Rutgers Professor Taken for Psych Evaluation After Anti-Trump Tweets

Kevin Allred
Photo by Bill Denver

Professor Kevin Allred made the undeniably tasteless tweet the day after Trump won the election.   If I see any Trump bumper stickers on the road today, my brakes will go out and I’ll run you off the road. While The Trump Effect does not condone threatening traffic related violence, it surely is among the more tame remarks made in the election cycle with Trump supporters frequently threatening to shoot and lynch the President or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as recently as during the Trump election victory speech.

He also posed a question first in his class and later on his twitter feed; would people care more about gun control if more white people were the victims of gun violence?  A student complained.

Several hours later, Professor Allred found himself taken into custody by campus police and delivered unwillingly to Bellevue psychiatric hospital, where doctors took only two hours to deem the concern absurd and discharge him forthwith.

Lower Courts have generally given a fairly wide berth to social media posts and the 'true threats' exception to free speech.    Given the fairly obvious vagueness of the 'target', the limitation of twitter as a platform to really explain one's actual thoughts, and that the threat would put the writer in just as much harm's way as his alleged targets, it seems patently obvious that this would fall under 'tasteless and protected speech' rather than a 'true threat'.

This particular incident gives us pause for two reasons  1.  Trump has made it clear that he wishes to curtail the 1st amendment  and  2.  The Fraternal Order of Police threw their support behind Trump, and the Rutgers University Police Department are members of that union.  

Rutgers University Professor Taken for Psych Eval