The police definitely went overboard.  Even if his delivery was rough, there was no need for such force.

Hugs,

Luella

I agree with Luella, so strongly that it is personally difficult to even entertain this as a serious question.

Some 50 years ago during congressional "oversight hearings" on what was during that era fairly new news of the public being apprised for the first time of ongoing global spook activity being sponsored and perpetrated by, for and through the CIA, a congressional perp mouthed the now infamous sentiment "at what point does the people's right to know become eclipsed by the people's right to be secure / protected by us?". Said perp, of course, gravely looked into the camera and answered his own rhetoric "I for one believe the people's right to be secure trumps their right to know what it is that we/their government are doing in the course of protecting them".  Between Rodney King 91' and Florida 07', there have now been ample enough events on a recurring and repeat basis that it's passed time to consider - who is to protect us from our protectors? 

Effectively this Florida student got Rodney Kinged , over what, ....being informed enough AND with the intestinal fortitude to ask an intelligent series of questions at a public event? When did this become a taserable crime?

Perhaps some of the readers here are too young to remember that event, but when all the murk and smoke of that event was parted, that was a watershed event on various fronts of the ever encroaching police-state. For starters, that event proved how people can slowly, gradually, through the expert use of media slanting /propaganda/ brainwashing, be convinced to believe what they apparently saw with their own eyes was something different than what they apparently saw with their own eyes. If the video of a man lying face down on pavement being bludgeoned by numerous bad cops with a wee bit too much caffeine in their system can be conjured into the guilty party, it's only a short hop, skip and a jump to make a video portraying jumbo jets crashing into prominent office buildings. It is likely that amateur camcorder/video news feeds in 91' possessed some genuine news worth to them compared to, say, mainstream variants circa 01' and later. What did news viewers apparently see with their own eyes in 91'? A half-dozen (or more) publicly hired, publicly armed, temporarily-insance L.A. thugs "cops" failing miserably at performing a rather routine chore of cop work while, collectively, in unison, with tasers, and batons a flailing, against one large prone black man said to be whacked out on PCP. Try to ignore the latter stages of allegedly being whacked out on PCP on film occured face down eating pavement whilst being whacked incessantly and mercilessly by said publicly ordained thugs. Anyone who remembers that visual possibly realizes there likely has never been a human boogeyman that has existed who deserved the amount of blunt police-force and brutality brought to bear in that particular incident......but ipso presto POOF!, after many months of churning and tweaking that story through the media "courts of public opinion" and the formal courts of judicial opinioin, a nation allowed itself to be conned into believing that, yep, King deserved what he got. Worse, in the process another police-state precedent became etched in stone....and some 16 years later we have renewed proof of that convuluted precedent, effectively shouted by the mere asking of the question - did the police go overboard? Is water wet?  While at it, should just as well ask - do people at large even remember the basic concept of where overboard is or what it means anymore?.....memory hole?........anyone?