Rutgers professor forced to take psych evaluation over tweets

What you say online has consequences. An adjunct professor from Rutgers learned that this week after he was detained by police and forced to take a psych evaluation after asking his class a few hyperbolic questions and later posting versions of them to Twitter. According to the New York Daily News, last Wednesday Kevin Allred asked his class if conservatives would care as much about the Second Amendment if guns killed more white people. "In class, we talked about flag burning generally as a form of protest, and what does the flag mean to different people," Allred told the publication.

Last night, police showed up at his Brooklyn apartment to take him to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. The cops told him that he could refuse going with them, and that he wasn't under arrest, but if he refused he'd be taken by force. He wasn't handcuffed, and rode to the hospital in an ambulance. Allred says the doctors couldn't understand why he was there.

"The doctors were like, 'This is ridiculous, why did they bring you here?'" he said. "And I said, 'That's what I thought, but they told me I had to do it.'"

In a statement, the NYPD said they were acting on a tip from Rutgers campus police that Allred threatened to "kill white people." One of his tweets says that if he saw a Trump bumper sticker that his "brakes would go out and I'll run you off the road."

""will the 2nd amendment be as cool when i buy a gun and start shooting atrandom [sic] white people or no...?" was the deleted tweet according to NBC New York.

"The Rutgers University Police Department responded to a complaint from a student and took all appropriate action," the school told regional news site NJ.com. "We have no further comment."

Rutgers said that the NYPD was sent because campus police hadn't been able to get in touch with Allred. Allred said that he had no missed calls or emails from the school.

Allred's Twitter account was subsequently suspended, and to get it reinstated, he had to delete the tweet regarding the Second Amendment.