Lawyer Arrested After Chanting ‘I Hate Police’ Decries Disorderly Conduct Arrests
A Washington, D.C., lawyer arrested last month after chanting “I hate police” admits his conduct was juvenile, disrespectful and not too smart.
But the conduct was not illegal, lawyer Pepin Andrew Tuma writes in the Washington Post. He says he is confident he will win the case, despite efforts by other officers to portray Tuma as resisting arrest or failing to obey a command to move along. Tuma maintains the officer who arrested him shoved him against an electrical utility box and told him, “Just shut up, faggot.”
“I am confident my name will be cleared and the charges dismissed, Tuma writes. “But that’s not really the point. The police, with the awesome power of the state behind them, have a duty not to overreact to people like me who act imprudently, even rudely, but are not breaking any law. Yet, that overreaction seems to occur in the District far too often.”
Tuma says that, in a “Kafkaesque” twist, he was arrested for disorderly conduct while he and two friends were discussing the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The group was noting that disorderly conduct arrests operate too often “as a troubling pretext to arrest anyone police officers feel like arresting.” He notes a 2003 report that found the arrest rate for disorderly conduct in Washington, D.C., is two to four times the national rate.
“What if I weren’t a white, gay, prosperous attorney?” Tuma asks. “Would the media care about this? How many unjustified arrests go unwitnessed and unreported every week?”
