There were a lot of mistakes made on this and the way Airport Police handled the removal simply provided a visual that everyone is reacting to. Never board the plane until you have the seating figured out. A few years back, my wife and I were flying somewhere and we had an overbooked airplane. After making a number of offers and getting no takers, the gate person called about 20 names of people on the flight to meet with the gate person. He then explained that they were overbooked by 4 seats and as there were not takers, the policy was to identify those who were flying on the least expensive ticket and explain that if there were no volunteers, 4 would be selected by random from the 20 people he had identified. He upped the offer from $400 to $600 and a couple of people bit. My wife and I looked around and decided of the people standing there, we would be better able to handle the delay than the others and decided we would wait. It was a relatively short wait (3 hours or so). I felt that the gate person handled a tough situation about as well as it could be handled.