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Tomo - having done similar it's a good job we don't have actual thought police. If we did I'd be on a life sentence in solitary confinement after the kind of things I've done to them. :p
I don't agree with restrictions on "reasonable force" in the real world so the unreal world of the imagination if a free for all.

(re. reasonable force - I advocate an "asking for it" law. Basically if they were asking for it, there can be no guilt. If someone breaks into your house and you catch them they were asking for it by being in your house. Tie them to a chair and practice your golf swing. Just imagine the paradise we could live in if there was an asking for it law. Victims sent forth from a coutroom with an official commendation for the treatment they gave a violent criminal instead of being too afraid of criminal charges to defend themselves.)

BigShot wrote:I advocate an "asking for it" law.

I concur with this but the Police don't always.
Some time last decade I was jumped by some nut case outside a night club; I screamed for the police (it was Wakefield, they're never that far away on a Saturday night) and by the time they got there I had the guy on the ground with my foot in his throat to keep him there. After finally getting them to understand he jumped me and I was actually the one that shouted for them they gave me a verbal warned regarding unneccessarry violence!
I say, if someone is trying to attack me and i manage to get him on the ground, I'm going to do something that keeps him there while the fuzz arrives!

"The police don't always" - that's half the problem.
In fact, if your story is accurate (and I have no reason to think otherwise) the police were WAY out of line. By the sound of it, your reaction fit every definition I've ever heard of "reasonable" except those used by pacifists who want us all to refuse to fight back, and by the police who fell they are entitled to hold a monopoly on violence.

Under my "asking for it" law, you would have been given a pat on the back for keeping him there, and if anything you may have been given a bit of advice about the law so that next time you'd remember to hurt him far more as, after all, he was asking for it.

To my previous comments about the problem being that we've been disarmed and dicouraged from defending ourselves, eachother and our property - add a firm belief that the police are actually part of the problem. "Just let us handle it" is one of the worst attitudes about crime imaginable; it not only suggests that we should surrender our defence to them, but it does so when it's undisputable that they can't "handle it" at all. The only thing policing really does to crime is displace it.