police in a lot of other countries achieve a lot more by just convincing uncooperative individuals with words than they do with blunt, pointless force, in murica.
there seems to be the strongly held opinion that "if they do something wrong, we have the right to treat them like shit and whatever that gets them is well deserved".
the idea that this was actually police, and not some random "security grunt" went completely over my head because this is not how police acts where I live.
for the overarching problem, theres a really simple solution: make it legislation that an airline may not book more seats than they have available. if you overbooked trains or busses or cruise ships or any other mode of transportation where you require a seat, people would call bullshit. airlines, however, somehow obtained the right to sell "the idea of a seat".
Isn't the act of overbooking akin to writing a check for an amount of money that you do not have in your account balance? If this can be considered fraud, why do the airlines get a break?
when you book a ticket, it says in the fineprint that you acquiring that ticket doesnt mean that you get to fly.
it is more like a bank pretending to have your exact balance available at all times. in fact, they do not. they kinda bet on the fact that not all customers want to cash out at the same time, which works almost all the time except when the banking sector melts down and all customers try to cash out at once and then banks have to admit that they cant really pay you out even if they wanted to.
There's also the x-factor of societal attitudes towards air travel post 9/11 (with additional post Trump anxieties added in). For all we know, the police might not have been told that Dao had been randomly selected for removal - they might have just been told that he was a disruptive passenger that needed to be removed. In either case, just by being on an airplane, the police will be primed to think of all the bad things bad people can and have done on airplanes. Laws and public attitudes have changed and it's gotten a lot easier to prevent people from flying since 9/11, so the police probably didn't think much of it from a consumer/civil rights standpoint (not that they necessarily do in any context), and just went into autopilot mode of applying force to resolve the problem in front of them. None of which is to excuse them, just to explicate that I don't think the incident was strictly caused by naked corporatism.