged that he wasn't completely blameless in all this, admitting that his profane insult of Schwab "was kind of dumb."
But if Stow was kind of dumb, it strikes me that the city of San Francisco's policy of arresting skateboarders, which a Police Department spokesman described as standard procedure, is really dumb. These teenage skateboarders should have treated the officer with more respect, but they're not the ones in that video who deserve to be in trouble.
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