You guys taking "deadly" too seriously :)

Big deal, its a squirrel. People get molested by police all around the world and no one gives a fuck about that...

squirrels CAN carry rabies.  it is rare, but they can become infected and pass on the disease.  rabies is serious fucking business.   this was a squirrel acting extremely aggressive towards people.  i probably would have squashed the thing. 

the cop did NOTHING wrong. 

I'm glad I wasn't there because I would've pepper sprayed him back and gone to jail...

actually i am more scared of the "pepper spy " you mentioned!

if i was one of the students, i would have punched him in the face.

rabies will kill.

honestly, that wouldn't have been cruel.  You would have taken out a threat to a squirrel populations around the area. What the officer did was wrong. He made the little thing suffer rather than taking care of the problem properly. So yes, he did it wrong.

Ugh, I already mentioned it in my first post. Squirrels can't carry, transfer or contract rabies. It's pretty much nearly impossible unless the area was hit by a bacterial bomb filled with rabies and every living being within 5 miles contracted rabies, then maybe the squirrel could have had rabies. The case is so rare, that the cop had a larger chance of getting beaten up by a random gorilla than being bitten by a baby squirrel with rabies.

The behaviour of the baby squirrel is natural, they are attractive and frantic when young and only get hesitant and anti-social when they are older. Go to any park in Australia and you'll find baby squirrels just running around, none of them with malicous intent.

The most likely scenario is that the kids probably kept feeding and playing around with the squirrel, a teacher saw what was going on and like dumb teachers do, they get worried and call the cops. Dumb cop comes, does dumb stuff and then says dumb stuff on national TV.

Like I said before, it'd be like getting scared and macing a puppy because they were running around, getting excited and jumping on you. If I saw the cop, I'd probably smack him across the head for lacking any sort of common sense or critical thinking.

Edit: It even mentions that Animal control actually came straight after the cop, they cleaned it and said it was fine and let it off back in the wild. If the squirrel had rabies, then they'd have to get rid of it. Had the cop been an intelligent man, then he would have trapped the squirrel that was being 'irrational' (didn't realise that walking up to someone was a sign of rabies) under a bucket, a hat or even a pot and could have just waited for Animal Control. Giving idiots big boy toys is just ridiculous. 

 my local authorites recommend trapping the animal in a plastic container alive and shoving it in the freezer.  

if you care for this animal you should be happy that he was able to subdue it alive. 

im actually rather surprised that the animal was released later, since the test for rabies is performed post-mortem.