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Students Put UCLA Taser Video On YouTube
dircha writes "As widely reported, an incident in which Iranian-American student Mostafa Tabatabainejad was tasered up to five times by UCLA police on Friday, has been captured by a fellow student using a video enabled cell phone and published to YouTube. From the Daily Bruin: 'At around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, Tabatabainejad, a fourth-year Middle Eastern and North African studies and philosophy student, was asked to leave the library for failing to present his BruinCard during a random check. The 23-year-old student was hit with a Taser five times when he did not leave quickly and cooperatively upon being asked to do so.' In a story which has raised concerns of racial profiling, police brutality and the health risks of taser use, the ubiquity of video cell phone technology has given us a first hand record of an incident which might otherwise have been a he-said, she-said affair. While the publishing of the video to YouTube has given the issue compelling popular exposure beyond the immediate campus community."
Now, it's time for the PR machine to get into high gear!
already a week old, and a week late, and a week after digg
?giS
Five times? Try five hundred times!
Where's the justice?
Nice scoop!
- Dave
...if after watching this video, you see what the LAPD(and by extension, the UCLA PD) are willing to do on camera, and in front of dozens of witnesses, what do they do without people watching?
And am I the only one that upon hearing, Police burtality" and "Caught of tape" are completely unsurprised the LAPD are somehow involved?
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
... were held at UCLA this year. I hear it'll be in Denver next year, then Florida State in '08.
The kid got what he wanted - attention. Now he's complaining? What exactly did he expect would happen for being such an ass? Now that he's had his 15 minutes of fame, I think we can move on to other more newsworthy things. And I hope this idiot loses his inevitable lawsuit. What does it say about our country when any moron can become rich just by being a jackass?
This was pretty sick. If you get hit by a tazer it's pretty impossible to stand up for at least a few minutes. That's the entire point of a tazer. They could have just handcuffed him and carried him out. I hope these "officers" go to jail.
Tagged "bzzzt" for over zealous use of tasers.
Haha, those coppers sure love them tasers. Nothing like zapping a victim with 50 kilovolts of nerve incapacitating love.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
The hundreds of eyewitnesses in the video, and the fact that neither the UCPD or the University denies this incident happened?
As a foreigner I can only look at this from an outsiders view. The taser system has yet to make it to our shores as far as I know, and seeing this has made me somewhat sceptical. Albeit quite useful in alot of situations, the threshold for using this weapon should be firmly stated. Problem is, even if it is "firmly stated", for instance as "when an officer feels threatend", or something of the like, this is a highly subjective saying, and open to quite alot of interpretation. In this case however, I can hardly see that the officers had any good reason for using it, besides the fact that he really didn't feel like obiding their orders - wich I can hardly blame from the treatment he recieved on forehand. These officers should have found a better way of handling this situation. "Trigger happy" is a term I belive fits well with their character in this situation. Though I would prefer a trigger happy person before a passive bystander in any case. I have never been tased, but it seems to really make the "victims" panic, more than hurt them. Most of the videos I've seen ends up with the tased person crying for some reason, I guess it's a really bad feeling to be completly paralyzed by an electric current through your nerves. At the very least it's effective...
-- Odd Rune Strommen
...between him and the police at the very end where it's "time to go" is supposed to prove what, again? Context, people. Context.
one has to have some reason when applying force...you can't apply force them expect the person receiving the force to have full motor functionality afterwards. Furthermore, applying force for a non-violent offense without any obvious threat to your own safety is highly unnecessary IMHO. That said...had the guy had a visible gun I say shoot him and go home safe to your family.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I keep hearing people complaining "if he had just listened" or "all he had to do was get up." But seriously, think about it -- should he really have been tased repeatedly or simply arrested?
1. After being shocked repeatedly, could he even have been ABLE to "just" stand up?
2. After being shocked repeatedly, would be have been in a mental state to understand the cops' commands?
3. He was on the floor. An irritating act, but something deserving electrocution?
4. What if someone asks for a warrant, should they also get electrocuted. After all "all he had to do was let them search."
Put simply, this was WRONG. The kid deserves to be arrested, NOT electrocuted. To those of you who say "tasing is non-lethal," well, i dare you to do it to yourself. Post a video on YouTube to prove it.
Nice to see that the introduction of street corner cameras is being matched by our ability to watch them.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
A) You don't need "beyond reasonable doubt" in a civil suit. B) There were a couple dozen witnesses on the scene, most of whom appeared angry enough to testify in court. C) You get clear views of several of the officers' faces. D) The officers' voices can probably be identified.
On a side note, it'll be interesting to see how the officers justify their refusal to give their badge numbers (which was reportedly followed up with a threat to the person who asked). It makes it appear that they knew what they did was an excessive use of force, and were trying to hide their identities. That will look EXTREMELY bad to a judge and/or jury.
Screaming 'cause he was caught on the vinegar stroke.
I was approached by a homeless woman while waiting outside my office biulding. She was screaming obsenities at me, saying she was sick of my beating her and she even made a fist and was starting to cocking back pretend like she was going to punch me. All the while I was typing away on my Blackberry avoiding eye contact and saying nothing. Imagine if she would have reached for my wallet or actually punched my, of course I would not hit her back unless she actually tried hitting my repeated times but if caught the end of that, it would look like some dude from that law firm was beating some homeless lady.
Video is very convincing but what may or may not be on video is just as convincing. I can show you a video I have of a man punching a woman in the face and running from her but that video does not show her stealing his wallet and threatening him as he tried to grab it back from her.
I am not trying to discount any police violence but just because you saw a video in the past that showed excessive force or discrimination in no way implies the next one you see is excessive force or discrimination related as well. Another note, just because the potential perp is not the same race as the police officer does not mean discrimination. Sounds convienent to claim though and it does grab headlines. Bottom line, the video is eye opening but no where near inclusive. There are two sides to EVERY story.
Four Officers... one kid come on.. They could have talked this kid into the handcuffs, while he was a jerk he wasnt exactly a threat.
Sorry the police are here to serve and protect, their actions are the actions of thugs who enjoy weilding power. So while I might not be deeply sorry for the kid, I am deeply ashamed of the actions of the law enforcement officials.
Storm
What's up with all the sheeple standing around watching? It's shameful that such a large crowd was too timid to stop the police from doing something so obviously wrong. What exactly would it take to get the crowd to intervene?
police are experimenting with using tasers at present.
Exert from the police press release:
Taser Trial Update #3 - 17 October 2006
New Zealand Police National News Release 9:00am 18 October
2006
Sunday 1 October - at 3.30 am police were called to a
sixteen floor apartment building in central Auckland
where a male, in breach of a protection order, had
assaulted his wife and was threatening to throw her off
the balcony. A police officer encountered the male, with
two other family members in the basement car park with no
means to exit the area because of a security system.
The offender became aggressive and the others obstructive.
The officer became concerned for his safety and laser
painted the aggressor. The officer continued to
communicate with the offender for several minutes before
having to resort to discharging the taser and using OC
spray. Eventually the offender was contained with
assistance from one of the family members present. There
were no injuries.
From the New Zealand Herald newspaper report:
An Auckland policeman attending a domestic dispute in
Auckland accidentally blasted himself and a teenager with
a Taser, before pepper-spraying an innocent woman.
The constable was attending the incident at a central
Auckland home when he shocked himself, the 16-year-old
and then later pepper-sprayed the 21-year-old woman, The
New Zealand Herald reported today.
The constable was reloading his weapon when he
accidentally blasted himself with the Taser's 50,000
volts while trying to stun a man at the centre of the
domestic incident on October 1.
One shot accidentally struck the man's teenage son.
After five attempts to hit the man, the officer eventually
used pepper spray but hit the man's 21-year-old daughter
- an unintended target.
The man eventually gave himself up.
The words "surveillance society" scare a lot of people, but I would actually love to live in a surveillance society that worked the way this event worked out: the surveillance is carried out by individuals, in a public place, voluntarily, and all they're doing is recording something that they saw with their own eyeballs anyway.
Similarly, I would love to see photo red light reimplemented so that if other drivers saw you run a red light, they could slap a button on their dashboards, and the video would be posted on you-tube. Hell, we wouldn't even need a DMV anymore. Insurance companies would just hire people to watch traffic videos, and log patterns of stupid behavior by certain individuals. The insurance companies would then refuse to offer insurance to those people.
I'm a teacher, and over the past 10 years of teaching, I've had the following experiences: (1) a student gets upset and disrupts my class for 10 minutes (10 minutes is a long time); (2) a homophobic student harasses a gay student while I'm out of the room; (3) a student attacks me in the hall, throws me in some bushes, and threatens to kill me. In all three cases, I would have loved to have the whole thing recorded on you-tube, because significant disagreements arose later about what really happened. In incident #2, in fact, a room full of students were unable to identify the harasser, and it turned out that it was more of a two-way thing than the initial witnesses (the gay student's friends) had claimed. A room full of witnesses is nice, but a video is a lot nicer.
The good or bad effects of this kind of technology depend a lot on who uses the technology. It's like guns. Guns in the hands of Nazis stormtroopers: bad. Guns in the hands of individuals: good.
Find free books.
Okay, I don't know exactly what happened or why it happened. Honestly I'm not gonna waste time on that, my question is however, what are the health risks associated with tazer use compared to batons, knives, pepper spray, mace, guns, and good ol'e fashion force.
I have never been shot, stabbed or maced. I have however been beaten with a cylindrical object and pepper sprayed(By accident). So I can give an opinion on those 2. All I know is that my eyes and nose were on fire and I wanted to die at that point. Of course i got an aftershock when I washed my hair in the shower... oh god.....
What makes a tazer safer than the others, what makes it more dangerous. I mean i can guarantee its better to be tazered than to be shot. Honestly i just want to know what yall think/know (Since they are the same thing here).
You mad
There was 60+ students standing around. If you ever see something like this happening, and you don't help, then you are just as bad as the police were in this case.
Does this come as a shock to anyone?
There was a post before on here about the FBI investigating the LAPD for brutality. You would think that would make them calm down a little?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
A UCLA student and a member of the crowd that witnessed this event posted his reaction on a board that I moderate, www.blogwars.com. Forgive the reference, but the tally of the first-handers who witnessed this event points toward the victim being a gigantic jackass, refusing to show his ID and not cooperating with campus police. When I was in college being asked for my student ID was never a protestable offense. In order to get into my dorm, enter the student recreation center, the campus gym, a football or basketball game, etc... we had to pony up our student IDs. If the police have to deal with an angry, shouting person who won't identify themself, show ID, or cooperate... what are they left to do?
I get the distinct feeling there are a few people, namely those in the video, who are able to verify its authenticity. Why, after all the news on this, do you suspect the video?
Oh, and, do you think that NASA really put a man on the moon?
See here and here for some inspiration.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm sick of the racist card being played. I will not sit by and take shit from some arab just because i'm white. I'm not going to be made to feel bad about my race. Fuck them straight up. Everytime that fucking racism card is played it only helps to justify more racism. Without proof of a racial motive the word racism should be left completely off this story. It's just stirring up shit and trying to gain sympathy for the muslim fucks of this country. Fuck that.
The definition of a taser:
Delivers a high-voltage, low-amperage charge that mimics the body's electrical signals, temporarily paralyzing the target from a range of 15-20 feet.
Notice the "temporarily paraliyzing". Im starting to think America doesnt train its police enough, to realise that a taser simply is not used as a means of getting someone to do something. Insted its ment to be used to defend yourself from a target that will cause harm to you, thus paralyzing them for your own safty.There were 5 policemen and one student, i really dont think any of those police were in danger.
So if you say, well why didnt he get up, 'well he couldnt get up because it paraliyzed him'.. Infact, there is a law against using taser for that very reason shown there.
If you say, 'well what if he had a gun, or what if he was selling drugs, then maybe a taser would of been approiate'.. Well what about 'innocent before proven guilty'? They could of checked him for that but they chose to stun him anyways.
And the most rudest reply, 'he deserved what he got'. These people obviously dont understand how powerful a laser is, and i dont blame them cause there mostly dumb americans with no clue about anything. But stunning someone five times to get up is abuse. they could of easily let him walk out, or at worst tackled him, hand cuffed him and escorted him outside.
but then again your right, he did deserved what he got, and that will be a big fat cheque.
In many other nations (I am a USA expat) if the police step out of line like this the community responds to police actions according to Newtons third law of motion they fight back in force. Don't expect the police to effectively police themselves ANYWHERE. There will always be the hard core storm trooper units but for the most part it causes the normal cop to be less confrontational. When thought crimes (drugs, speech, religion, political revenge, library card patrol....) become the focus of the police revolt is the only answer. Sadly these college kids are willing to stand up talk big (upper class WASP's know they will not be beaten/shocked for talking) but not say push down and zip tie the cops.
Using YouTube to disprove a false assumption based on YouTube...
We have all seen multiple videos where a guy who is tazed rolls around for a moment then gets to his feet - especially teenagers who seem to love to taze themselves for YouTube.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Haha this is hilarious. The guy is an idiot. He just kept asking for more. bzzzzt!
Does this have any bearing on the decision to try to subdue him using force?
As a side note, it has also been largely unmentioned that the police used the most mild form of tasering, despite this man's loud screaming and profuse cursing:
Lastly, IANAL so I wanted to ask how the law works here... If a police officer grabs you, and you physically shake him off as this man did, are the police in the wrong for grabbing you in the first place? I remember reading somewhere that if you physically resist an officer, it can open a whole lot of nasty doors... Someone please let me know.
And this surprises you ... why?
I've seen cops and bar bouncers smack around people on various occasions, some of them deserving, some of them probably not, and in each case there were people standing around and watching. I've never seen anyone who wasn't directly connected in some way to the person getting the beating involve themselves unnecessarily.
Most people will happily stand back and watch Bad Things Happening To Other People Who Probably Deserve It Somehow. It's probably humanity's oldest form of entertainment.
To most of the people in that library, the whole thing was just like watching COPS, but in the ultra-ultra high definition sometimes known as Reality(TM).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Look at this from the perpective of the UCPD officers: a person was refusing to produce ID and acting in a way that led the UCPD to be called in. When they got there, they found this kid being irrational and confrontational. He refused to obey their orders, angrily yelled at them to not touch him, and went limp on the ground when they tried to escort him out. The officers at this point had to consider the possibility that he was in some way armed with a concealed weapon, or would go for their guns/tazers if they tried to wrestle with him. They decided that the safest course of action was to hit him with a tazer on drive stun mode to get him to comply. This was a reasonable decision, and after the first shock the kid should gotten up and let the cops lead him out. If he can scream about the Patriot Act and abuse of power he can stand up. The kid was putting on a show and trying to get the crowd riled up; he got what he deserved and I really hope he doesn't cash in with a civil settlement.
Yagman said his firm has handled hundreds of cases similar to Tabatabainejad's
If it can happen to this guy - innocent of any wrongdoing but with a most spectacularly justified distrust of the dimwit powertrippers carrying the weapons - then it can happen to anyone.
All respect to the students and others present who challenged this outrageous abuse of authority, as far as they felt able. I can only hope I'd have similar courage in their place.
you had me at #!
What's up with all the sheeple standing around watching? It's shameful that such a large crowd was too timid to stop the police from doing something so obviously wrong.
From first hand accounts posted above, it would seem very possible the police were not in fact doing anything wrong and the guy they were tazering was acting in a way to get himself tazered. It sure seemed that way to me midway in the video.
The simplist answer would then be true - the bystanders did nothing because nothing needed doing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
a few points:
a) The student chose to seat himself upon the floor when the officers were trying to escort him out (per his own lawyer's account to an LA Times reporter). Near the beginning of the video you can hear the student asking the officer to take his hand off his shoulder, then the officers asking him please stand up. All before the student starts screaming (which may have been when he was tasered).
b) He was defying a standing policy of requesting proof of ID in the campus library after 11PM. It is undoubtedly in place to prevent late-night attacks, muggings, and rapes. He chose to not leave after being asked for ID multiple times and then asked to leave if he could not show ID. The reasons for this policy are very real, ignoring it could be be dangerous for students in the building late at night. Why protest enforcement of such a policy, on private grounds?
c) From the point where he voluntarily hits the ground, the police are mostly just asking him to get up. This is because they were still ina libarary, with a man who refused to show ID and refused to leave, for a period of time long enough for campus staff to hound him repeatedly before calling campus security, who then called police.
It's hard for me to speculate about whether that was wrong or out of the ordinary, since the one time I got caught in the computer lab without my pass, I just left and came back with it later. But I think he was given plenty of chances and was mostly just spoiling for an argument and bit off more than he could chew.
I don't like to make decisions on such videos without seeing the whole incident from beginning to end, but since more or less the beginning of time, if authority figures (police or otherwise) are standing over you ordering you to do something, and you lay on the floor yelling that you won't leave and other assorted obscenities and slights on their position or authority, well, that is so blindingly stupid that you are lucky if tased is all you get.
Surely everyone has seen an episode of Bad Boys and what happens when you resist arrest. Whether the authorities should have tased the guy 5 times (or more) is questionable, but the guy that got tased was asking for more of the same by refusing to cooperate with the authorities. These are the same authorities, by the way, that he and other disapproving students will count on any other time to protect them from nasty people. Rules are rules, and if you glaringly flout them, bad things happen sometimes. I think the guy should be grateful that he wasn't drug down stairs feet first, or given the King treatment.
Yes, they could have carried him out, but then again, his mouth was running too much to get any kind of compassion from the cops... that is life most times. Ever seen anyone get unruly in a bar? When that happens, bouncers are about as gentle as these cops were... or can be.
Arguing with cops or resisting arrest is worse for your health than smoking or eating sugar soaked breakfast cereal, let that be a lesson to those that think that 'believing you are right means you will always win'.
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Yes. I am afraid this did happen on my campus. Someone who had a videocamera with them in the computer lab captured the video. The police department is the campus UCLA Police Department (not the LAPD).
Some background:
All students are required to present ID at night in the libraries. Unlike Berkeley we don't require a Student ID to get into the library during the day. In response to this incident this policy probably will change.
At night, random checks occur where students are asked to show their Student ID. This is a safety mesure, as on occasion we get people who are not UCLA students in our library late at night. Everyone is asked to show ID.
The student in the video had his ID, but decided not to show it to the CSO (community service officer -- a pseudo police officer) who was checking identification that night. I believe as a result he was asked to leave the library. When he didn't comply with this request, the CSO contacted the UCPD (actual police officers) for assistance in removing the student.
The video shown starts after the UCPD arrived on the scene and started to remove the student (several minutes after he was initially asked to leave the building).
Of course if any of this is wrong, please correct me.
We have been having protests, and other such distractions from programming on campus as a result of this incident. See http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=39025 for details of one of the protests.
I don't think it would look bad to a judge at all. These officers were in the middle of an altercation. The proper thing would be for them to give their badge numbers once the culprit is handcuffed in a squad car. Once people are screaming at officers they are conceivably a threat. As much as I dislike legitimate police brutality, I think police officers damn well need to have the right to act firstmost in order to protect themselves, especially when some stupid punk kid is refusing to listen to them.
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
He was asked nicely to leave several times
He didn't comply
He got a taste of taser because of this and because the partialy paralyzed person is easier to arrest.
After electrocution your muscle doesn't work for some time (if you want to test -- tput your finger into electrical socket >:D ). IMHO police intentionaly didn't use the full power output as they didn't want to carry him, they wantet him to on on his own foot. But that idiot decided to make a show.
Somehow US became a country where abuse of rights with intention to go to court has became common sense. This can be clear example: asshole was take by force. Now he's complayinig about police brutality and racial opression.
And they are NOT being treated as such by police. They are "less-lethal," not non-letal.
Police at like they are the "one-all" solution to solving crime, the perp will stop.
sorry, but this is very dangerous and needs to be corrected. this should never have happened to this kid. Cops are getting lazy and lives are being lost.
"He definitely taunted the UCPD into behaving the way they did with him."
O RLY?
Was Jeffrey Miller taunting Ohio National Guardsman into shooting him in the mouth?
Excessive force seems to be a popular thing with police in the United States. If this person was causing a problem, how hard would it have been to cuff this person? Have you ever been tased? Have you been tased twice? Have you been tased 5 fucking times in 5 minutes? The only thing worse is how no one seemed to care beyond the person smart enough to record it. I'd think you'd lose bowel control by the 5th time, but I've never been tasered, so I can't say.
I know what pepper spray feels like (one of the many non-lethal crown control devices), and it's not pleasant. Do you? Would you be so quick to spray someone who was merely not co-operating, or would you try to reserve that for people who posed a threat? Unless this guy was trying to fight the cops, I don't see how this was justified. Acting like a child doesn't mean you should use this level of force.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The problem with that video is that we enter midway through the true story, where he is down and been tazered once already. But why are there four cops around? What exactly was he doing that made them ask him to leave in the first place? It would seem that in order to be asked to leave from a library you would have to have done more than be speaking loudly or bring in a sandwitch.
That combined with how he was screaming about the "patriot act" made me more than a little suspicious that the victim went in with the goal of mixing it up with some law enforcement people, angry at The Man to start.
That video raises more questions than it answers, about both sides of the conflict. Next time, if anyone else is in the same situation can't you stand on a chair please!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A civilian using a taser on someone in an argument has nothing to do with a cop using a taser to deal with people resisting arrest, which this case may be (I can't say one way or another with this limited footage). If I was arguing with a cop because he cut in front of me in line, and he tasered me, yes that's aggravated assault. If he's arresting me for DWI and I'm resisting arrest, I'd much prefer that he tasers me than whip out a baton, or even worse, his pistol. Tazers were developed so that cops wouldn't have to resort to violence - in extreme cases people do die, but in most cases, people are regain strength quickly.
I dunno. Maybe arrest him, bring him to the station, charge him with disorderly conduct, and tell him that if he causes trouble like that again, he's gonna spend a few days in jail? I know, it's a little bit "out there," but I really think this strategy could work.
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
I'm uneasy with the idea that exposure on a (commercial) website decides how your case gets handled. Not equal like justice is supposed to be, right? (Same just happened here in Finland. YT video prioritized the investigation by creating media pressure. Somebody's similar case got pushed back. Mob justice, I'd say.)
Every first hand report I've read said the kid deserved what he got. Perhaps you should do a little research before "applauding" those whose actions you know nothing about.
Man ... when I was in college the only thing I had to show my ID for was dinner and checking out books from the library. Wasn't even that long ago (graduated 1992). Maybe I'll sound like a foil hatter, but it seems we're training kids that they need an ID to go anywhere on campus so that in the future, they aren't too concerned when the checkpoints go up and they have show ID everytime they cross a county line.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I made the point that the cops should have just grabbed this dude. One cop, each handling an appendage, could carry him outside without incident. If bar security can do it, so can the black and blue. Lemme tel you something. I'm an iconoclast. I push boundaries by accident. But I have never been tazed by the police. This jackass could have prevented this EASILY.
Watch the video again. As they are going out the door telling him to stand up the officer tasers him. He is in handcuffs/restraints. It is not justified. Rehearsed rants or no rehearsed rants, tasering him when he is already restrained is excessive force.
Since this is very old ill just say what I said before about this. IMO this guy was just putting on a show... Trying to be anti-establishment and put on a show for everyone else. If they didn't taser him they would have had to carry him out kicking and screaming. Also tasers dont have any lasting effects... once the current stops the pain stops and your muscles relax. The mayor of our city adn the council got tasered on TV for demonstrations when they gave out the tasers to the police force here and they all laughed about it after they fell down and got back up. And someone mentioned on another board I read that the police already said they This guy was screaming like a lunatic and I truely feel like he got what he deserved. I read most of the replies and slashdot members seem to take almost the exact opposite stance that the other message board I read had. The other board all seemed to think this guy deserved it and the police did nothing wrong (other message board is a younger audience 17-20). But from all the replies here being the same I think this discussion is suffering from groupthink. This is hardly police brutality. Was the guy hurt at all? No.
As college tuition rises, the people in charge feel a responsibility to provide their students (and their parents in newsletter format) with services worthy of yearly tuition hikes. It has nothing to do with breaking people down and forcing them to toe the line, it's just like carrying a digital receipt of the knowledge you're borrowing and returning.
Name call him all you want, it's still fucking true. Go ahead, call me a karma whore, fellow AC!
That is foil-hattish. We were asked for our ID's in order to get into our dorms after a certain time and night, since visitors weren't allowed unless being registered. That's not about surveillance, it's so they know who's in the building in case of a fire, alien attack, etc.
We were asked for our student ID's for sporting events so we could get our student discount for the tickets. Same thing for shows or conferences. They need some way of making sure you're a student, and an ID is the obvious method. Keep in mind they don't record your ID for these things, but I wouldn't mind if they did. What nefarious scheme could they be implementing by knowing I go to the football game?
I'd be more worried about your example of checking out books, where they could track your reading habits. The other things aren't a big deal in comparison.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
If he did show his ID card and the police still fired the taser, then he has a case against the police. However, in this case, he refused to show a card.
In my opinion, the police acted properly. As a former university student, I do not want strangers or uncooperative weirdos floating around campus.
As a police officer, I have two things to say about this:
1) This kid sounds like an ass and I'm certain that there will be more than enough "He got what he deserved posts." I might even agree in the moral sense, but not in the ethical or legal sense, because....
2) This cop should never work in law enforcement again. This is inappropriate use of force by any professional standard. One post is not nearly enough to recount the things he did incorrectly, but I'll hit the high points;
General rules for any controlled encounter (one where you aren't in danger from the get go) include finding out what the issue is, telling the subject what he/she needs to do, and explaining what will happen if they do not. There is almost never a need to place your hands on anyone for any reason until you are ready to take them into custody unless you are suddenly attacked. This "officer" is grossly incompetent. Understand we deal with aggressive people that posture by yelling and swearing at us all the time - this should not disrupt the officer on bit. Keep. Your. Cool. So, screaming/swearing or not, this encounter should have been over with three sentences from the officer.
A) "Sir, per university rules and regs, I need you to show me your valid student ID or leave the library."
B) "I need to to show me your valid student ID or leave the library right now, or I'll have to take you into custody for trespassing and disturbing the peace."
C) "Sir, I am placing you under arrest." Then Mirandize him and be done with it. If he does anything but exactly what you tell him ("Sir, place your hands behind your back.") then....
Now and only now, if he/she resists (NOT if he simply fails to cooperate i.e. passive resistence), you may use force sufficient to subdue him to the point of having him cease to be a danger to the officer or bystanders. That's pretty simple stuff, folks. Basically, never be the first to use force, but when you do - do it quickly and overwhelmingly then STOP when he's restrained. You are a trained professional who owns the situation and NOT a street brawler.
From what I can tell, he never told the subject he was under arrest until after at least five taserings, some of which occurred while he was in cuffs and all but the first while he was on the ground unable to stand under his own power. This "officer" grabbed the guy's arm while he was leaving. Bad move, even if it seems like a little thing. Physical contact constitutes use of force, and any trained officer knows this is a big line to cross. I don't care if he didn't leave immediately - in that case place him calmly in custody early on and be done with it, no argument needed. You're the cop; you NEVER need to be in an argument. You aren't asking him what he wants to do, you're telling him. Never ever let a subject think they are in control. Arguing tells the subject they have some power.
What he did is inexcusable. If this power-tripping bully didn't have a badge what would you think of somebody tasering a defenseless person on the ground FIVE TIMES some while he was handcuffed and yelling at him to "get up." A badge doesn't free you from responsibility, it adds to to it exponentially.
This sadistic SOB gives all true professional LEOs a bad name and is part of the reason so many distrust cops. I've had training on most of the common less-than-lethal systems (lawyers don't let us call them non-lethal) including tasers, stun guns, pepper spray, rubber bullets and even conducted some training on the same. Unless this guy was issued a system with no training, he knows damn well the individual won't be getting up immediately after one tasing, let alone five. Frankly, I hope this guy answers for assault charges.
To summarize, to non-cops this might appear to be a case of overreacting during a tense moment with a belligerent person. To most professionals, this is about as vanilla an arrest as there is where the cop did basically everything wrong. So wrong, in fact, I intend to use these videos as a training aid.
This was so absurd that I actually laughed when the guy threatened to to taser the bystander who asked for his name and badge number. It's almost like he was trying to get fired and sued.
If the student in question could offer one reason why he disobeyed the officers' request,... uh, wait. He can't. Sorry.
First of all, this was UCPD, not LAPD.
UCPD officers were not the ones that carded him, so profiling is not the issue. The student was originally carded by a Community Service Officer (CSO), basically a student security guard working in the library. The UCPD was called when the student refused to leave.
While the bystanders were not physically doing anything to stop the officers, they were yelling in protest and requesting the officers' ID numbers. The officers threatened to tase the students who were asking for badge numbers. (...And what do you expect? these are college students here. They hardly ever actually do anything; they just protest and make a lot of noise.)
I am a current UCLA student, and honestly I don't see why this story is so huge, especially when the officers in question will probably be punished appropriately. Again, this is UCPD, not LAPD, and so does not really affect anyone outside of campus. I think YouTube was probably the main reason this story is as big as it is.
Regardless, it is definitely abuse on the part of the officers. Enough people die from being tased just twice... five times is completely unnecessary. if they had used the taser only once, no one would have had an issue with it, especially considering how much of a jackass the student was being (judging from the video). Tasing an already-incapacitated suspect is unacceptable, though.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
I read a post above that claimed the student involved loved to make trouble. And what I saw from the video would lead me to believe that is likely true. However it shows just how primitive the police force at the scene was. They were led into "abusing" the student and took it hook line and sinker. You could classify the person as mentally ill by definition he obviously was making bad choices that would only further his situation. Yet the tough pigs thought force would fix the problem. I blame both sides, a disruptive irrational person got the best of the police force. There was no need to injure him; a professional team would have kept him subdued and safe from escalating the situation and waited for time to let him calm down until he could quietly leave the area. Instead they strutted their big balls and made the situation worse. If they don't have training in this then I really do wonder if the next time I'm upset and the cops show up I'll take a few slugs for behaving badly. What makes me blame the police is their unprofessional handling of the situation. They're supposed to be "peace officers" but obviously they chose to turn this into an aggressive situation in which the hammer won. From the moment they arrived, many of them, they had physical superiority, there was no weapon, there was a person that wouldn't stand up. God forbid they seek other options instead of harming the individual to cement their power over them.
For those that don't know, this is very far from unordinary. I've hung with "bad" people and the police act like this all the time. They have the gun, they have the badge, in court they are a credible witness. Go up against them and you WILL LOSE without proof. Even with proof you are unlikely to win unless they kick the shit out of you while you stay absolutely motionless, even then you better hope your arm didn't move more than 2 inches cuz if it did you were attempting to violently assault an officer. I am exxagerating a bit but if you think this is uncharacterstic of police behavior you are ignorant (meaning that you just don't know).
Officers obviously need more training on how to handle a non dangerous situation. This comes up every time Joe Blow Black man with a rake is capped. They need to understand that having a gun, having control, does not mean using it to expedite the situation. If they have to spend 2 hours trying to calm the man down so be it. That's what they are payed to do, to keep everyone safe. Force should only be applied when NECCESSARY, and that is the downfall of this whole situation.
* Whites are a minority in 4 states, Hawaii, New Mexico, California and Texas but are not given minority status in those states.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I like Slashdot sometime because the news that is so old I've already forgotten about it is brought back up the next week. It's like "week in review!"
or else!
The cops don't carry guns. A number of cops carry tasers, introduced this year, but have to attend a training course on how to use them, protocol, etc. During this course, some of the cops get shot with the taser so everyone can see what's involved. If they use the tasers (even draw them from their holsters), they have to fill out shitloads of paperwork. Of the times that the tasers have been drawn, in most situations the suspect has submitted and has not had to be shot.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What we need now is to have clothes with a conductive mesh woven into the cloth!
It doesn't even need to be particularly fine mesh, a couple of inches would probably be enough to draw the current away from the wearer.
Watch the cops eyes widen in disbelief as repeated applications of the 50,000 volts does *nothing* hah!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I have max karma. It's just true. I said the same thing back when the fading star was b4 and Kuroshin was trying to be the up and comer. Now Kuroshin is pretty much forgotten and digg wants the good readers. For whatever reason, the most desireable posters (and lets be fair: the least desireable too) stay with slashdot.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
A man is sitting in an airport, refusing to produce ID and refusing to leave the building. Upon refusal of leaving the building or even getting up, he is tased. After being tased he not only still refuses to leave but starts ranting about the TSA being brutal or corrupt with a scripted-sounding rant. The man is then tased again more than once after each time he refuses to leave the building....ect ect ect. If this happened in an airport I have a feeling people would be singing a different tune rather than calling out TSA brutality. This guys rants just sounded WAY too scripted to me...it was planned.
"I will not sit by..." No, but you'll hide in your little AC hole which is even more pathetic!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How is that any different? What if the police had demanded to search him right there, or risk being tasered, and he had simply stayed on the floor? You're telling me that going limp on the floor or not moving is considered "suspicious?" They can tase me if, for some reason, I can't move or it hurts to move? Man, dead people must be TERRIBLE for the police. They scream at them to get up, and you tase them, and they STILL don't get up.
Not providing an ID when asked by authority sounds like he didn't provide ANY ID. He just didn't have his campus ID. Why didn't they ask him for a driver's license or some other form of identification? If he was leaving anyway, as the article said he was, why did they need to grab his arm at all?
The police are not supposed to be the ones inititalizing a physical confrontation. It's different if the criminal does, or shows intent to (having a weapon). Remember, these people are serving YOU (and everyone around you), you're not serving THEM.
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
sorry, doesnt matter what the fuck the student "SAID", officers should be trained to take care of the situation in a mature and restrained way, which would have been to restrain him physically. If he resisted THEN they could have tazer'd him 1x, and then carried him out. THAT IS THE PROPER WAY TO USE A TAZER, TO INCAPACITATE A VIOLENT OFFENDER.
tazers, while markets as "incapacitating" really are often lethal(180 lethal cases so far) and do cause many long term health issues. They were created as torture devices for a reason. Cops have no right to use them without laws and regulations governing their use, OF WHICH THERE ARE NONE PRESENTLY.
Those cops should be hunted down and tazered within an inch of their lives. Lets hope the next time we hear about it, they have been fired and brought up on charges of brutality and battery. Of course we know the courts will get them off, as they always do, but at least it will bring the issue to nationwide attention.
After carefully viewing the video several times, I just get this nagging feeling that the student tries to manufacture this outcome. To make a statement? Fishing for a lawsuit?
Cops are pretty easy to bait; what better place to do it?
http://www.ucpd.ucla.edu/ucpd/contact.html
kross@ucpd.ucla.edu
adamsj@ucpd.ucla.edu
alvarezk@ucpd.ucla.edu
heleng@ucpd.ucla.edu
Umm...be a professional? Basically do all the things this cop didn't do: tell him he's under arrest, get him into cuffs, and get him off the property (with help to carry him if needed.), and not assault him with no provocation as he's doing what you asked him to do in first place, i.e. leave the facility. That's simple stuff. Let him yell and curse. So what? Until he gets violent or resists arrest why start violence? This guy didn't resist arrest, because the officer never put him under arrest until after the ordeal.
You really think because somebody yelled at him the cop should lose his cool and start beating up the guy? Get a grip.
See the cop's post below for how this should have been handled, and is by anyone with half a brain.
Is the UCLA library different from other UC libraries? I know for a fact that non-students are allowed in other UC libraries. If I were in a library and cops demanded my ID for no reason, I would get pretty angry, too. I don't know whether I would have reacted the same way or not.
I saw the video on TV right after this incident went down. I'm not sure which side I come down on, however.
:)
As has been mentioned before, cops are cops, and renta-cops are not. In any case, if the check was indeed random, Mr. Tabatabainejad stuck his neck in the noose the instant he refused to furnish his I.D. He then attempted to saunter away, perhaps regretting his initial defiance after all. I don't see any reason this should have gone as far as it did, with him certainly foregoing any chance of claiming to be a victim. (Websters' - victim: a person subjected to circumstances beyond their control).
Once he started resisting, it was just a matter of time before it turned into a confrontation...and this is where renta-cops get all warm and excited, wetting their panties like a little school girl who just had her first kiss. They get to show AUTHORITY!! (it was kind of funny, tho, seeing him do back-flips on command & all) - "How many times they say you can prod a perp before that thing runs down, Harv? Zap him once in the testicles just for me, please?"
All I can say is that Tabatabainejad should be thankful this happened today, with only a Taser being shoved up his ass, and not twenty years ago, with a Smith-Wesson... I got $10,000.00 for being a target, one time - can't wait to see how much Mr. T. thinks he should be paid for being forced to act like a pop-up doll. I hope he gets zip, by the way
Walking without a pedestrian license...
Now, you don't really want the terrorists or Mexicans taking away our freedoms, do you? Or as certain German freedom fighters used to say: Papiere bitte
Next time put a .45 between the eyes at the first hint of resistance and end this quick before there is a camera on scene
Haven't heard anybody mention it yet, but the kid was handcuffed when they were shocking him. That, according to multiple claim-to-know people, is against pretty much every district's / precinct's rules.
Also, the guy was in the process of leaving when the officer(s?) grabbed his arm, that's why he shouts out "let go of me." Now I agree that the guy probably shouldn't have been such an asshole when he was asked to leave the first time, which provoked the staff to call the "cops," but he definitely didn't deserve any of this.
Also, "this is your patriot act!" --> wtf???
First, we're not catching anything before the video, which firsthand accounts make it seem like the guy should be tasered.
Based on what.
Second, they repeatedly warned him before tasing him each time.
Irrelevant. They had no business tasering a handcuffed suspect for being uncooperative.
Third, according to firsthand accounts and the story, he was provoking the crowd.
Watch the video. He wasn't doing anything more than screaming "here's your Patriot Act, here's your fucking abuse of power."
Sure, it looks like the cops overreacted, but not to the extent that you're saying.
Yes, they did, and they belong in jail for assault.
Or is anyone else having difficulty finding Tasers in the PATRIOT Act?
The police went too far here, no excuses.
We can't be sure what was said or what happened before the video started, but it seems like he was leaving and then was stopped by the police. He has the right to sit down on the floor. Sure, he had been asked to leave and if he didn't he would be arrested. Why they prevented him from actually leaving is another issue. But he was stopped and he decided to get down. At this point you know you are going to be arrested, but there is no reason why they needed to tase him. Any two cops could have dragged his handcuffed ass out of there with a minmum of disruption to the library. Once they decided to break out the taser that's when things got ugly.
They say cops need to maintain control of the situation, but the actually generated the angry crowd because of their actions.
The angry crowd was generated from their poor judgement, and they continued to abuse their power as a result of the threat they had created.
This is ridiculous, and I can't believe that the crowd did not react in a physical manner to stop what was happening. Another place, another time, there would have been riots. People should not stand idle and allow this to happen.
Maybe "kids" should stop raping others in the library at night.
or so they claim. Its funny these accounts are turning up now. Not a few days ago. A few days ago when the campus paper was first writing about this, they couldn't find anyone who remotely backed up the police's story and the video doesn't support it either. He's done nothing in that video to indicate he's a threat and justify their behaviour. End of story. He could be the biggest asshole on the planet, but if he's not being physically threatening it doesn't justify that response.
I know the University of Sydney, where I studied, usually has tons of people on campus and at the library who are not students or staff of the uni. After all it's got a huge library that is useful to more than just students. Sounds like it's a bit harder to get into a decent library over in the land of the free. Why?
Software patents delenda est.
Clearly the crowd was not a threat and they knew that. Most cops are just scared pussies with small dicks. That's why they use excessive force in the first place.
Oddly enough R. King had the shit beat out of him because he wouldn't stay down.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Whether it is justified or not my question is why does this man keep yelling about the patriot act? The patriot act does not give University Police the power to taser someone.
Maybe they didn't properly identify themselves. Criminals dress as cops all the time to take advantage of someone. Obviously they didn't want to give their badge numbers, so they probably did not properly identify themselves. Most pigs don't, and they get real pissed when you question anything about them. That's because they have small dicks acording to the latest CNN-USA Today Gallup Poll.
Wow, you're a really big man for saying that. Clearly he was a pussy, confronting a bunch of police.
Attention whoring? Probably, and that should get you kicked out of the library, and a date with a judge and a nice fat fine, but it should NOT get you repeatedly electrocuted. I don't know about tazers, but I have felt an electric fence that corralled a bull. It was hell on earth.
Maybe this guy doesn't realize that the fastest way to get hit with a taser in this country is to be any-color-but-white and start mouthing off to a cop and refusing his lawful orders?
...and that also brings me to why they continued to insist he stand up rather than calling for a stretcher he could be strapped onto and moved safely on... If the cops carry him out, or the EMTs wheel him out on a stretch, his lawsuit is that much stronger. "Your honor, how could the force have not been excessive? Every attempt at compliance was met with more force and my client was unable to leave the building under his own power."
I would argue the first two tasers are both justified. A police-officer places himself at risk when he attempts to carry a handcuffed (and leg-manacled) limp adult down a flight of stairs. He could easily injure one or more officers if he chose to resume fighting while they were carrying him. Many decisions about what risks to take and what threat warrants a violent response are ultimately up to the police officer's discretion in the moment. I probably would have insisted he get up too--fuck this guy and his attitude... If you want to be in the library after hours, be prepared to show some ID! If I was a policeman responding to this call, my concern would be the guy was looking for the opportunity to sue the University, the CHP, or me (or all three.)
Where I take exception is the third-hit and forward. He was disoriented and pissed after the first-two, but it appeared he was starting to get up when they hit him with the third-charge. After watching the angles available online, this seems to be when the police go from appropriate, measured force for their own safety and into the realm of "attitude adjustment." This was when the litany of "motherfuckers" and "cocksuckers" started coming out, and the guy was essentially incoherent for the remaining time of the video. From here on out, it is unreasonable. The thid-shock appeared to have been applied in frustration, and not because of non-compliance--indeed the subject appears to begin to comply by starting to stand-up when he's hit with the third charge.
So to all of you who say "He had it all coming," you're wrong. And to all of you who said "HE had none of it coming... you're wrong too. There, that should piss-off just about everybody...
Who did what now?
If one were to follow your logic the police would continue to ask someone to please be nice long after they initially refuse. OH please, good sir. Please behave yourself. I realize that you are not threatening others physically, so I will not stray from my initial request, which if I may recap, is please curtail your brutishly uncivilized behavior. Oh please listen to me, please? I will continue to ask you to respond to my commands, but if you refuse while still being non-physically threatening, I really must continue to use words forever. Yes, I'm an asshole. I'm sorry. When do requests end and orders begin? Seems like these officers were clear about what they wanted the unidentified individual to do. How long should they shoot the shit before intervening?
Again and again, the police apologists come out in droves saying "Oh, but you don't know how HARD it is being a cop!" and "The guy was definitely asking for it!" I'm just going to say what I said last time this came up (original post: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192848&cid =15830849) Full text:
The perfect reply to this argument (which comes up every time someone mentions that most cops are assholes) is this: a McDonald's employee has more accountability than a cop does. As a 16 year old burger-flipper, if a customer acts like a complete asshole--even going so far as to yelling and cussing you out--you are NOT allowed to verbally abuse the customer in return in any way, shape or form. At most you can ask him/her to leave the building, that's it.
Years ago, I worked at McDonald's for four months and a very good friend of mine was punched in the face. Through a plate glass window. A woman tried to order at the pickup window, was told she needed to drive around again, so she punched through the drive-through window, hitting my friend in the face. If she (my friend) had hit her back, there's not a doubt in my mind that she would have lost her job. Instead, she walked away calmly and called her supervisor and the police.
Now, I'm not implying that the police shouldn't use force when necessary. I'm also not denying that they're human too, that it's a nasty, dirty job and I'm sure it's really rough on them. But you know what? Working at McDonald's is in many was rougher (if you doubt this, I could tell you some more horror stories... absolutely the worst 4 months of my life, period.), and yet their workers are held to a much higher standard than the police. Why is that? Why do so many of us make allowances for the police to exercise HUGE leaps of personal discretion, to bend the law whenever it suits them? It's a tough job, but they chose it and we shouldn't let them bend the rules (or ignore them) whenever they feel like it. I saw a TON of asshole customers at McDonalds, yet I didn't say a foul word to any of them. I didn't spit in their food either (no one did--they would've been fired on the spot.) I did my job as professionally as I could, regardless of how shitty I was treated.
And I was a fucking fry cook!
Please please please please PLEASE tell me we can hold our police officers up to the same standards as our burger flippers.
Police Taser Anti-War Protesters in Pittsburgh She looked pretty harmless lying on the ground to me. Direct link to video. Jump to 6:42 or 7:02 - 7:13!
More video and coverage of Pittsburgh Taser-ing of protesters.
Coverage of protests against taser deaths in Ohio and California.
Third Taser Death in a Month in Florida.
All coverage of tasers by Democracy Now.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Cops don't get tazers to use them on people who are uncooperative. Their asses belong in jail for assault.
I agree with you that the guy was most likely being a jackass, and should have been forcefully removed by the premises. I was just pointing out, as you have, that there are far more civilized ways to go about it.
A lot of people are making the point that, "He was just begging for an ass kicking." Quite possibly true. However, it is not law enforcement's role to provide him one. The only, and I mean _ONLY_ time law enforcement is justified in physically attacking (as opposed to restraining) someone is when they pose a danger to themselves or those around them. Then they are to use the minimum amount of force necessary to subdue and restrain the person. Tasers are not tools of expediency.
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
Couple things need to be addressed:
....with the TASER it's a million times dummied-down in that the only thing happening to you is that your muscles are getting a mini-super-workout.
We don't know the whole story and there is no way for us to accurately judge or justify (or NOT justify) the actions of either side based upon what we have viewed in this video.
Many of you have mentioned that it takes a couple minutes, and in one instance "15 minutes" to recover from being shocked by the TASER - these are miss-leading and incorrect statements. As part of a thesis I wrote in college - I personally was shocked by the X26 TASER (the same device that was used on the young man in this video).
During my research, I personally received two consecutive shots from the X26 at a range of 10 feet away...When the device was deployed, two straight fish-hooks punctured my shirt, outer layer of my skin and then penetrated about one-eighth of an inch into my muscle tissue. This sounds horrific but it was almost a surreal feeling.
Each experience lasted for five seconds and what I felt at the time was NOT likened to pain; instead, it is best described as a complete loss of control...and once again "surreal".
A common miss-conception is that the TASER jolts at 50,000 volts - this is incorrect...50,000 volts is actually the "energy reserve" that the TASER has in store. In reality, the device sends a "low-level" current which is slightly higher than the same electrical current that our brain sends a muscle when our brain wants it to contract the muscle.
This current passes through your muscle tissue at an intensely fast interval (causing nine muscle contractions per second) and in doing so is over-riding the nervous system which is trying to compensate and bring these contractions under control - At this point all your energy is diverted into muscle compensation...So, it's not a matter of all your muscles in your body contracting...instead, it's an issue of where none of your muscles are responding because your brain is not sending messages to them.
What is happening is occurring near the surface of the skin and ONLY between the points of the two darts. What the person experiences is muscle contraction beyond what is physiologically possible for the human body to perform on its own.
This is the part that makes people scream out because they go limp and can't respond. Imagine this, you do nine push-ups in one second...well, you know how crappy we feel when we do nine push-ups in thirty seconds...so just expedite that crappy feeling in a split second. When it's over, you're still able to get up, walk around, smile and say "hi" to your buddies
In my case, when the TASER was shut off - I recovered instantly and was able to stand up and walk around with no pain whatsoever. In fact, I felt like I just got down with a massage.
It's important to remember that the TASER is an energy weapon...NOT, a stun gun.
Energy Weapons use multiple on/off and low-level electrical currents in order to stimulate muscle contraction. A stun-gun sends a solid arc current through muscle tissue which causes an electrical shock which can burn and kill muscle tissue.
Tasers are not tools of expediency. That's a really great point.
Police brutality: See website on Rodney King! This is merely another case in the millions recorded incidents. YouTube is for trolls to make old stories new again!
Lemme tel you something. I'm an iconoclast. I push boundaries by accident.
An iconoclast pushes boundaries, but not by accident.
But I have never been tazed by the police. This jackass could have prevented this EASILY.
Yes, and if the cops had shot him, you could make the same bullshit statement. You are missing the point....but then, you don't even know what you are.
Most cops have small dicks. I should know. I've slept with 144 of them. Compare this to nerds who have average to large size dicks. Their is a direct correlation between general ethical behavior and dick size. Larger dicks lead to more ethical behavior. Smaller dicks lead to less ethical behavior. The dick size is one of many determining factors when a young man decides to become a cop. What you end up with, by a vast majority, are a bunch of cops walking around with small dicks and inferiority complexes. This combination immediately leads to violence, abuse of power, corruption, and homosexuality. Just observer the average cop's nose and/or hand size for qualitative evidence of these claims.
That's assuming all tazers have equal strength. Police-grade tazers, I'm sure, are on the upper end of the spectrum.
And also adjustable - supposedly these the campos used were set on the lowest power level - much like you'd presume was the case in the video I posted.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Has anyone got one of Michael Richards being Tasered 5 times on stage? He sure as heck earned it...
you had me at #!
Did you see the video? The suspect was incapacitated on the floor, and the cops were mostly just standing around (except when they were tazing the suspect again). There was plenty of reasonable opportunity for one of the officers to give the students his badge number.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When the police tell you to jump, you say, "how high"?
Well, yeah, sorta. When they tell you to leave, you say "OK! See you guys later." You don't fall to the ground screaming. What were they supposed to do, give up and go home? Should the police only arrest the cooperative? Now, if they really are running around telling people to jump and tasing those that don't, when they come to you, you jump and then make your way to the command station and bitch to their superior. Having a video of the whole thing won't hurt as we see here (give that to the local news station). What if a cop wants to see if you have explosives under your feet and tell you to jump. Do you tell him to fuck off?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Seconded. In fact, that's quite possibly the best point brought up the whole discussion.
This whole video is a fucking scary affair. Last i checked, a taser was used to incapacitate a hostile suspect. This guy, while mouthy, doesn't look like he made any hostile actions at all. We've learned from shows like Jackass that if you taser somebody, they're staying down for a while.
For me, the really worrying part of this video is at the end, with the officer warning people to "Stand back or you'll get tased". If you give an idiot a non-lethal weapon, then he's probably not going to think twice about using it. And therein lies the problem. While police can get away with excessive non-lethal force, it's going to keep happening. Thankfully, with the advent of cellphone cameras, they might not be able to do it for much longer.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
After the Nobel prize example: "Pulling the wing off a bird makes it deaf. Fly little bird fly!!!"
The 2006 edition feature a breakthrough example: "Tazing a terrorist^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H student from persian origins makes it deaf. STAND UP!!! STAND UP!!!"
Home of Faramir Paint Shop Pro scripts
It sounds like this guy got a highly effective lesson in the fact that Americans are not prone to martyrdom.
In all of these taser threads, I see a lot of people assuming they're not safe, but I have yet to see one single supported claim that they are inherently unsafe. I can imagine if a person has a pacemaker it's unsafe, but at this point I'm not seeing any evidence it's unsafe.
That said, I can't imagine why 5 police officers were unable to move a handcuffed victim safely to a squad car. And then for them to use a disabling device as a means of getting the guy to move is something I'm sure was at least wrong on their part. Maybe not criminal, but definitely poor tool selection at the least.
The video does demonstrate audibly that there were at least a handful of vocal students yelling at the police to stop using the taser after the first one. The impression I got was that it was an unpleasant and somewhat inhumane sight to see.
At this point I just want to hear the police justification for this painful and botched attempt to remove the guy. I can't imagine how it will go well because the guy appears to offer no physical threat or significant deterrant to simply picking him up and hauling him away.
Going limp and forcing the police to carry you is resisting arrest. While I would never say that excuses tasering a suspect 5 times, they did not do it just because he was yelling and being a jerk.
That's because they tasered him so much he can't think.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
A finnish guy filmed two mall guards beating up a man and posted in on YouTube. The press got a whiff of it and now one of them was suspended, the other one fired and there's an ongoing criminal investigation. Yay for YouTube. A link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvsUA-qEzy0
The event may follow their carriers but it does not end it, nor does it necessarily stop repeat behavior.
Those cops may lose their jobs (as they should) but will end up with nice jobs offered by employers who are racist or approve of excessive force...
I already know a guy who only sided with the cops because the student was not a white Christian.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
With all those highly educated leaders of tomorrow (a ton of other students) at UCLA
How come nobody spoke up or came to his defence?
These college kids talk the talk but when the time comes, they do nothing. I heard someone asking the cops for their info, that's good, but ultimately the crowd's response was "yes sir" I'll shut up and watch you assault my fellow student. We're in our 20s but are too weak or spineless to stand up to rent-a-copy authority.
The video was up within hours of the actual incident. I'm a student at UCLA and based on the little information that has been spread on the news and the hearsay here, I think there is so little known for sure that the whole thing may have been blown out of proportion. Who can tell what the cops and kid were doing based on the video? The views here seem to be pretty evenly split regarding which party was more at fault, the cops or the kid. I'm somewhat surprised this made national news.
Ya, these cops definitely got a little carried away. From what I've witnessed in real life, people only need to be tazed once to figure out that they need to comply. I'm a paramedic and the only situation that I've ever seen someone tazed multiple times is when they are loaded with meth. If the cops really wanted him to go outside, they should have just pulled him outside. Its not like he would have been able to stop them after being tazed....
Before criticizing the officers, you might want to read the UCLA Police Department Taser Policy. The policy explicitly authorizes the use of Tasers' "Drive Stun" mode against passive resistors. In some circumstances, this can include passive resistors already in handcuffs. When officers are following policy, I think it's more worthwhile to criticize the policy than the officers. Criticizing the policy is the only way to change things for the future and hold those who formulated the policy in the first place to account.
Baaaa. Baaaaa. Baaaaa...
At least now he'll have an interesting thesis to write.
This issue is just like the recent Israel-Hezbollah war-let: a massive overreaction resulting in undue harm to one party at no gain to the other, and extremely bad PR for the 'winner'.
Does it describe a general US attitude toward 'minorities'?
L
I wonder if Tabatabainejad would have been even so well-treated back home in Iran. Frankly, I suspect he'd have been driven to the outskirts of Tehran and messily dispatched. I doubt you'd hear anything from or about him ever again. Taser-schmaser -- the Revolutionary Guards would just use good old-fashioned lead.
But what really gets to me is his behavior, just because he's not currently living under the repressive regime he grew up under. The guy's a guest in this country and he pulls this shit? Who's paying for his education here? Give him a pass back home!
Wow... Every time someone mentions here something about ID cards, everybody is raising the Holly Privacy Bible. Today, A guy which has done nothing but wanting to keep his privacy is beaten by the police and you say it's a good thing ?
Terrorism is, you know, about, uh, terror I think. It seems its working with you. By saying you are happy that this guy got tasered, you are entering their game. You acknowledge that you are afraid of them. And beside, now they can tell: "See, Americans are not respecting the rights they are promoting".
What sig ?
It's to keep out people that don't belong, plain and simple. Students want expensive equipment available without having to pay for thefts, students want to use the library at 3AM and be safe. IDs are the easiest way for that to happen. On my old rural campus it would've been overkill, and mostly they let IDs slide, but at my new school in the middle of a city I do appreciate the added layer of security.
This is a taser. It fires wire-connected electrodes at a target to electrocute and subdue them. It's effectively a single-use item.
This is a stungun. The electrodes form part of the unit, hence it requires close proximity and physical contact, thus allows multiple discharges.
The student in the story was hit multiple times by discharges from a stungun, not a taser. Physical effects from both stunguns and tasers vary from person to person - some are completely fine after charge removal, others are dazed and immobile for 15 to 30 minutes. Others can and have died.
It would be more humane to nuke the offending student from orbit. The cost is probably about the same, taking lawsuits into account.
Just asking...
Seriously, comparing a fry cook's job to a cop's job is just silly.
If cops keep doing this shit there is going to be serious bloodshed VERY soon.
Kids will start to violently resist in mass during situations like this.
Then cops will call for backup, and people will end up being shot.
Congratulations, Police! You just went from checking college ID's to fucking KILLING PEOPLE.
Just handcuff the kid, pick him up, and carry him out. We didn't even get to see what they did to him after they got him to the station.
This is the most disturbing video I've seen in a long time, and I've seen a lot of disturbing videos. Those cops should be fired and put in jail.
This kid is a tool, you can tell 10 seconds into the video when he starts into the "Patriot Act" and "dont touch me" crap.
In my opinion, he stole from the basketball playbook and DREW A FOUL.
He wanted the attention, and these idiots played right into it.
All they had to do is cuff him (maybe 1 TASER shock required) and drag him out.
If he resisted, they could have let him scream on the library floor for 20 minutes,
then see who had any sympathy for him.
Maybe the youtube video would've been "Islamist a-hole annoying everyone in the library".
Probably, you would never have heard about it again.
P.S. I'm no fan of our current knee jerk "Patriot Act" either, but this is a pathetic way to protest.
Lurking in the desert
get yer facts straight
..........FULL STOP.
he UCLA police officer videotaped last week using a Taser gun on a student also shot a homeless man at a campus study hall room three years ago and was earlier recommended for dismissal in connection with an alleged assault on fraternity row, authorities said.
UCLA police confirmed late Monday that the officer who fired the Taser gun was Terrence Duren, who has served in the university's Police Department for 18 years.
Duren, who was named officer of the year in 2001, also has been involved in several controversial incidents on campus.
In an interview with The Times on Monday night, Duren, 43, defended his record as a campus police officer and urged people to withhold judgment until the review of his Taser use is completed.
"I patrol this area the same way I would want someone to patrol the neighborhoods where I live," he said. "People make allegations against cops all the time. Saying one thing and proving it are two different things."
While he would not directly talk about why he used the Taser on the student, he said a videotape of any arrest doesn't necessarily tell the whole story.
"If someone is resisting, sometimes it's not going to look pretty taking someone into custody," he said. "If you have to use some force, it's not going to look pretty. That's the nature of this job."
A student's cellphone video of the incident has been broadcast around the world and focused much criticism on the officer.
But Duren -- who was back on duty at the UCLA campus Monday night -- said he can roll with these punches and wants to explain himself to students critical of his actions.
"In this line of business, you have to have a thick skin," he added. "I am proud of my service as a cop."
The incident occurred about 11 p.m. Nov. 14 in a library filled with students studying for midterm examinations.
Senior Mostafa Tabatabainejad, 23, was asked by Duren and other university police officers for his ID as part of a routine nightly procedure to make sure that everyone using the library after 11 p.m. is a student or otherwise authorized to be there.
Authorities said Tabatabainejad refused repeated requests to provide identification or to leave. The officers decided to use the Taser to incapacitate Tabatabainejad after he went limp while they were escorting him out and after he urged other library patrons to join his resistance, according to the university's account.
The video shows portions of the incident, in which Tabatabainejad can be heard screaming in pain when the Taser shocks are administered.
The tape, which has been broadcast on the YouTube website and TV newscasts, prompted widespread criticism both on campus and from outsiders. On Friday, more than 200 students held a march to the police station, while acting Chancellor Norman Abrams tried to quell the critics by announcing an independent investigation of the Taser use. Abrams said UCLA had received numerous e-mails and calls from concerned alumni and parents.
Tabatabainejad's attorney, Stephen Yagman, said his client was shocked five times with the Taser after he refused to show his ID because he thought he was being singled out for his Middle Eastern appearance. Tabatabainejad is of Iranian descent but is a U.S. citizen by birth and a resident of Los Angeles.
Duren said Monday that he joined the UCLA police force after being fired from the Long Beach Police Department in the late 1980s. He said he was a probationary officer at the time and was let go because of poor report-writing skills and geographical knowledge.
In May 1990, he was accused of using his nightstick to choke someone who was hanging out on a Saturday in front of a UCLA fraternity. Kente S. Scott alleged that Duren confronted him while he was walking on the street outside the Theta Xi fraternity house.
Scott sued the university, and according to court records, UCLA officials moved to have Duren dismissed from the police force. But after an independent administrative hearing, officials ove
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Here's a question for ya: if I see a cop do something flagrantly illegal, which poses a physical threat, do I get to perform a citizen's arrest on the spot? I mean, seriously, these cops weren't tasing the guy because they were physically threatened (he was in handcuffs). They were tasing him because, well, they wanted to. That's assault. Shouldn't someone have, you know, done a bit more than ask for a badge number? I'm not saying it's the wisest strategy, since you'll likely get beaten down, but is it _legal_?
You can't argue with the video and audio evidence in the tazer incident, just as you can't with the Michael Richard's racial rant (both events were captured on cell phones). It is outrageous behavior, and a sad commentary on where we are nowadays in America. It proves there is still a lot of mending and healing that needs to be done. The alternative is very bleak.
Thankfully, web sites like Slashdot allow people to debate these issues and overall that is a great thing for democracy and for reinforcing the American Value that racism in any form will not be tolerated. We need to be one big team regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sexual orientation, whatever.
Phil http://www.indierockcafe.com http://www.webcontentprofessionals.org indierock@indierockcafe.com
Can anyone explain to me what run by the University of California means in relation to a law enforcement agency?
I'm not an US citizen and more than a little bit confused about what I have read/seen, and think if the whole issue is half as bad as I understand it, you guys should better start to worry.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
He should of followed the simple pointers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gCCjFbFXn8
This reminds me of the cops a few years back who decided to remove protesters from a government office area by dripping "pepper gas" into their eyes - in front of television cameras and everything. How exactly does creating closeup footage of bohemian girls screaming in pain resolve a trespassing problem? Obviously the pain went from being a compliance technique to a kind of experiment, and this became the same thing. Saying it's "sadistic" gets right to the point. I have a feeling that UC will regret hiring this cop many years after he's been fired.
It bothers me that the cop's fellow officers apparently weren't doing anything to wind the situation down.
Come on... get back to rest... Youtube is as far away as Guatanamo Bay or Irak.
Good night.
*disclaimer: I haven't seen the video due to restricted net access*
It's this sort of crap that's going to get a very useful and life-saving tool taken away from cops who use it right.
There's no reason to deploy a taser on someone who is ALREADY ON THE GROUND AND NO LONGER FIGHTING!
I have used my taser as a police officer twice. The first time, the wires broke on contact and I had to chase him. The second time, the guy fell to the ground and became verbally and physically compliant.
Tasers cannot be used as FREAKING CATTLE PRODS! They're a sophisticated, useful tool that is meant to incapacitate a VIOLENT criminal in order to protect *both* the officer and the offender from serious bodily injury. When deployed in a sensible, responsible fashion, tasers save lives. When used 3 to 5 times on a compliant subject on the ground, they don't help.
In Florida (where I am a sworn law enforcement officer), most agencies are not allowed to use a taser unless a subject is actively resisting arrest (i.e. fighting and/or running away). A large powerful agency nearby was using them on everyone for passive resistance (i.e. "I'm Ofc. Jones, who are you?" "Screw you pig!" *taser*)
fuck you and your fucking porn ads you cocksucker
To the poster who commented that being tased with the darts isn't painful, that's not how the system was being used here. The "drive-stun" mode (which is how I am assuming the weapon was being used) causes pain and is not incapacitating. In fact Taser recommends that care be taken in its use because it can result in lengthy struggles when the pain isn't sufficient to cause the subject to comply immediately.
Duh.
Oh and those same cases, Taser warns, are where police are often criticized for excessive force or brutality.
The simple fact is, Americans aren't terrorists. Anyone who tells you otherwise has been corrupted by public education, sharing, or evolutionists.
Fuck him, just show him your card and leave, no the desert nigger got's to start some shit! Fuck them all!
I've seen three articles on the subject. They all skip over it.
I now read a Slashdot summary. It also skips over it.
I read dozens of posts. They all skip over it.
Can we please include in the discussion the fact that _before the police arrived_, the computer lab was checked by regular staff, who asked him to show ID, which he REFUSED, and then subsequently asked him to leave, which he REFUSED as well? And only AFTER these two refusals did they call the police?
Is there some magical mystical reason why this fact keeps being left out of articles and discussions? A memory hole, a blind spot of attention?
You know what, it's the cooperative weirdo like you that has me scared.
cops fill out forms after arriving at a crash/crime scene, pick up the human trash involved at some later time, annoy motorists, and eat donuts while filling out more forms. not really enough of them to perform the protect & serve motto unless you're a politician, another cop, or donut shop cashier.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
The alternative was shooting? Shooting an unarmed, handcuffed person lying on the ground? Are you nuts?
This is disgusting.
Here are the email addresses of the UCPD.
Everyone who feels strongly about this should let them know what they think of them.
Chief of police: Karl T. Ross
kross@ucpd.ucla.edu
Captain: John Adams
adamsj@ucpd.ucla.edu
What do the witness do to stop the police ??????? I'm from Argentina, 30.000 persons were missing (1976-1982) . It began in the same way. Do you know something ? The police and army that kill our people were trained by the USA. Think about this. The next time may be you. Sorry.
in these situations, at least what should be done is to put the names of the officers (and why not their superiors) that's the only way it they would start caring. They should be tagged at youtube...
When is it *legal* for a crowd to turn on a police officer?
Is it basically ALWAYS illegal, and the members of the crowd have to hope a judge and jury are understanding?
haha loser troll.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Cops come in and tell you to stand up, else there will be consequences... if the idiot decided to resist then he deserves to be tasered. In his own country, he would have been shot. Maybe the cops should have just shot him and make him feel at home... but then again, if police were allowed to do their job, then he wouldn't have felt he could mouth off like a little immature kid.
The fool deserved to be tasered. The fact he was given an option by the police, to stand or get shocked, he wanted to be given some juice so I don't know what the shock factor is all about (sorry for the pun).
This is typical of "police brutality" claims. Some moron stands up to show people how he was shot and beatin by police and what we actually see is some thug mouthing off to a man with authority AND a firearm. Seriously people, if you're so stupid to mouth off to a man with a gun, you should be shot dead, shocked till you piss your pants, bulgened till your mentally retarded. You wouldn't pop off to the drug dealer with a gun... oh, becuase he will shoot you for doing so! Yeah... mouth off to the cop, becuase you can, makes you feel big inspite the fact he's able kill you all the same.
They had to tell that jack-ass more than once to stand up. I think they did an excellent job. They should have broke the guys ribs and legs and dragged him out as if he were a rag doll.
What a martyr eh? Were it not for him screaming like a girl, I'd have laughed. I'll preface this by saying it's excessive use of force (nothing quite like tazering a guy when he's already down) but, man, he's inciting people to resist because of the patriot act? Pathetic. I can only imagine the cops were terified they'd have an angry mob on their hands. Peace through superior firepower! When he's recovered he can get the tazers and ID cards removed and happily go about harassing chicks in the library, doubtless telling them about the time he "stood up to Bush". What a hero... But we'll always have that video of him screaming to laugh at.
Ive seen a lot of people commenting that the Cops in the video are idiots, and a few saying that the student was an idiot.
I move that all involved parties are atleast a little retarded.
The student was stupid for refusing to leave when asked politely, then complaining and screaming when told by police officers to leave. Then more idiotic yet for not cooperating after being tased, and told he would be tased more - something he obviously knew he wouldn't enjoy. The whole time screaming about how our justice system is working. Yes, my good sir... the police officers are in place to enforce rules set in place by society - rules you certainly knew you were being violated by yourself, even after being told to stop.
The cops are idiots because they continued to tase the student when he obviously was set on not cooperating, after being tased multiple times. theres a point when you have to go old-school and just haul his out kicking and screaming.
But in the end, ive really gotta side with the cops in the situation... Tasers are a nice piece of equipment. they definately made too liberal of use with theirs, but i think calling "police brutality" in the situation is too much. People who intentionally violate laws need to understand that being arrested wont be a pleasant experience if you resist.
My hand touched her hand. Her hand touched her boob. By the transitive property, I got some boob! Algebra is awesome!
should obviously attend a video course. He won't receive an Oscar for filming backs, lamps and cubicles.
Ah, good ol' video cell phone technology - the death of Kramer (Michael Richards)
Where would we be without it?
Kuro5hin is still good, though. It's not as active as before, but it does have original articles added every few days. Plus I like the diaries feature.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Heh, truth hurts, don't it? Seriously, I see you wanted to make a real point by... posting anonymously.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Whoa, slow down there.
Yes, the student was carded randomly, around 11:30 PM, in a library that is only for students, at least after hours. And not just in the library, from what I understand, but in the computer lab, where (iirc) there is a posted policy that you must have your BruinCard if you're using the lab.
This town has a lot of homeless people and the campus has a lot of younger kids running around, also. For security, it is necessary to do these random checks at night and remove people who are not supposed to be there.
And besides, how is one's privacy invaded if they're asked to prove that they're a student in an area that requires ID anyway? It's not any more of an invasion of privacy to have to swipe that same card to open the door to a dorm building, call the elevator, let yourself into a dining hall, or even enter your res hall after hours. The UCLA BruinCard is critical to access just about anything on campus, including said computer lab. I'm sure most campuses are the same way...
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
They do more than pass around knowledge out here
Hmm, I think they should better stick to passing around knowledge and leaving the passing around of taser shocks out of it. Anyway, here is the official account, which is in no direct words mentioned on the page by the way.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
that's what I'd've done.
If I'd felt that they'd listen I'd tell em to back off first and if they'd tasered me and left me to recover, THEN I'd hit em with a chair, take the taser off the SOB and taser his nads.
Then again, I'm not a nice person.
What about guests of students?
Or people trying to find a student to pass on a message?
Or those helping a student with something?
There are plenty of reasons to be in the library & lab and not have a card, just so long as they're not using the resources and leave as soon as they are done.
Too bad any of those pigs is still breathing.
Remember, folks, if you decide to resist a nazi in any way, you've got to be ready and willing to kill it.
"oooh! he's being *mean* to me!" zap "take that you big bully" zap "and that for being nasty to me" zap "and that. You hurt my feelings" zap "you're under arrest for making a loud noise when I zap you".
Not allowed. The library itself is closed entirely to non-students after 11PM. Hell, you can't even bring non-student guests into your dorm with you after 9PM unless you sign them in as a guest. There are people waiting in the lobby that check in anyone who passes through.
They take student security very seriously here.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
What we see on this video is a reflection of what is going on in the american society. Patriot act is a good hit. Constitution rights, war, Bush... Tension tends to break here and there, like the way tectonic plates relief pressure. So, we have a society that is frightened by terrorists, its own chosen government, and thinks that every other country hates it (vastly true). There is/will be more of this happening, trust me. Fear causes cruelty. I personally am amazed that this brutal display of power did not cause the "officers" to be beaten by the crowd. They were really close though... I am standing here more than 12000 km away and am furious about what has happened to a fellow person, what about the bystanders?
this guy should have watched http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gCCjFbFXn8/
are we a police state yet?
Oh, please. Do you really think that the obviously absurd expectations and low level of training exhibited by the campus cop(s) involved is an indication of what "police" (as in, "all police") do? Have you suddenly found that your local municipality's laws have changed? Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing? In a "police state," this is policy, not a much-yelled-about, firing/arresting event. Your question is no different than asking whether or not, since some airline pilot was caught heading to work under the influence, we're in a "drunk pilot state." There are also badly broken people in other professional roles... I'm sure you've heard some stories. Does that mean we're in a "rapist dentist state?"
What we are in is a "hyper extrapolation state," where the incorrect actions of 1/100,000,000 people is discussed here as if congress had just passed some new statute about how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID. I'd be interested how this discussion would go if instead we were talking about someone having captured video of a person (without ID) who got into a secured part of the campus and assaulted a student. All we'd hear about would be the absent security, and how we're in an "assault society," blah blah. These guys weren't trained right, and should have better known how to handle someone making a stink about carrying the ID needed to use the facility. They blew it, and they get to lose their jobs. In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I just find a bit sad that an innocent has been shocked five times just so the students can feel safe. That is not security, it just gives you a feeling of security.
I prefer to live free than to be suspected anytime I enter a library, even if the bag next to me might explode in fives mi---Connection reset by peer
What sig ?
Kramer here: he's lucky he ain't Black or I'd have stuck a fork up his ass.
You have no imagination. It is sad that you could miss such obvious insight.
Don't touch them.
Don't mouth off to them
Don't run/resist
Looks like he violated all three to some extent. Unfortunately the kid got what he deserved, maybe a bit too much of what he deserved, but definitely what he deserved.
I'm not saying the library as an entity doesn't have the right to eject, and charge with trespassing, anyone who is there in violation of the rules.
"Eject, and charge with trespassing" does not imply tazering.
The point about privacy rights is that the individual in question was making an effort to protect those rights. Can the library choose to eject persons who choose to exercise those rights? Certainly. Again, though, it's no excuse for this level of response.
"I suggested that one might be able to avoid the charge of assaulting a police officer by pulling the guy who was tased away from the wannabe-fascist cops -- by using the common civil disobedience protest tactic of "de-arresting" someone. You get everyone in the immediate area to put their arms around his body and don't let go, and just drag him away. Make two cops try to arrest a dozen people all holding on to eachother."
That would require two things most (us)americans lack: care about the other, and compromise.
Americans live in fear. Terrorists have won already.
I don't have a sig.
I think it's like they're campus security, but then they went and got themselves deputized as police officers. So the have police powers and can act like police, and do most of the things that you'd expect police can do, but they get paid for and have their equipment provided by (and probably, their area of jurisdiction limited to) the University of California.
It's not uncommon for the 'Campus Security' forces at a lot of state universities to be deputized. The universities want "actual" police protection, as opposed to more powerless rent-a-cops, but the local municipalities don't want to pay for more police officers out of the tax budget, or divert police resources from the rest of the community, so basically the universities run a quasi-private police force.
Arrangements like this are more common than you think. On railroads, the Amtrak Police or other transit police ("bulls") are privately employed, but have police powers within their area of jurisdiction. In California, bus companies can do similar things. (At least they could, a while ago.) In most states, they also have to complete regular police training at the State police academy or pass an equivalency test. WP has an interesting discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_police
Basically, the line between 'security officers' and 'police' is blurrier than many people think, and has been for a long time. This isn't a bad thing -- the municipally-employed police don't have the resources to do many of the things that transit/metro/campus police forces do, and it saves a lot of public tax burden as well.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You honestly believe that being tasered 5 times is the appropriate reaction for not producing your papers on demand? Once wouldn't me enough? 6 times is too much? I'm hazy on your logic here... 5 times for not producing papers...what's appropriate for looking at an officer oddly? Or saying something politically incorrect?
I could see the officers escorting him out of the library... I could even see them hauling him down to the police station until they could positively identify him... But getting tasered 5 times for not producing ID? And you think this is appropriate?
What this does is create fear of our authority figures. You better do exactly what they say, when they say it, or you'll get tasered repeatedly. You better not do anything questionable because they can taser you if they feel like it. You know what it's called when you use fear as a tool to achieve your goals? Terrorism.
It isn't in Australia (NSW)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
This shows exactly why i no longer will visit the fascist police state named United States of America. Maybe when it becomes a civilized country again.
http://www.crtlesslethal.com/taser-stinger-experim ent.html
Here we go:
Less Lethal Stun Gun Testing:
In 2006 we independently tested TASER X26, TASER M26 and STINGER systems stun guns to determine which was more effective. Watch the following video to find out for yourself:
You know what, this is one time I am proud to be an Indian. If you transpose the same to an Indian school, the cops might have been lynched for touching a student. Terrorism is a ploy, and who the fuck doesn't forget ID's.
"you will submit and do what we say, or we will continue to cause you pain until you do".
And that, my friend, is torture.
Well put.
Sounds fun and all but, as the great and wise maddox once said:
Civil Disobedience is STILL Disobedience.
There's a UCPD? What the hell kind of a place is this?
I've been to two universities, one in Sweden and one in Germany, both about 70% the size of UCLA -- as many pre-graduate students but fewer post-graduate ones. I've never heard anyone even think the thought that a university would have its own police force!
At student parties we have four student guards trained by the police. Some people feel that this seems a bit over the top, but they're good for checking the student IDs of people entering and once in a while carrying away some unruly guy who had a few drinks too much. Deputy officers in the library? Man, that's just straight out of another planet.
where you have to show ID.
Papers, please.
Incidentally, how many other people in the library were asked to show their ID? On what grounds do you claim that having an ID is necessary for presence there? Are there posted signs indicating that an ID is required to enter the premises? I've never met a college library with that restriction, and I've been to a few down here in Texas. But I guess here, people are usually trusted to defend themselves instead of hiring poorly trained thugs to do it for them.
Good catch, thanks for saying it.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Digg has no good stories any more. Add that to the fact it already had crap for discussions. Quite frankly I hope Digg stays popular though. It seems to draw complete morons away from slashdot a bit.
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
Land of the Free? Ever notice how the assholes of the world are the ones trying to glorify themselves? Democratic Republic of Congo, Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, USA: Land of the Free.
God damn, USA sucks monkey balls. Your country is so fucked up, inhumane police state that I wonder why some people still wish to go live there. Rampant police brutality aside, I don't know how it can be considered a 1st world country when people get beaten up for teaching evolution, execution is still legal, people get thrown in jail for smoking pot, there's no universal health insurance and firearms are readily accessible to anyone in spite of unfathomable gun death rates. I'm not even going into the foreign policy of your deluded corrupt clique in power that has pissed of every sane person in the world outside US.
You honestly believe that being tasered 5 times is the appropriate reaction for not producing your papers on demand?
You are right. Being tasered 5 times after not showing your papers is NOT the appropriate reaction.
However, that is not the reason he was tased.
After being told to leave, he wasn't making much progress to the door. At this time, one of the guards put his hand on the guys arm, to which the guy responded by yelling at him, falling to the ground, and going completely limp.
There, right there, is where he went from "nuisance" to "potential threat".
Anything security does that this point to remove him forcefully puts them in a vulnerable position. They plead with him to stand up and leave. He refuses. This goes on for a minute or so after which they warn him "Stand up and leave or you will be tasered." He still refuses to comply. At each point, the officers told him exactly what was going to happen and exactly what he needed to do to prevent it. He chose not to.
All he had to do was leave. Instead, he chose to make himself a threat to security and to those students around him.
That is why he was tasered.
If the police have to deal with an angry, shouting person who won't identify themself, show ID, or cooperate... what are they left to do?
I suppose that if tasers had not be invented a shot to the leg would have been called for then right? Certainly picking him up and arresting him for trespassing is out of the question, we cannot have police following police procedure now can we? Maybe a shot to the head would have been preferable, teach those punks standing around a lesson about not complying with the infallible police.
Finkployd
OK, hypothetically, let's say this was another young man, at Guantanamo Bay. And let's say that, instead of asking him to stand up (which he may or may not have been fully capable of at the time), that they were asking him "where are the WMDs?" (which he may or may not have known). How is it significantly different?
Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how this is not torture: 'the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty'. It was most definitely punishment, and a (idiotic) means of obtaining a desired behavior.
May the Maths Be with you!
First, he didn't get beaten, he got tasered. That's quite different. You can't injure someone in normal health with a taser. It's SUPPOSED to be used on people resisting arrest, which is exactly how it was used. It is far safer than manhandling the suspect, or using batons.
Second, the "privacy" argument is bullshit. If he wanted to stay anonymous for whatever reason, he should have used the library during normal public hours. Otherwise, he should comply with whatever rules they had in place. He does not have a constitutional right to be in the university library at night with no ID. This is trespassing, which is a crime.
Third, he was a whiny, obnoxious bitch, who was trying to cause a scene and incite a crowd. THIS is the reason he got tasered -- he repeatedly refused to follow police instructions and resisted arrest by refusing to get the hell out and whining about the Patriot act. If he quietly complied, none of this would have happened. Police are not supposed to have a lot of patience for this kind of thing. If a cop tells you something and you ignore it, expect consequences.
May cost me karma points but the truth usually does. If he did the same thing in Iran, getting tasered would be the least of his problems. Just changing for the Muslim religion to Christianity gets you the death penalty. The problem with video is that we don't know what happened before the person started recording. To me it sounds as if the guy was a real Dick. Why did he not leave and get his card and return. If you have a gun and the police tell you to drop it and you don't....well expect bad things to happen. Is it racial profiling....could be. Do you expect a black man to be a Ku Klux Klan member? Is that racial profiling. Could it be that he was just a Dick and that is what got him tasered? That is what my money is on.
If this happened to me I would go on TV and say "I was being a big Dick and it was all my fault". Then again I believe in personal responsibility. If this view costs me karma points then so be it.
If this had happened in Indonesia, I can almost guarantee you that those four cops would never be able to walk out the campus building. Instead they would be beaten to a pulp, hanged upside down and be burned alive. Americans have become such wimps, especially the youth. Have fun with your police state :)
(Without Prejudice) I was staying at the official Youth Hostile in Santa Monica, California. Although there are signs everywhere- that it was illegal to smoke - and not to smoke in shared sleeping rooms (each with 8 bunk beds) - smoking was going on illegally in manyt rooms (if not all rooms). The cigarette butts were just left in the rubbish containers in each room!
After complaining to the so-called management at the desk about the same group smoking in "my room" - the management decided it would move me to another room (with others smokers??!!). The management refused to remove the smokers from the room I was in!! When I suggested that the management remove the smokers instead of me - they management called the cops to remove me from the Hostel!
Within 2 minutes, 3 cop cars arrived with 5 cops. They told me to leave or else. The cops were not interested about the smokers who were breaking the law - they were only intertested in seeing if I was going to pack and leave immediately (11:30 pm). It was obvious to me - that if I didn't leave immediately - that they were going to use physical force. So I left.
The USA National Youth Hostel Association refused to do anything about the asshole management at the Santa Monica Youth Hostel.
Seriously, comparing a fry cook's job to a cop's job is just silly.
You are quite correct. A fry cook has no authority over the general population. He is not given powers and privileges far above the common citizen. A fry cook can lash out and abuse his position and the consequences for society are minimal. A law enforcement officer must be held to a much higher standard.
There should be no second chances for a LEO abusing their power or violating the law. Given the responsibility and power we as a society give them, the consequences of them abusing that position of authority and power are severe.
Police put their lives on the line, and for that they should be paid much more and trained much better than they are today. However, that is no excuse for bad behavior, and it should never be tolerated. Every one of the police involved in this debacle need to lose their jobs immediately, they are clearly not responsible enough to hold the position of authority they were given and are much more of a danger to society than a punk kid to wouldn't stand up when told to.
Finkployd
There is much more to the story than posted here. The student purposely tried to "rally" others to protest with him when asked for his ID card. The video does not show the complete picture. While he did not deserve to get treated as harshly as he did, he repeatedly tried to get students to stand up against the police officers and resist.
Again, he did not deserve to get tasered multiple times, but this is NOT the complete picture.
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
It would have been interesting to read the official police report and *Then* release the video.
Then the people could see how honest the police are if they think no one saw them.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Tasers are meant to knock people down who are being unruly. Here, they're using tasering as a threat to a person already in a prone position! They don't care that the taser inhibits movement, they only care that it hurts him!
They could have just jumped him and dragged his ass out. Tasers aren't meant to beat people into submission, they're meant to drop an immediate threat, after which they can be handled better.
who's gonna pay for that?
If I saw someone getting tasered for bullshit like this at my college, I'd probably find it hard to stop myself from attacking the cop to help the guy.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Its obvious that only people that fail every single possible subject, or are forced by their parents to become a cop.
Else, a real smart human that knows logic and sense or laws and common sense wouldnt say "get up" after a taser stunt.
hey, where are the old gestapo of the 40s? they hid well, they didnt say "im proud i used to be a gestapo"
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
From the LA Times:
Officer in Taser case identified - Terrence Duren, a 2001 UCLA officer of the year, has been the subject of two other use-of-force complaints.
The UCLA police officer videotaped last week using a Taser gun on a student also shot a homeless man at a campus study hall room three years ago and was earlier recommended for dismissal in connection with an alleged assault on fraternity row, authorities said.
UCLA police confirmed late Monday that the officer who fired the Taser gun was Terrence Duren, who has served in the university's Police Department for 18 years.
Duren, who was named officer of the year in 2001, also has been involved in several controversial incidents on campus
But Duren -- who was back on duty at the UCLA campus Monday night -- said he can roll with these punches and wants to explain himself to students critical of his actions
Duren said Monday that he joined the UCLA police force after being fired from the Long Beach Police Department in the late 1980s.
In May 1990, he was accused of using his nightstick to choke someone who was hanging out on a Saturday in front of a UCLA fraternity. Kente S. Scott alleged that Duren confronted him while he was walking on the street outside the Theta Xi fraternity house
Scott sued the university, and according to court records, UCLA officials moved to have Duren dismissed from the police force. But after an independent administrative hearing, officials overturned the dismissal, suspending him for 90 days.
In October 2003, Duren shot and wounded a homeless man he encountered in Kerckhoff Hall. Duren chased the man into a bathroom, where they struggled and he fired two shots.
The homeless man, Willie Davis Frazier, was later convicted of assaulting an officer. Duren said Frasier had tried to grab his gun during the struggle. But Frazier's attorney, John Raphling, said his client was mentally ill and didn't do anything to provoke the shooting.
His parents are Iranian and born in Iran, he is American and born in United States. His own country is USA.
What I can tell from the video is that there was definitely police brutality going on. Actually I can't even understand why they had to touch him in the first place? He was leaving. And I completely don't understand why they had to use tasers. From my experience and from lessons I got in the Finnish army in peace keeping is that when you out number your opponent with 3 to 1, you need only a little force to subdue your opponent. In this case the cops had him in hand cuffs, in that situation one can control easily hand cuffed person and two can move him/her without difficulty. What hear is going is just police brutality and usage of extreme force.
What this video has done, has got me rethinking again of coming to study to US: if this is what is happening, I definitely don't want to step in to american soil. In Europe, especially in Nordic countries, that kind of police work would have led automatically to firing of polices in question and warning notices to all other polices who led the situation happen.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
What made it a racist act? because he's not white?
Why didnt he comply with the authority?
I f a police or guard tells you to get out because they cant know if you truly belong where your suppose to be then shit get out or face the consequences.
When Tasers first came out, it was believed to be the answer to reducing police offericer involved shootings. As an alternative to deadly force.
Policy has changed to use tasers in a multitude of situations and it pisses me off. After several taser uses in Arizona a nice editorial came out about how police officers lost the skill to use the Night Stick, Baton and their own muscle to take control of a suspect and a bad situation.
I still believe tasers have a use, but when you have a person outnumbered and cuffed, pretty much subdued, your not doing yourself any favors by escalating a situation further.
Has anyone here ever watched the show "cops"? They do this kind of thing all the time when people don't cooperate. Did you hear the guy scream in the beginning "Don't touch me!"? If he had left when they asked him to leave(rather than making a scene) none of this would have happened. And the use of the taser is good - in the past, they would have beaten him with clubs.
As far as I can tell, the subject had been subdued. He was sitting on the ground, not attacking the officers. Still they tased him. That's what got the mob forming. The officers were endangering themselves by using excessive violence in a situation like this. Had they just arrested him, cuffed him and dragged him off, most students would have ignored them, but excessive violence like this should get any upstanding citizen to react and to stop it.
The first use could maybe be defended that way, but even that would be shaky. There was no proof that he was an immediate threat, so they have to work for it to be seen as justified. And the 4 subsequent shocks? There's no way to justify them. How the do you expect someone to get up under their own power when you just shot a couple hundred volts of electricity through his nervous system? Screaming like he did was probably about all the motor control he could muster.
As for not complying with the student's request, there wasn't much immediate danger there, either. They were lucky they didn't have a riot on their hands, but it didn't look like one was going to break out. Threatening a bystander was much more likely to spark one than complying with his request.
He's not an innocent. He refused to show ID and refused to leave when asked.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
Do you really think that the obviously absurd expectations and low level of training exhibited by the campus cop(s) involved is an indication of what "police" (as in, "all police") do?
Since we could have heard about this from NY, or FL, or LA, and this particular one just happened to occur on a college campus - Yes, I'd say this does reflect the generally brutish quality of police in general.
Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing?
Better question - Have you suddenly started seeing cops fired for shit like this? Departments cover it up as much as possible, the cowards hiding even their names behind their "LEO's Bill of Rights"; When it makes the press, the chiefs talk about investigations and appropriate discipline, then give the offending cops a few weeks of paid vacation.
Rodney King, Humboldt County (Earth First vs Pacific Lumber Co), the present example... And do cops go to prison for grossly abusing their authority? Hell no! Given one cop testifying against two dozen dirty hippies, the courts show just a wee bit of bias there...
how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID.
Trespassing does not negate your basic human rights, nor the responsibility of the police to act humanely and with as little force as the situation requires. Some punk taking a bit longer than they want to pack his books up does not justify tasering.
we were talking about someone having captured video of a person (without ID) who got into a secured part of the campus and assaulted a student.
A college campus doesn't count as a war zone. You don't have a "Green zone" where you only expect to see familiar white faces, and if you want to survive to see tomorrow you must view anyone unfamiliar as carrying a bomb. This didn't happen in Baghdad, it happened on a goddamned American college campus.
Get a sense of scale, here! 9/11 did not change everything, regardless of how those who want an authoritarian government may spin it.
In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation.
Chinese and Egyptian students keep blogging, regardless of the risk.
But
that
doesn't
happen
here,
right?
Intervening doesn't mean moving directly to the taser which they they did. Its hard to tell from the video but they had at least 3-5 officers there with an individual who wasn't being threatening physically. Intervening at that point is initially having 1 or 2 officers attempt to handcuff him and grab him by the arms and drag him out. They didn't do that. They're trained to handcuff people using passive resistance and laying on the ground.
Next time a cop asks you to move along and you hesitate I hope he blows you away so you get the point of inappropriate response. There were many intervening steps on the force chart (yes police have them) before arriving at tasers. Attempts at physical restraint would have been number one in that situation since he wasn't waving a knife or taking a swing at them. They might have also tried using a pressure point to get him up once they had their hands on him. They're trained to do that too. All appropriate first steps. Its very clear they started tasering though before they even attempted to handcuff him.
Papers, please.
Gee, do you think you could use a German accent when saying that? It's more sinister sounding that way.
Listen, I was at the U of MD in the early 1980's. We weren't allowed to enter the undergrad library without showing our ID. This was to cut down on book theft, and left things like the bathrooms for use by the students (instead of the general public). Do you have a gym membership? Do you think, in a German accent, "your papers, please" whenever you present your ID at that facility? Students pay a lot of tuition to have their school's libraries and other services available to them. Different schools have different policies, but expecting the students to show that they are students is completely reasonable.
A lot of schools also have problems with non-students wandering into dorms, locker rooms, and other spots where some parent may pitch a fit if their 18-year-old freshman daughter was approached by someone who wasn't supposed to be on the campus, or in that building, etc. Typically, the policy is, then: if a campus cop asks you for your student ID while you're in a facility set aside for students, you show it to them. Refusing to, and making a big stink about it isn't helpful, obviously - and just tells the cops that whatever motivated them to think you wouldn't have your school was in fact correct. Of course, if they ask you to leave, and you refuse, you're not helping matters, either. The taser bit wasn't necessary, but neither was telling the cops to pound sand when you don't have the campus's ID to show you're allowed in that building.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
*tasers suspect to disrupt motor functions*
Then yells "stand up or we will disrupt your motor functions again. ??? yes real bright cops
http://www.ucla.edu/bulletin/remarks-nov17presscon f.html
... and here's my favorite:
Short cut from the link above:
UCPD officers became involved after they were asked for help by a community service officer - or CSO -- employed by the library. This is typically the next step in such a situation, since the UCPD officers and our CSOs - which number 123 and are mostly students -- work collaboratively and routinely without incident. A person identified after the incident as a student was repeatedly refusing to comply with the requirement that he show an ID in the library after 11 p.m.
UCPD officers became involved after they were asked for help by a community service officer - or CSO -- employed by the library. This is typically the next step in such a situation, since the UCPD officers and our CSOs - which number 123 and are mostly students -- work collaboratively and routinely without incident. A person identified after the incident as a student was repeatedly refusing to comply with the requirement that he show an ID in the library after 11 p.m.
The student was clearly told by both the community service officer and, subsequently, the UCPD that if he refused to show his ID, he would have to leave the library. When he continued to refuse to do so, officers attempted to escort him out. At this point, the student went limp and, at the same time, encouraged other library patrons to join in his resistance. These actions created an urgent situation in which the officers deemed it necessary to touch the student with a Taser that was set in its "drive stun" capacity in order to gain compliance. He was touched -- not "shot" -- with a Taser, which conveyed an electric current.
Not all the events Tuesday night can be heard or viewed on YouTube...
Apparently there will be an independent investigation, so I'm guessing nothing will happen in the end.
Wait long enough and people forget...
apparently that video followed a ten mile 'chase' where the woman had refused to pull over..
if so, (ten miles?) their actions seem more reasonable doesn't it?
at the end of ten miles, with police lights flashing, I would not expect any outcome other than being under arrest.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
OR you are just wrong. It's already been reported that the taser was on the lowest possible setting that only stunned a localized area. BTW, that's why you can tell he went into this with an agenda, as he was playing it up with his screams.
Truly, truly disturbing. Saddest part perhaps is that the dozens of students who witnessed it didn't rise up and beat the living shit out of these so-called "cops".
I know that's an unrealistic expectation, but this is simply outrageous. Beyond the pale.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
http://civilliberty.about.com/od/historyprofiles/a /uclataser.htm
I don't know how reliable this is though. It's interesting using google to search for "Terrence Duren" - seems like he's had, erm, incidents, before.
The officer using the taser was Terrence Duren. He has been accussed multiple times of using excessive force. In 1990 he was accused of choking a student with a nightstick. In 2003 he shot an unarmed homeless man who was allegedly trespassing. Also, he was fired from Long Beach PD prior to working for the UCLA PD. http://civilliberty.about.com/od/historyprofiles/a /uclataser.htm
http://www.bruinwalk.com/groups/DailyBruin/article .asp?articleID=79
No, they did the right thing by simply observing and recording.
Simply put, if they had interjected, the Police would have had a reason and opportunity to turn this into a riot, and flush it all down the memory hole. The guys with cameras? Arrested, and the "evidence" confiscated for the "investigation" of the "riot that evil Iranian Muslim terrorist" caused.
Instead they watched, recorded, and let the police do their bad things all on their own, and the cops will get theirs when the time comes.
Personally, if I was the UCLA students, I'd be carrying a camera everywhere I went from now on. Because if these cops are stupid enough to do this on camera and in front of a crowd, just what do you think they'd do in front of 1 or 2 witnesses in a more questionable situation?
Go and see the video. If THAT is not torture to you, I don't know what could be.
Since the first shot was not on video, only the people present can tell what was going on. But all the other shots were pure sadistic torture.
I hope these assholes get fired, then convicted of aggravated armed assault.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
I hope these cops all lose their jobs, they are obviously not up to the task of controlling anyone.
I don't feel too sorry for the kid though. With any half decent lawyer he is looking at at least a 3-5 million dollar settlement. Hell, I see at least 3 suits here, UCLA itself will be sued, the UCLA campus police, and the LA police (from what I read both police corps were on the scene). He should easily get 1-2 million from each of those institutions, they are all equally culpable. I would be tased 5 times if it meant I never had to work again. This reminds me of Office Space a little bit, when the guy gets hit and gets his 7 figure settlement and says "If you just hold on good things can happen in this life".
Anyway... I don't mean to trivialize this incident, it was horrid, I was appalled watching the video. They've got the guy 5 on 1 and he's on the ground in handcuffs, and they tase him 4 more times because he won't stand up. BECAUSE HE WON'T STAND UP! After being Tased! What is it against the union contract for these cops to lift over 20lbs each? They could have easily picked him up, instead they were lazy assholes and kept tasing away.
On the bright side, the legal system will reward this guy handsomely for his efforts.
When someone is asked by the police to leave and doesn't, what is the appropriate level of response?
Falling to the ground and going completely limp is a threatening action? You sir, are a cum brained fuckwit.
And if any would-be hero pulled a gun on them, I would hope they would empty the magazines of their sidearms into his center of mass and kill him stone dead on the spot.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
I for one DO NOT welcome our new power-tripping electricity-wielding police-state asshole overlords. Matter of fact, if it'd happened TO ME, I would have made sure an officer involved got the death penalty, in or OUT of court, as the case may be....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
"To most of the people in that library, the whole thing was just like watching COPS, but in the ultra-ultra high definition sometimes known as Reality(TM)."
Is that better or worse than 1080p? Or can it be upscaled?
There are not capital letters big enough to say this: HE DESERVED IT 110%!! Jesus Christ, you moron, the police have asked you to leave because you don't have proper ID to be in a facility that requires you to have an ID. Let's scream and resist and fight it, instead of leaving peacefully, going and getting your ID, and coming back. After all, it was YOUR dumbass mistake to be there without proper ID in the first place! The so-called victim had ALL the power to prevent this from happening at all, and to stop it immediately after the first taser by cooperating instead of continued resistance. Then, after the first taser, how f'ing stupid do you have to be to continue to yell and resist, despite countless warnings that you are about to be tasered again? If my kid came home crying that she'd been tasered by police, and I saw a video like this of the incident, I'd say, "Well, kiddo, you definitely got what you deserved, I'm just glad you didn't get shot or beaten, and instead have only the memories of some temporary, non-scarring electric shock induced pain."
What's that? University police? ID cards to go to a library?
Boy, do I feel lucky I'm a European!
The problem is simple, asshole kid who thinks he has nothing but rights (duty? what is that?) deciding he wants to be prosecuted. So he acts like a small kid refusing to leave as ordered (legally by the way) and then is all shocked when the police don't act like his mommy and give in to his temper tantrum.
My own experience with this, working for a moving firm for a job with a housing agency that had given the task to clear the staircases in apartment blocks for safety reasons (fire marshal orders and general health regulations). People had been sent a letter and a notice had been put up way ahead of time.
Offcourse 99% of the apartments still had stuff in the hallways on the staircase on the day we came to check. No problem, this is expected because nobody reads personally adressed mail or a notice stuck up on the notice board. Most people give some sort of excuse but on the offer to then take it down the sameday agree AND comply. It is a bore since it means we mostly had to hang around with the housing agency reps (One very big and heavy marokkan and a slighly less mountain like white guy, we the movers were with the four of us (you wouldn't believe the amount of crap to be carried down sometimes) and had all but the asian race represented.
Yet we got a lot of acusations of racial bigotry hurled against us (we were told to stand back but close by, work as a group and never walk alone).
But mostly it was just people venting stuff. Annoying but easy to deal with by just showing that you are not out there to get them and just want to do your job wich benefits everyone.
But a tiny handfull, were not to be reasoned with, they wanted a fight pure and simple. How do I know they were not truly upset about having to clear the hallway? Because the one that actually had to be beaten down didn't actually have anything in the hallway at all. We had just passed his apartment door when he came storming out.
There was nothing even to, he attacked one of my co-workers just like that. It took all six of us to get him down and he was scrawny while all six of us were used to heavy manual labor.
The problem in such a fight is simple, YOU DO NOT WANT TO GET HURT by some freaked out kid. If I had had a taser on me the guy would have been lighted up like a christmas tree, if I had teargas with me he would still be shitting pepper. I did have a crowbar with me and I did hit him very hard with across the back leg.
The guy was eventually taken away by the police and locked up, the sad thing is that it was known he was a mental case but our caring society has invented something called care in the community.
Is this kid in the video a mental patient? Well probably not, but I sure seem to regonize a spoiled little shit who think the world owes him something.
A lot of UNI kids are like this, right up until the moment they need to police to protect their assests. How much do you want to bet that all those kids calling for badge numbers in 10 years time want those kids arrested who play soccer near their BMW's?
It's a nice thought, but just wrong. If you are ordered by the police to do something that violates your civil rights, in most cases you should do it anyway. The most effective recourse is usually to take legal action after the fact.
Civil legal action will be more effective because:
* It is a cost to the police force, which will force them to change.
* The victim gets real compensation.
* There will be a lower likelihood of collateral harm.
The police are the real-time arbiters of force in our society. That's their job. So if they tell you to do something, suck in your pride and comply. Your time will come later.
Obviously this is a rule with exceptions, but "suspicion of racial profiling" is not one of them.
The employers seem to have an overly relaxed attitude towards their staff. I wonder how much they let their employees get away with before taking appropriate action.
"You sir, are a shining example of what police SHOULD be. I hope the vast majority are like you"
Assuming it is a real police
"nobody went as far as saying the officers should be fired"
The officers concerned should be fired. Tazers should only be used if their lives are being threatened.
"the proliferation of camera phones is damaging law enforcement and something needs to be done about that..."
No, it's the over reaction of police such as in the above incident that is damaging law enforcement.
was Re:police POV
davecb5620@gmail.com
1) If he wanted help, why not ask for that instead of ranting about the patriot act? He showed where his mind was at.
2) They were not police, they were campos (campus security). Big difference, including training.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While policy/training clearly needs updating, possibly an officer should be fired, it strikes me that University based police force might be an easy target for provocation as they don't deal with serious offenders on a daily basis.
I have zero sympathy for the kid who instigated this event. In no way should he be given a payday for provoking this. I went to university a few years back and anywhere on campus you had to provide your ID when asked by security. This is not an onerous requirement. Nothing to become belligerent about. If anything they should probably ask for ID more often to help the nut cases realize this is nothing to flip out over. A university is not open to any member of the general public, you may at anytime be required to prove you have the right to be there.
This was poorly handled by university cops, who are probably inadequately trained to deal with belligerents. But no permanent harm was done to the instigator (him and his friends no doubt think he is great hero now) and he doesn't deserve a reward for being the asshole that started this.
Option two - Stay and Fight:
I constantly oscillate between the two. Right now I'm in the run phase, how long will it last?
I dream of a revolution, a violent one. Blood and death is all these folks understand. I think its close to time we gave it to them, its what they want.
In this case, since the individual in question is directly observed by an officer committing trespass (typically a misdemeanor without circumstances causing it to be otherwise), the officer had the ability and authority to arrest the individual -- or at least, would in my state; I don't know about the laws where this occurred. Following said arrest, there's potential for both civil and criminal trespassing charges, charges of resisting arrest, etc.
So, answering your question directly: The appropriate response is forceful ejection and arrest. "Arrest", however, should not mean repeated taserings unless the officer has a reasonable belief that such is necessary for his or her safety -- which is clearly not the case in this situation.
In the mid 1980's, they had to remove the bathroom stall doors in the men's room at Powell. It was a well known "cruising" spot for gay students and non-students. The resulting outcry about the lack of privacy for actual users of the bathrooms for their intended purpose resulted in half-sized "dutch" doors being put on the stalls. This is only one example, but Powell Library is not really a cozy place to study. It is a library only in the sense that there are a large number of volumes there. All you slashdot readers out there who envision your comfy local suburban public library should instead think of the New York Public Library when considering the type of foot traffic in that facility. UCLA students are tempting targets for predators. UCLA is also a magnet for non-student nutcases.
"One alarmingly raised the point that the proliferation of camera phones is damaging law enforcement and something needs to be done about that..."
1. Saw something about UK officers deploying their own helmet cameras as to be able to give their own "view" of the situation. They also bought 3 500 copies of Adobe Premiere for all local police districts...
2. Cell-phone cameras will most likely decrease police brutality. To the extent that police brutality is an effective anti-crime measure, it might also be deterimental to law enforcement effectiveness.
and if he'd been shot dead? would that have been appropriate "punishment" to someone for not showing ID? jesus, have some sense of proportion. not pulling out your ID does NOT justify physical violence by two burly officers. would you be this cavalier if it happened to a friend of yours?
Instead of just bashing the campus police, how about you consider the idiocy of this student. This guy was a complete asshole, basically refusing to do as instructed by campus police. There are some people who will continue to raise the stakes of a situation until they get their way. This guy appears to be of that type.
Considering the slashdot audience, this idea probably won't get much sympathy, but in the real world, sometimes you just have to do as you are asked. This guy pushed the limit, again and again. He was a fool.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
The issue isn't that he was being removed by the police, it's that they tasered him 5 times. Apparently he was resisting their instructions to show ID or leave. It then looked like he got combative (the angle in the video is pretty poor). Ok, so they taser him, fair play. But now he's down on the floor in pain, and they keep tasering him telling him to get up. Sure, he's screaming like a crazy person, but he's no longer a danger to anyone (unless you count his politically motivated statements as being dangerous to the state). The nice thing about tasers is that most of the time (provided you didn't kill the guy with it), you can sit down and talk once the person is incapacitated, rather than rush them to an emergency room.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Why was the parent moderated down? It seems to be a trend on Slashdot where petty people with moderation powers moderate down a post they disagree with instead of posting constructive criticism as a reply.
I agree with the parent and I hope that anyone who does not would have the courage to debate the parent instead of trying to censor the opinion.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
Actually, if coached by a lawyer, a motivated student could stage this whole scenario and end up with big money in their pockets. Hummmmmmmm.... makes you wonder who is already milking the system.
You guys can debate all you want whether it's torture or not. The simple fact is that if the kid was cooperative, this wouldn't have happened. Did the police need to do what they did, no. Should they lose their job, maybe. But this is the REAL world and you all should know that if the cop says he's going to hit you with a taser if you don't act right, you better follow instructions. The kid deserved what he got. The cops deserve to lose their jobs and should be charged with assault. Bottom line, nobody did right.
...are spoiled idiots. brutality? please. try taking a nightstick to the head. maybe if more of you idiot kids and internet badasses got tased you'd be less likely to grow up to be worthless punks looking for a quick payday at the expense of someone else. i wouldn't be surprised if the student involved didn't set this all up so he could try and get some easy money.
This was not an unsolicited behavior by security, he was the one causing the scene, being disruptive and disobeying authority. If he had is ID everything would have been fine, but he didn't, and he refused to leave. You thing security asked him once and he was on his way out when they decide to stun him? You could tell he was throwing the dramatics out in full force. It was enough yelling and screaming on his part to get students to whip out their video phones, at least.
hit him until he bleeds and finally says ok ?
then the next week he's gonna serial kill people because of his experience that life and cops sucks ? cause it's how he will feel like.
get a clue ?
they are cops, that means ONLY cops. not god. no right to hurt you physically if you put no one into danger or aren't doing anything like that.
You can be an asshole, doesn't give the right for people to torture, kill, or simply hit you. Of course, it might happen, but from cops, that's totally wrong. because they're supposed to prevent this kind of stuff, not to make it happening.
so yeah getting him out of there in a normal way and maybe a day or two of jail would have sufficed. no one hurt.
As Barry Goldwater said, when we speak of freedom, we mean freedom from Government. Yes, things are screwed up here real good, however, as long as we have our guns, we still have the power to take our country back. You can't really have a Police State untill all the guns are confiscated.
Like it or not, we have to comply with our law enforcement officials. If you have been wronged, there is a channel to handle that. Being a dumbass and screaming in a library about abuse of power is not the way. Given the way this happened, the fact that there was some camera phones around, the way he acted, that speech he gave after he was tased...this was nothing more than a setup. I would have tased him in between punches to the face.
Most people abusing their authority will quickly yield if they know someone of higher authority is going to arrive soon. The thought of them being deemed in the wrong usually puts their abuse of authority into perspective, or at least stops it temporarily.
The LA Times is reporting that this is the third "excessive use of force" incident on that police officer's record. Also, anyone who is concerned about this type of police conduct can/should contact Chancellor Abrams and ask when the independent investigation is going to be completed.
I already contacted Chancellor Abrams' office, the FBI, and my members of Congress to request they investigate, and prosecute the officers responsible.
I am guessing you have never been shocked to the point of lossing controll, I don't mean touching 110/220V I mean something closer to the 5000V stun guns use.
It is quite the opposite, you are guranteed to injure someone when you use a stun gun. They will feal the effects for days (I have) every muscle in your body will be sore and you will be tired. not so much that you can't walk, but so much you don't want to.
I would much prefer a good beating than a Taz, just because you can't see the after effects doesn't mean they aren't bad, why do you think that is the most commenly used method of torture?
no doubt this guy was being a pain in the ass, and needed a lesson, that is not the police job. But I can gurantee you, quite the opposite of what you think, once you are tazed/shocked, most people just want to lay still and gather themselves, that is why it is used for the purpose of bringing people down, they don't want to get back up no-one would. Thats why it's extreamly important that people who are going to use these weapons first experience them first hand, so they know you can't use them to try and get someone to move.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
After all that has happened, it's amazing that America still allows universities to train potential terrorists.
... not that it should matter, but since it's SO MUCH FUN to throw monkey wrenches into the neat, orderly belief system of people ready and willing to turn America into a police state and burn the constitution thanks to 9/11 (most of whom immediately began foaming at the mouth throughout the Blogsphere about "Mad Mullahs")...
Mostafa isn't a Muslim. He's Baha'i. Google it.
If the cop was was able to sufficiently disengage from the performance of his primary duties to threaten the bystander, then he certainly had the time to succunctly state his badge number.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Yes, they could have handcuffed him and escorted him out. I think he was doing something wrong but the response was over the top. Does anyone know how it feels to get tasered 5 times? I'm just curious if he actually couldn't get up after being hit that many times. Certainly he was passively resisting them early on but could he have complied near the end?
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Sigh...
For the sake of this argument, we'll assume your account of how this incident started is accurate -- even though he clearly had his books packed up and was reportedly walking towards the door when the police arrived. We'll also treat the first tazing as appropriate, even though it seems it wasn't necessary.
At this point the student is guilty of criminal trespassing, something that can't be waved away if he were to leave now. He has been ordered off the premises and blatantly refused the order.
No he is not. He is entitled to the court system to decide whether or not he is guilty.
You have an unidentified criminal, trespassing on government property, acting violent in the vicinity of young students, resisting arrest, moving in a violent manner. What would you propose, other than using force?
Despite your use of the word 'violence' twice in this description, you cannot honestly tell me that this student was any threat after being tazed. If he was, put handcuffs on him. These officers were clearly using the tazer as a compliance weapon. You know what? Sometimes police work isn't fun. Sometimes police have to be patient and listen to someone saying mean things about them. Tough shit -- do your job properly. Us taxpayers pay their salaries because they do a service to us. When officers break the law because they don't feel they should have to wait or carry someone out of a library, the punishment needs to be harsh. These cops are lazy at best, cowards at worst. Pussies like these have no place in law enforcement.
Tasers seem to be a panacea for poor police work. It's the magic weapon used by shitty officers to enforce their authority. A bad officer who uses this is simply a sadistic asshole. In this case, you have four sadistic, poorly trained cops brutalizing someone under the guise of authority. Apparently, proper police work is passe.
Officers are supposed to be trained to use the least amount of force necessary and elevated it only when required. Cops like this have no respect for their professions and in turn lose respect. Regardless of what this man did the repeated use of the taser was unjustifiable and brutal. There seems to be an increase in "Rambo types" becoming officers and dressing like G.I. Joe. Those officers are cowards, especially since four of them can't control the situation.
The truly sickening aspect of this is that the university presented at least 2 of the officers a "Meritorious Service Taser Award" a few weeks prior to this incident. Why not just a service award. It appear the UCLA policy endorses the use of tasers before proper police procedure is used and believes the use of a taser IS proper procedure.
Parent post made the most important point: The students who were in the library stood there and did nothing. They protested, but only as if they were watching this on YouTube, like the rest of us. Something not right happened -- someone got hurt, and educated college students didn't lift a finger. We question the morals of the police officers because they did, but not the morals of the students who did not.
How about I tase YOU three times and see how fast you get up.
How about I tase YOU three times and see how you act.
He is actually an AMERICAN.
Would you call Michael Jordan an African or specify what country his ancestors came from?
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
And if this kid had a heart condition--something that's not at all obvious to the naked eye--he'd probably be dead now. So you advocate the death penalty for people who can't find their government-issued ID? Fascist.
How about we tase YOU three or four times and see how you feel about it?
> If I'm wrong then feel free to tell me how a 120lb policewoman is going to stop a 250lb male mental patient from bashing her senseless simply because she looks like his mother.
"Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! "
Comment removed based on user account deletion
dude I think you missed the train to digg
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
This story is a dupe! Same officer, same campus, but no cameras:
7 099
http://dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?ID=2
Frazier said he had been writing a letter in the study lounge for close to an hour and a half before he was confronted by Duren. He said the officer approached him and asked if he was student. Frazier said he responded, "I'm leaving," and got up to leave.
Oh, and here's another dupe:
After Duren allegedly awoke a student napping in the Kerckhoff Hall study lounge on Aug. 25, 1993, Duren escorted the student outside, slammed him against a wall, and cuffed and arrested him, a court complaint stated. While on the way to jail, the complaint said Duren told the student, "For a while there I thought I was going to have to 'Rodney King' you."
And another:
Only a day before, Duren had arrested another student who was also studying in the same building. A second court complaint said Duren harassed and unreasonably searched the student about three months earlier in the lounge, and this time, while the student was studying, the complaint said Duren questioned and arrested him without probable cause.
-1 Fascist Pig
It is your fascist attitude which always gets the police in trouble for brutality. Contrary to your fucked up authoritarian ideology, the police are not there to punish people. Dragging someone face down across textured concrete is not appropriate police behavior in a free society. Threatening to electrocute someone in handcuffs who has already been electrocuted multiple times unless they get up from the ground is not appropriate police behavior in a free society. Even a suspected murderer should not be treated this way when arrested by the police, and yet here you advocate that a student who was unable or unwilling to produce his ID while sitting in a library be brutalized more than he was! If you are sitting in a library and someone comes up to you and demands "your papers please!" how would you feel? If you saw this happen to someone, you saw them become upset, and then you saw them grabbed by the police as they left the library, and then you saw them become even more upset and ask the police to get their hands off of them because they are trying to leave, and then you saw the police taser them, and then handcuff them and taser them some more, and then drag them out of the library and taser them some more, what would you do? What would you think if you saw that?
I'd like to take a moment and add my perspective to this situation. I've cringed at too many misinformed comments about use-of-force and other police issues to sit idly by and allow FUD to get spread as fact. I am an officer with a large metropolitian police department in the Southeastern United States. As part of my duty gear, I am issued a Taser International X-26 air taser. About one in three of our officers are issued these tasers (or the slightly older M-26 model). Now, I think a lot of people have some misconceptions about the tasers and how they work. Taser International has almost a 100 percent market share when it comes to law enforcement air tasers, so the device the police are using in the YouTube video is probably the same type taser that I am issued. The X-26 is able to shoot two probes connected to the taser by fine wires up to a range of 20-25 feet. The taser is laser-sighted by a laser that is activated when the safety catch is released. One probe is fired straight ahead, while the second has a slight downward trajectory in order to (hopefully) maximaze the distance between the two probes when they hit the target. The current runs between the two probes through the target, so the further apart the two probes are on the subject's body the more major muscle groups are affected by the charge. When the trigger is pulled, the taser produces the 50,000 volt current for 5 seconds. At any time when the current is being generated the safety catch can be used to switch the current off, however our current department training policy is to give the subject the full five seconds every time the taser is deployed. After that, if the subject is still combative, the trigger can again be pulled for another five second burst (and so on). A secondary way to use the taser is the so-called "dry stun". In this method, the catridge at the front of the taser that contains the probes can be removed to allow the taser to be used as a "stun gun" for a press-contact discharge onto the subject. This method would be utilized if the probes from the first shot missed or malfunctioned. Now, what some Slashdotter may find shocking (pun intended), is that the deployment of the taser falls into the use of force continuum right above verbal commands (the same as OC or pepper spray, or using soft, empty hands to subdue to suspect: e.g. 'habeus grabus'). In the context of the YouTube video, the subject was obviously guilty of disorderly conduct (at least per Georgia law) and ANY non-compliance by the suspect after the officers decided to place him under arrest justifies the use of the taser. There is no reason an officer needs to risk injury to himself or the susect when the taser can be used to harmlessly end the confrontation. It doesn't matter that the suspect was "trying to leave". You can't break the law, CONTINUE to break the law once the police arrive, and then just decide to leave and think that you are immune to the legal repercussions of your own actions. Just to be clear: it is my opinion that the FIRST use of the taser by the police in this situation was entirely justified. The suspect was resisting arrest by being both physically and verbally non-compliant with the officer's commands, and the deployment of the taser was justified in such a situation. I'm going to reserve comment on any further use of the taser shown in the video until more information is available. Are there situations where it would be necessary to taser someone that is handcuffed? Yes, but there had better be some pretty extreme circumstances to justify such behavior.
Remember, you only got to see a tiny piece of the situation, and not even very well at that.
After reading some accounts like this one, it seems pretty clear that tasing the guy once was justified. Tasing him again while in handcuffs, of course, was unjustified.
Another eyewitness said that the officers had already tried unsuccessfully to restrain him with compliance holds before using his taser. I'm having a hard time coming up with a reason why the first taser use was excessive given the background information. Again, tasing a restrained, unarmed person is never justified.Regarding threatening to tase a mob participant while the officers were in the process of subduing a belligerent person, it may have come out poorly, but that was not the time or place to demand a badge number. Wait until the officers have the situation under control, and then you can ask for whatever number you want. Heck, if you wait a few hours, you can go read the arrest report and get every detail down to the serial numbers of the tasers fired.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I watched the video. You could barely see the begining of the incident. You could hear some of it.
Before anyone bitches one way or the other, I have something to ask.
Have any of you been tazered?
I have. Not as a result of a crime, but during training to know what it feels like.
After being tazered once, I had to have someone help me up. This was at a time when
I was young and physically fit. When you tazer someone, they are not always going to
"get up" under their own power. I keep thinking in my head "If you want him to get out
after the first taze you will need to move him. Duh."
Being tazed for a no show on ID is a little extreme, but he did continued to be uncooperative.
As a security officer (I'm not talking real law enforcement), you usually give your badge number if someone has a complaint.
I'm kinda surprised the mob didn't rush them. When they started going too far.
Whoa there, buddy! Carried him off campus? You think he would have let them carry him off campus without kicking and screaming and attracting even more attetion? And without cries of physical assault? And how exactly do you know he was unarmed?
They were not going "downtown", these are campus police. Nor was he arrested (at least at that point), and from what I can tell of the shaky video he was very actively non-cooperative, which IS reason enough to use a taser.
There are enough varying accounts of what happened that I cannot say what we saw (which was really very little) was justified or not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Another punk kid who thinks he is above the rules, gets tasered and everyone cries for him. SCREW HIM. He's just another idiot from another country who comes along and thinks he is above the rules. If you don't like this country, get the H**L out! Bunch of socialist screwballs have really screwed up this country. We have to be "politically correct". Well screw that! If you screw up, expect to be thumped! Ok, start your flame war......I really don't give a d**n what you think!
I dunno. Maybe arrest him, bring him to the station, charge him with disorderly conduct, and tell him that if he causes trouble like that again, he's gonna spend a few days in jail? I know, it's a little bit "out there," but I really think this strategy could work.
That is precisely what the officers were trying to do, but the suspect refused to comply, resisted arrest, screamed explatives. This was after he was asked to leave by library staff, campus security (unarmed students) and finally by the University of California police.
It is not like 4 police officers showed up, demanded to see ID and when he didn't produce any, tased him. This incident took place ver a period of minutes and every point of escalation was controlled by the student who refused to comply. As a kicker, it looks like the student who got tased has been seeking to pick a fight with authorities (which one can already figure out by his screaming about the PATRIOT act).
The university's employees mishandled the situation from the start. Had the CSO responded to Mostafa's refusal by calmly announcing that he would check the IDs of everyone in the area:
* The surrounding students would have been mildly irritated
* Mostafa would have probably ended up feeling pretty silly had they unceremoniously presented their IDs, and either presented his own (if he had it) or left quickly (partly because he'd feel the angry vibe from the others who were ID'ed as well due to his complaining). By standing his ground and demanding to see ONLY Mostafa's ID, the CSO did a wonderful job of validating and reinforcing the beliefs of Mostafa and every other student on campus who thinks they're being unfairly picked on.
* Or, alternatively, the CSO could have asked for the IDs of only the students vouching for Mostafa's status as a student.
Either way, the policy's goal would be achieved: giving police an excuse to kick homeless people out of the library who'd otherwise sleep there overnight. Of course, braindamaged antisocial bullies for whom rulebooks are the equivalent of softcore porn will bitch... but they're kind of like diehard fundies whose own words do a better job of making them look like complete tools with stakes up their butts than anyone else's writings possibly could.
Another example of incompetence and stupidity: the first actual police officer to encounter Mostafa apparently proceeded straight to the "grab him and drag him out" strategy, as opposed to looking straight at him (while maintaining a nonthreatening, respectful distance) and calmly informing him in a "look, I really don't want to do this, but..." tone of voice that he WOULD be forcibly removed if he didn't leave voluntarily, and that if he were subject to forcible removal and resisted, he could be tased and/or subject to real, honest-to-god arrest... something that might very well have not occurred to him up to that point.
God knows, if I were pissed and embarrassed about having been singled-out for an ID check (or believed myself to have been), threw in the towel & conceded defeat by heading towards the door, and THEN had a cop grab my arm so he could bully me some more and rub some more salt into the wounds... yeah, I'd have probably reflexively tried pushing him away and had some angry words for him too.
Police need public respect. Using tasers maintains public respect. If the police followed the advice of the liberal hippies on Slashdot, they would have no public respect just like the liberal hippies on Slashdot.
Slashdot says: Taser him once and carry him out. Carrying / Dragging him out would definately cause a scene for a lot of reasons. And once outside, he would raise hell outside, and libraries (quite places) don't need crazy people outside screaming. The best thing for the police would be for him to leave on his own accord. The mere fact that he is unwilling to do this implies that he wants to make the police look bad. Just this want alone warrents the taserings.
Second, it's always best when police don't have to touch the criminals. The criminals might fight back, and will ultamately lose, but they might cut the officers skin with their nails or whatever, and manage to transfer their STD's to the police. It is not the job of the police to put themselves at risk (even a little bit) to make the life of crimials less harsh.
did you watch the video? they *randomly* grabbed the guy as he was leaving the building. they zapped him, then zapped him again when he would not stand up. the point of tasers is that they incapacitate the person for a bit of time. you are not supposed to zap somebody to get their attention. you zap them to knock them down. to then zap them again because they can't hop up and comply is crap. those cops/guards should know that. real police use them to knock somebody out of commission enough that they can cuff them or put them in a car or whatever.
i realize we do not see what precedes the situation, but after they start zapping the guy they can not expect him to just hop up and be docile. they also had a crapload of cops around an unarmed student. they could have just as easily picked him up or something if that was a concern. they obviously were not worried about his safety by zapping him 5 times in that few minute span. there is no reason they could not restrain him some other way if they really felt it was that important.
being a cop/guard on a college campus means you signed up to deal with potentially obnoxious students. it might be rough, but how could you not realize that was going to happen? i can't imagine a situation where some rude student that did not have his ID deserved that kind of battery.
someone ought to taser the cops and see how long it takes for them to "stand up" or even "if" they can stand up. I think the powermad law enforcers ought to get a taste of their own medicine. Sad to say Cali isn't the only place with stormtroopers in their ranks, the "shoot first ask questions later and don't you dare question my authority" mentality prevails all over this once great country.
If the student did excerabte the situation by not simply leaving when ( or IF ) he had the opportunity, he failed to realize these 2 truths:
1. There are bigger assholes in the world;
2. And there are more of them
GP makes no indication that his page is loaded with porn ads.
/. from work at lunchtime might have appreciated that.
Those of us who browse
No, the key message here was "we want you out of the library".
The police were called by the library. The police were acting in accordance with the library's wishes. The police didn't just show up for no reason and taser the guy. The message from the library was "we want you out of the library". The message that the library gave to the police was "we want this guy out of the library".
The guy should have left when he was asked to leave. There should have never been a reason for the library to have to call the police. He should been long gone before the police got there.
The library was not his home, he had no right to stay after being identified as an unauthorized visitor and being asked to leave. The library has a right to control the who uses its facilities.
I've already posted something similar to this in response to some other moron in this story, but this is yet another reason I'm ashamed of my country.
No, not so much because of the police brutality. That's to be expected any time you get someone with a controlling personality coupled with an inferiority complex in a position of authority. The system is supposed to be able to handle these troglodites and get rid of them.
What I'm ashamed me is the number of people defending these thugs' actions. They are effectively breaking our immune system to these things. There is absolutely no conceivable justification for repeatedly shocking someone who is clearly not a threat to anyone. I don't care what he yelled at the police (I'd be yelling at them too in this situation), I don't care that he wasn't leaving as quickly as the officers wanted him to. I don't care that he was "guilty" of criminal trespass. The use of a taser was not an acceptable response!
If you believe that their actions made that library a safer place, or that the student deserved what he got, please move somewhere that already has a police state. Or, alternatively, seek euthanasia. The United States of America and the ideal of individual liberty can't afford any more of you sheep fucking everything up.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Hear! Hear!
Last I heard, you could not [legally] be arrested for failing to show ID.
Is that no longer true? No matter how you look at this, this guy has a great case.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So you advocate the death penalty for people who can't find their government-issued ID? Fascist.
I think you fail to understand that this is a University... now it is a government run university but it does have posted rules.
Most universities have ID's issued to students for a variety of reasons. I went to a private one, and only students were allowed in the library after 9pm... much like other posters have cited Powell library being closed to the public after 10pm.
I wouldn't say that the library is private property, but the university can make whatever rules it wants for the buildings on its property.
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
"Have you suddenly found that your local municipality's laws have changed?"
What, like the fact I can't protest (even peacefully) where I like, my freedom of speech is restricted, I can be detained indefinitely on the mere suspicion of terrorism, my calls can be traffic-analysed or intercepted without a warrant, even a retroactive one, my library and ISP records can be taken by law enforcement and it's illegal for me to even be notified, etc, etc, etc?
No, no, none of that here.
"Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing?"
No. But it's happening a lot more, and I haven't seen a huge upswing in firings or imprisonments for abuse of power, either.
Fuck it - the fucking president's leading the way and you don't see a trend?
"In a "police state," this is policy, not a much-yelled-about, firing/arresting event."
Again, no policies about this, nosireebob. And certainly no secret detention camps, warrantless domestic surveillance or directives to place peaceful anti-war protesters on terrorist watch-lists...
"Your question is no different than asking whether or not, since some airline pilot was caught heading to work under the influence, we're in a "drunk pilot state." There are also badly broken people in other professional roles... I'm sure you've heard some stories. Does that mean we're in a "rapist dentist state?""
It depends - is the current administration leading the way by example, and positively encouraging the circumvention of anti-dentist anti-rapist rules and procedures?
"What we are in is a "hyper extrapolation state," where the incorrect actions of 1/100,000,000 people is discussed here as if congress had just passed some new statute about how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID."
No, what we have here are ever-increasing indicators of a society-wide trend away from essential civil liberties towards the illusion of a little temporary safety.
There's quite a famous quote about it you might perhaps have seen somewhere before.
"These guys weren't trained right, and should have better known how to handle someone making a stink about carrying the ID needed to use the facility. They blew it, and they get to lose their jobs. In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation."
Nobody ever achieved a police state in one night.
You need years and years of gutting of due process, removal of checks and balances, a complient media, relaxation on proscriptions against domestic surveillance and torture, a removal of the assumption of innocence... oh, wait-
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Lots of college students are uppity assholes. But I could give two shits what happens in some other fucked up country, if we are a free society electrocuting a student 5 times for being a pain the the ass is totally out of line.
You go piss on an electric fence, come back and tell me you've never been a dick and you'd probably be a better person if you were humiliated and electrocuted if you ever were.
The guy was trying to leave. The police threatened the other students, wouldn't provide their badge numbers and continued to shock the student even as the surrounding students protested. There were witnesses and they didn't look like hippie-lefties.
Your cavalier attitude would be alarming were it not so common.
Quack, quack.
Their presence wasn't logged - the ID was shown at the door to ensure that only students were admitted to the all-hours facility.
So how the fuck did the student get in? He was already down, at a computer, with books. If ID is required to be shown at the door for entry, why would he be caught LEAVING the building to begin with, unless he had already shown his ID and was granted entry?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Thanks good summary.
Ignore the cowardly AC.
Five times may have been excessive- once certainly wasn't.
As you say- wrestling the guy from the ground puts the officers in danger and he had plenty of warning to stand and leave the area before they tasered him.
Seriously tho after one taser, they should cuff him while he is incapacitated so they don't have to hit him more. Tasering that many times does start to look like torture.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I was in college 15 years ago. I couldn't go anywhere or do hardly anything without my university ID. How did this kid not have his on him in this day and age? Hell, I couldn't get back into my dorm without my ID.
It must vary by college. I was in college (not UCLA) 5 years ago, and while I had a student ID, unless I was paying for something through it or checking out a book, it was never used. I think the policy manual said you had to carry it at all times, but it was kind of silly (and people often didn't) because nobody ever stopped to check -- why would they? And no, even in 2003 (last time I was there), none of the dorms had electronic locks: they all still used regular metal keys. Or maybe he was living off-campus in a house. Not at all unusual.
True, I went to a slightly smaller school (only about 15,000 undergrads, compared to UCLA's 25,000), but really, what's so magic about the UCLA library that non-students can't go in there? I can't imagine anybody getting kicked out of a university library for not being a student. The whole point of the library is to let people read or study, and it's not even a revenue-earning part of the university. But further, why would campus police even go into the library? That's a mystery to me. There's no more peaceful place in the world.
If I was there (and knew somebody else was filming it) I'd start making phone calls.
- Hello, newspaper, get a reporter and photographer to the library quick and you can see somebody being tazed for just sitting there
- Hello, 911, the university campus police are torturing somebody for doing nothing, please send some real cops to restrain them [this wasn't LA]
- Hello, university president, your campus police are tazing some fellow for just sitting there
What the fuck kind of reasoning is this? Making a scene is not an arrestable offense. Being rude, loud and obnoxious is not an arrestable offense. Bring up the Patriot Act while you're being tortured/arrested is not a taze-able offense. What the hell is wrong with you people?
The cops were clearly out of line. This is NO excuse for tasering a handcuffed person. NONE. All of you authority-worshiping psychopaths who are justifying the cops' actions need to look deep inside yourselves. Is this the kind of country you want to live in? Where people who step out of line (a trivial offense - not having an ID card after hours) deserve to be tasered repeatedly? If that's the kind of law&order country you want to live in, I suggest moving to North Korea where the officers don't have to worry about any pesky civil liberties getting in the way of things. Much more efficient that way.
Personally, I'll take an inefficient democracy over an efficient fascist government any day of the week. We must accept certain limitations when we embrace freedom. One of those is the right of others to behave in a way we don't like. The whole point of freedom is giving others a wide degree of latitude as to how they act.
Please don't respond with any diatribes beginning like this: "but, but, he broke THE LAW!!" No, he violated school policy, which shifted under his feet. He felt he was being racially profiled. Besides, there are so many laws on the books that it's almost impossible not to violate one per day (which is part of the creeping fascism reflected in this video). I bet almost every person here has broken a law today. Did you speed on the way to work? Download a song/movie? Did you make a complete stop at that stop sign? Well, I guess we should all be tasered repeatedly since that's how we're handling problems now.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but what happened to talking to a person (note, I didn't call him a "perp", a "suspect", a "criminal" or a "foreigner"), instead laying hands on him right away? These cops used tasers because their brains weren't up to the task. They used a taser for their convenience, rather than for our safety. This should have been a non-event. Kid makes big stink. Cops ask him to run home and fetch his ID. End of story. Instead, Officer Idiot decides he needs to be a Big Man and manhandle this kid. The kid isn't having it, so Officer Idiot whips out his taser to compensate for his tiny penis. Then he threatens to taser anybody who asks for his badge number. That is ASSAULT.
These fucking cops should be sitting in a jail cell right now. How can you defend these scumbags?
More rantings/info on my blog. Please don't taser me if you disagree with my opinions.
Electric Monkey Pants
Your conclusion is that because the cops and various students were telling him to get up, that he could get up?
You are a mental midget with the IQ of a fencepost. I wish people like you would leave, you're bringing down the median IQ on slashdot.
Well, let's handcuff and taser you and see how much you yell and scream.
Asshole.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well let's see now. George W. Bush was elected 2 times. CondaNAZI Rice... errr... I meant Condoleezza REICH using one threat after another when dealing with foreign issues? The Patriot Act? So let's defend freedom by removing freedom... does that even make sense? Then you're surprised when issues like that start popping up more and more?
The state is encouraging it... think about it.
It's not the destination that matters, but rather the journey.
The Arar inquiry
Montreal gunman
etc.
It depends on the level of resistance, which in his case was entirely passive. The appropriate response when dealing with a passively resisting subject is nonviolent.
Tasering someone five times is violent.
This was completely inappropriate use of force, but no one is surprised, since it's in LA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The second this torture was identified by the students, they should've KNOWN that the "police" were violating the law - thus imediately asubject to arrest, themselves. Why the hell didn't the mass group of students subdue these campus cops? I thought UofC had a decent law degree, FFS. Were I one of those students hearing "I have a medical condition" and seeing a multiple taser usage after being subdued from the first taser shot, it'd have been one clothesline, with a knife-edge strike, directly to the throat, in defense of another person's life in direct response to violation of the law (the easiest violation to name being the 'cops' refusal to produce badges and IDs when asked to do so.)
Mod me troll all you want - I'd love to hear what the NewYorkCountyLawyer would say to my response, there. At least let a lawyer with knowledge tell me I'm wrong before you mod me down.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Nobody deserves to be tortured with a stun gun.
I for one do not want police that are ever justified in torturing someone. If you do, then why don't you move to some communist or nazi country and leave the rest of us in peace.
Where did this mistaken belief come from that just because something doesn't leave any permanent marks that it isn't torture to endure?
I would fully agree with you, but how do you know this guy is innocent? Living on a college campus I can tell you there are a lot of crazy people around. If a person in a student area doesn't have proof of being a student and doesn't immediately leave when asked then I, as a student, would want them removed - forcefully if necessary. That is one of the benefits of using university libraries instead of municipal libraries, and one of the benefits of a university dorm over an apartment complex. Being on a campus where I saw programs like this put into place I can tell you it is not just a feeling of security - most crimes on campus are committed by non-students and incidences of assault in the dorms have dropped greatly since ID was mandatory to enter the dorms after 9 pm.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
You do not know what the fuck you are talking about. You should have just stopped there. A google search for "taser injury" provides TONS of examples.
But not on people who are passively resisting arrest. A cop who relies on the taser is like a garbageman who is too much of a pussy to pick up a 50 pound can of trash and can't do his job without the hydraulic arm. Maybe they should just fucking stay home if they don't want to work.
The proper response to someone passively resisting arrest, which means they're just lying there and not doing what you tell them, is to cuff them so they can't suddenly fight you, and carry them away. Shocking someone repeatedly with a taser, which often renders people unable to stand, and then shouting at them to stand, and then shocking them again is not an appropriate response. This is a clear-cut case of police brutality.
In California, you're not trespassing until you are asked to leave and decline. It is not clear from the video that this is what happened. The claim is that he failed to show ID. If you are in a place, and you are asked to leave, and you are leaving (which counts picking up stuff and packing it up in preparation for departure) then you are not trespassing by California State Law. Failing to show ID is not a crime.
Even if he was trespassing, the proper thing to do is to arrest him for it, and then use necessary force to secure the suspect. Which is not what happened. Again, you don't know what the hell you're talking about, so why are you bothering?
Whining? Sounds more like he was screaming in pain to me. But let's taser you a few times, and see how YOU feel. I think it would do you some good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
LAPD are having a pretty bad time and I have *no* idea what it must be like working in the Los Angeles area. I saw the video and it was hard to shake. Kind of disheartening. The kid had no weapon, was never considered a serious threat, appeared to be incapacitated while trying to comply and was surrounded by frightened and outraged students who the police also threatened. Makes you wonder what happens when civil disobedience can be nullified with none lethal violence. Who will speak up? Someone should have intervened *peacefully* much sooner. Hell, drag the kid out yourself. But of course they would have been tased too.
Quack, quack.
Let me get this straight: 30 students are standing around 3 cops that are beating and torturing 1 person that has already been handcuffed. Why are we not reading a story about 3 cops that were lynched to death by 30 students? You can not be serious that they watched that type of shit and did NOTHING? Oh one of them took pictures. Wow. Hey wake up and grow some balls! You'll only ever be as free as you MAKE and KEEP yourself free. As long as Americans bow their heads and submit instead of physically intervening to stop this sort of crap, it will never end. Too bad the Black Panthers aren't around anymore.
I think it really depends on the taser. I have been hit by one that knocked my wind out and knocked me down, but I still would have been able to get up (or at least make an effort to) in about a minute or two. I have also been hit by one that left me standing, but sure as hell not wanting to get shocked again (that one was one that sent too cords out and actually stuck into my skin).
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
The US military did not execute dozens of kids at Kent State. It was the Ohio national guard, and they only killed four.
And those four probably deserved it, because they were questioning the authority of the US President (may God bless him and guide his every move). That makes 'em pinko commie hippie Ruskii-lovers in my book. They probably killed and ate babies. If they were in Iran, they wouldn't've even had the right to protest-- they would've gotten a lot worse than killed, let me assure you.
So let's not exaggerate.
(This shouldn't be necessary, but DISCLAIMER: post drips with irony. Handle with proper protective gear.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Right, because I usually feel very threatened by people who go completely limp. I'm terrified! They might, like, lay on my foot and make me unable to move! They could shit themselves and then I'd have to smell them! OH THE TERROR!@#!@#!#!
Let me help you with something; going limp when you are assaulted is not a threat. It is called passive resistance and it is called this because it is resistance which is passive. I know this is overly simplistic but you are clearly a fucking idiot so I am trying to make this as simple as possible. Let me make this clear to you: the officer commited an act of assault, punishable by a court of law, when he grabbed the guy's arm. Any citizen, whether a member of the police force or not, is assaulting any individual that they touch without permission. Now, if the officer had been placing him under arrest, then he would have had the right to use necessary force to subdue him, just as I would if I were placing you under citizen's arrest.
However, lying limply on the ground is by definition "subdued". The student was offering no violent resistance at all. He was in fact doing exactly what he should be doing when illegally assaulted by police. (Assault is a crime, so that was a redundant statement, but again, I wanted to make things very simple, in deference to you.) Did you see videos of what happened to protesting students at UC Berkeley in the sixties? They were dragged down steps on their asses. Even they were at least simply removed from the buildings instead of being repeatedly assaulted.
What makes you think the cops have the right to do that? It's unnecessary force. He was not acting in a violent manner whatsoever.
Yes, he laid down on the ground when he was assaulted, and that made him a threat. And maybe winged primates will aviate from my fucking rectal cavity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What was the kid arrested for?
I see no mention of a criminal trespass arrest....
there is only the mention of resisting arrest.
In court it is pretty impossible to win (for the police) if the kid is not in the process of being arrested for anything while he resists.
A simple charge of resisting arrest will never cut it, because the kid was NOT ARRESTED FOR ANYTHING ELSE. THERE WAS NO BASIS TO ARREST HIM.
The record will show that I am correct in this matter if the kid gets a compitent lawyer.
Cops sometimes over-react with belligerent idiots. Film at youtube. Lots of quacking.
Dear Idiot:
The cops are not your parents. You are not a snowflake. Get over it.
Dear Cops:
1) You screwed up. 2) If we see you, we can film you.
From the video the jerk is yelling at the police before they taser him. They tried to escort him out after repeated commands to leave. He decides to be stupid and resist. Seems perfectly justifiable to me -- he should be happy is does not live in Iran.
You can be arrested for trespassing.
It was on a university campus, which I don't believe is considered to be a public place. I think if you review the University's regulations, you'll see that students must present their student identification on demand. In this case, I'm guessing the student was arrested for trespassing. Now, I'm sure that charge will have to be dropped once the police get comfirmation he is indeed a student. Unfortunately, he might face additional charges in front of some sort of student review board.
would much prefer a good beating than a Taz, just because you can't see the after effects doesn't mean they aren't bad
You have obviously not ever had a good beating. Having it physically hurt to walk, not see out of your right eye, and have dreadful pain in your right ear for a week is a lot worse then feeling fatigued.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
I really think anyone in law enforcement needs to be held accountable. A zero-tolerance policy. If there is any evidence that the behavior of an officer is not in line with his duties (such as with brutality), then all duties should be revoked, all benefits ended, pay terminated, and all ties cut.
It is the job of an officer to carry out the enforcement of the letter of the law, is it not? It is his job to ensure that the law is being obeyed. So, if he disobeys that law, then the law should be even less lenient to him than to the common citizen. Taken to the logical extreme: If a police officer kills an innocent man under any circumstances - then the fullest extent of the punishment for such a crime should be carried out.
Too many police officers believe themselves to be above law. They need a deterrent far stronger than those over whom they enforce it.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Boing boing has some background on one of the kids attackers. apparently he was dismissed from the real police force for shooting an unarmed homeless man he was recommended to be dismissed from the UCLA for previously choking a student. http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/21/ulca_tasercop _has_a_.html
The Las Vega police describe it as:
Sounds more like he was trying to hurt him in order to get him to cooperate.
Quack, quack.
>I just saw the video. That kid was being a total ass. You couldn't count the number of times >security was telling him to get up. He didn't, not becuase he couldn't. He just did not because >that was his choice. You could even hear other students in the background yelling at him to "just >get up!"
duh, the *whole point* of the taser is to INCAPACITATE you. So the cops can then go in and cuff him and put him in a squad car. You talk about it like hes just stunned. My buddy is a cop and as part of his training he had to get tased. The way he described it, it's next to impossible to have any sort of motor coordination for the next 15 minutes. So to say it was "his choice" to not cooperate after being tased is incredibly retarded.
>This was not an unsolicited behavior by security, he was the one causing the scene, being >disruptive and disobeying authority. If he had is ID everything would have been fine, but he >didn't, and he refused to leave. You thing security asked him once and he was on his way out when >they decide to stun him?
did you watch the video? he was halfway out the door when he got tased and screaming "I said I would leave!"
>You could tell he was throwing the dramatics out in full force. It was enough yelling and >screaming on his part to get students to whip out their video phones, at least.
If excessive force was being used on me, I would make sure everyone in earshot was aware too. If these things don't get documented, the cops always win.
>I would fully agree with you, but how do you know this guy is innocent?
Last I checked, it was innocent until proven guilty.
... an acquaintance of mine, a police officer in Indiana, offered to dress like Keith Richards and be tasered on stage for five seconds [...] telling someone "get up or I'll taser you again" is absolutely moronic.
And if anybody knows the definition of "absolutely moronic", it's you!
The fact that people can't tell ironic dialogue from a troll is the greatest argument for moving slashdot back to the model where only a "trusted few" are allowed to moderate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you're in the middle of an arrest and some jerk runs up asking for your badge number, then they are liable for obstruction of justice, you may well be shot. Wait till after the guy is subdued and out, and then the cop will only be too happy to give you a badge number.
Aside from that, wait a few hours, go down to the station, and they'll give you the guys badge number, the taser serial number, even the perps shoe size.
But whatever you do, don't go barging into a high tension situation like an arrest.
Get over it. This has nothing to do with race.
If some dirty stinky white bum was in there when he wasn't supposed to be AND didn't show any ID AND resisted being escorted out AND physically resisted and then the police tased him none of you'd be talking about this and YOU KNOW IT.
If any of us went down the this trail of multiple non-compliances and then resisted being escorted out and then resisted arrest what do you think would happen? Ever watch the COPS TV show? I have seen plenty of whites shoved into the ground, had their joints torn, and/or tased.
It is just a convenient out to cry racism where none exists.
The event of the UTube posting of the tazering of the brown-skinned student at the UCLA Library may or may not signal the end of freedom. It does, however, signal the end of both the paper press and television news!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
Whether the cops overreacted because they were nervous, stupid or acted appropriately is something that I am sure people will debate on and on about. I do think the guy started a situation and escalated it (as the cops may have done as well). I dont see him as a blameless victim. Why would he do such a thing over a Library ID card? The spouting about the patriot act and so forth may be a clue. If you walk around believing that we live in some sort of police state (and you may be right, Im not arguing that) you have to understand you now have a chip on your shoulder and have introduced the possibility that you are going to escalate any stupid issue of not having your library card (or anything involving a confrontation) into a point against living in a police state. That may be the goal whether its conscious or not.
funny, I thought people in the US are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of their peers. guess I must have been thinking of some other country
Mmm hmmm. Agreed. Maybe the police missed their Substantive Justice class. Or maybe it was the Process of Law class.
If that ever happens in MY town, I'll be ALL OVER THOSE BASTARD PIGS!
From the video it's obvious that everyone is afraid of the PIGS, I'm NOT.
I'm a real American and I'll STAND UP FOR WHATS RIGHT.
Bastards!
What are YOU doing to make sure that this doesn't happen here again?
Nothing... you whimps.
A university regulation does not permit the cops to arrest someone for not showing their university ID, though; only to remove them from the premises for trespassing. Furthermore, all of the assaults (grabbing his arm and tasering him) occured prior to his being placed under arrest (or so we are told.)
Nothing like the charges that these officers will hopefully face for their role in his abuse...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Right, but regardless of the rules, tazering someone 5 times is excessive in almost any circumstance (unless, for instance, the dude is seriously pumped on stimulants and the size of an elephant), and especially in this particular case, where the dude did not pose a threat, and was definitely not a threat after the first, or second, or third time he was tasered. The rules in this situation are totally moot, this is an issue of proportional response.
There are lives at stake here!
This is really very simple, the officers involved in this incident will continue to be police officers, they might lose some pay or they might be put on paid leave, basically paid vacation, for a while. The lawsuit against the department, if there is one, will amount to nothing. The officers' actions here are way over the line even if I do think the guy who got tasered was an idiot for back talking to them. This is not a country where you backtalk to police, it's a good way to end up beat to crap or dead. I say this as a person who is friends with a handful of the police in the city I live in and someone who has nothing against police in general, I have just seen their work good and bad. For a variety off reasons this is the country we live in right now, less privacy, more authority over people by police, military forces and other groups that fall under the "security" label. It is going to get worse before it gets better, Unless you have a lot of money, good political connections or both, when the police, the TSA or anyone else in authority asks you something, no matter how dumb, smile, show your ID, and do it unless you want to end up like this guy or worse. The people in authority don't care what you think, or what you think your rights are, and our nation is letting them get away with it a little more each day. Makes me glad I am white, registered republican and a member of the local megachurch, these things make me no better or worse than anyone else, but they are handy for getting along here in the Midwest.
So finally, after 1233 inane messages, the LA Times introduces some reality - and some new unreality - into the discussion.
We have a police officer with a past history of problems with violence (and who is himself a minority) carrying a taser because the university was concerned with his use of a nightstick on one person and his use of a gun in the shooting of a homeless man.
The facts may be subject to more endless debate, but the LA Times report says that he was suspended for 90 days for the incident where he used the nightstick to choke someone who was hanging out on the street in front of a fraternity house.
You could make a reasonable hypothesis that tasers were purchased at UCLA because someone was concerned about the use of guns and nightsticks by their police.
"Tabatabainejad's attorney, Stephen Yagman, said his client was shocked five times with the Taser after he refused to show his ID because he thought he was being singled out for his Middle Eastern appearance". (Remember that the officer with the Taser was NOT the person who originally asked for ID and who then called the police.)
Considering the rampant paranoia throughout our society, there are any number of American citizens of middle-eastern decent who probably feel degraded and threatened. (Among other incidents, they threw a couple of Hindus off an airplane because other passengers were frightened by their appearance.)
It may not excuse acting like an asshole, but it does sort of explain it.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
I think this was pretty reprehensible.
Quack, quack.
nsfw
From what I can see on the video that kid was asking for trouble. He deserved all he got.
He had plenty of warnings and chose to ignore them and to be non-cooperative.
I watched the video.
There were a fair few people standing by and watching the show. If the police were really brutalizing him, why didn't anyone step in?
Look, here's the appropriate response if a mob of people are standing around watching a couple of officers torturing someone. Start picking up heavy objects and throwing them. Step in and stop the crime in action.
I don't think there was a crime here.
I think the guy was a pathetic sack of shit, needy for attention, and that he wanted to create a scene with the Police to prove some kind of idiotic point. They should have dragged him out of the building kicking and screaming far faster than they did.
JB
Better than a karma kissing ass whore, eh Anon Coward?
No matter how much of a "jackass" so many of the posters claim this guy is, it doesn't justify the police's actions.
A few years ago I watched 5 police officers restrain a friend of mine who had been using PCP (who is 6'2", 220, and extremely strong to begin with), without any use of a taser or gun. If 5 police officers can restrain my friend on PCP, those 3-4 UCPD officers can restrain that little guy without the use of anything other than a little elbow grease.
Even if he was inciting a riot or disobeying their commands, he could have been disabled, handcuffed, and lugged out to the cruiser without the use of the taser, by a single cop.
I hope this guy gets a fat check out of this crap.
Mods are on crack today. How is praising a poster for his well-made point FLAMEBAIT?
I've said it before: people who "argue" by means of moderation are COWARDS. Worse cowards than ACs. If you don't agree with me then POST A REPLY and argue like a man. Modding me "flamebait" or "overrated" is pure unadulterated cowardice.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
I have never seen a cop taser someone. I've never seen a gun used to threaten someone. The only time I have even been stopped and asked for ID is when I was driving too fast. When I take my family out at night, we feel safe. I do not feel threatened by people because of the colour of their skin or the clothing that they wear. I regularly go for walks alone in the evening to get some air and when I come across people I have never met, we exchange greetings and continue on our way without fear. I use libraries without having to show identification. When I am at home, my front door is not locked. I do not own a gun. If I screamed for help, my neighbours would come to help. If my neighbours screamed for help, I would go to help them. A policeman lives several houses down the street, reciently he took one of the neighbours children for a spin around the block in his policecar with sirens and lights flashing, because it was his birthday.
I live in Auckland, New Zealand - the land of the free.
have courage
Like it or not, we have to comply with our law enforcement officials.
Bullshit. Those are the words of a subject, not a citizen.
If you have been wronged, there is a channel to handle that.
Which is an utterly ignorant statement. The channels to handle that are all completely broken. They work for the police and against the citizens.
That is why your original statement is nothing but bullshit
When children that don't listen to parents and the parents let them get away with not listing grow up. They think they can get away with not listening and do as they wish. This is also known as the "Me" generation. This is the now teens and early 20's group of people that feel they have the right to do anything and everything they please without obaying laws or respecting the people around them.
Flame away, it will only help prove my point.
The fact that they put their life on the line to protect other people doesn't give them the right to abuse their power, period. As the other guy said, police are given powers above and beyond those granted to ordinary citizens (including fry cooks), and if these guys aren't mature enough to deal with the occasional non-violent asshole without resorting to violence themselves, they should be stripped of that power.
That said, the details I've heard thus far are still a bit sketchy. If they tried to cuff him or drag/carry him out and he physically resisted then less-lethal subduing force may well have been justified. But if, as was implied, he was just sitting there being an ass and they shocked him with a potentially lethal device, then they crossed the line in a MAJOR way.
I studied Criminal Justice in college and the officers may be in the wrong, although it is very difficult to tell from the video itself. I think the director of the University Police was smart by calling for an independent investigation. It shows that he is committed to fairness for all parties. The student used profanity towards the officers. This, in most states, constitutes disorderly conduct . . . a mere summary offense (like a parking ticket). Did his response warrant a taser reaction? While the video does not show the student was not compliant, the video also does not show that the student was cooperative. This is the kind of situation where being a police officer is a thankless job. While certainly chilling, we cannot really draw any conclusions from the video alone. What was the student doing while lying down? Was he grabbing for the officers guns or at their bodies? On that note, random ID searches create a major problem and I do not think this is constitutional. You have a right to refuse to show ID (unless in a motor vehicle.) The above situation may be complicated by the fact that this might have been a false arrest. If the actor (the student) had calmly and reasonably asked what he was being charged with and why he was being ID'd and me with resistance from the police, we have a false arrest situation. Instead he used profanity and the accompanying language and gestures may have lead police to believe him to be dangerous.
lots of people like to claim the police are present to protect and serve. i'm not sure why they've removed that slogan from all of the patrol cars in my city. i'd like to request that every person with an attention span past [f5][f5][f5] watch as these officers are suspended, while an investigation takes place. don't worry, they'll be reinstated as soon as this is all out of the news. that's almost always the way these kinds of cases go. nothing to see here, move along or face electric shock coercion.
The university is private property.
They can kick you off for any reason they deem fit.
It's called trespass. It is a law.
Carrying and showing an ID shows you are a licensee to the university (i.e. they have given you permission).
I don't think that there's conclusive proof that the channels are broken. If the student had left as asked, without being "wronged", there would be no reason to even need a channel. He broke the clearly posted rules, and should have left as a result, even if it was just to return to his dorm room to get his ID card. He was not being asked to leave as some sort of extension of the Patriot Act which he raves about in the cell phone video, or because of his race, age, gender, sexual orientation, shoe size, or Mac/PC preference. It was because it was late at night, he was being belligerent, and he couldn't prove he was a student. Certainly, in this case the officers' behavior at the end was unacceptable and indefensible. So a wrong was in fact committed. But I would hold off judgement on whether those channels work or not until after the university finishes its investigation of the incident. I suspect that some fairly harsh disciplinary action will be taken against the officers for their actions, and a balance will be struck again.
And, whether Darby thinks it's bullshit or not, the reality is that following the rule of law is what makes us citizens. The very word comes to the English language from the French "citeain" which means something like "of the city". I believe that supporting order and a rule of law is at the very least implicit in that definition, if not explicit.
of the YouTune video, and reading the official and unoficial reports that are available on the net, all I can say is the guy is lucky he didn't get the holy living shit beat of him.
You want to stand up to authority, you better have something more to stand on than the fact that you feel like you are being profiled.
If that were all it took, I would stop paying my income tax. I am a single male with an income +$100K per annum, tell me I'm not being profiled !
Like it or not, law enforcement officials have to comply with the law. When they do not, they are simply thugs with badges, whose actions should be stopped by any means necessary.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Incorrect. Dozens of people have been killed by tasers.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Innocent in this context means not responsible for any wrongdoing. He refused to leave when asked. Should he have been taszred? No. Should the cops assume that anyone in the library without ID has a good reason until proven otherwise in a court of law. Again, no.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think the Supreme Court has already established that you have no right to privacy in a public place. The library seems like a public place. If you want privacy, stay at home.
I agree, the guy was a jerk. IF he had pulled out a weapn and started attacking people, everyone would be questioning how a guy with no ID got into the library. Rules are there for everyone. Now, if he had had his ID, then everything would have been cool, regardless of race. I would find it highly suspicious if someone refused to show ID and then refused to leave, regardless of race.
I also agree the police office went crazy. I have two brother-in-laws who are cops. I know a thing or two about what you should and should not do. There are many ways to exert your influence without physicallity.
You said "... or they think that because of the uniform they wear, that they are above the law."
When taser-boy was being tried in court for one of the previous incidents (yes, taser-cop has a documented history of sadistic bullying, including shooting an unarmed deranged homeless man) he made a point of carrying Machievelli's book "The Prince" with him to court, and flashing it around.
One of the central messages of "The Prince" (yes I've read it, and it's not Niccolo's best work, incidentally) is that the law serves the Prince, and not the other way around. Common morality must be set aside (except in public, of course) by strong rulers. Or, to put it another way - "The Prince is above the law".
Taser-boy is unlikely to have comprehended any of the deeper messages of the book.
And if this kid had a heart condition--something that's not at all obvious to the naked eye--he'd probably be dead now.
Which would be entirely his own fault. I'm sure he got plenty of warning that he would be tasered unless he stopped resisting and started walking. Let's remember, the video only shows the second half of the situation. In the first half, he laid down, refused to move, and started verbally abusing the cops.
So you advocate the death penalty for people who can't find their government-issued ID?
Not quite. I advocate the death penalty for stupid people, which includes people who can't find their ID AND decide to verbally abuse police officers and resist arrest.
Can't see a damn thing. All you can do is hear the cops demanding the guy stand up, and the guy yelling back at them, plus the other students demanding to see the cops badge numbers.
Nothing to see here - move along.
As for the case itself, this will go no where - despite the fact that bloggers are reporting that one of the cops involved has a history of excessive force including choking a student with a nightstick and shooting a mentally ill homeless man. The cops can claim that the guy was either "resisting arrest" or "interfering with an officer" and that will be accepted as justification for using the Taser.
The facts are that the guy was in process of leaving, was seized by a cop (unnecessarily since the guy was leaving) and when the guy demanded to be released, the cops accelerated their use of force, and then when the guy went limp to avoid further abuse, they proceeded to Taser him.
This is clearly improper police procedure, at the very least an inappropriate way to handle a situation which had no reason to become violent.
Nonetheless, the cops will walk on this one, because police forces everywhere in this country are out of control as part of the general decline into fascism in this country. Go back and look at the NYPD goons involved in the Abner Louima case. When I first saw videos of these cops, I thought, "What section of the SS did they find these goons from?"
A primary reason for the Abu Ghraib and other torture scandals in Iraq was the presence of correctional officers in the National Guard. Correctional officers in both state and Federal prisons routinely abuse prisoners. It's no surprise it occurred in a military setting outside the overview of the court system.
Face it. The only proper attitude to cops these days is: death to cops!
The only good cop is a dead cop.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
A google search for "taser injury" provides TONS of examples.
A google search for "bowling injury" produces 3 times as many results as "taser injury". Any activity injures someone at some point.
But not on people who are passively resisting arrest.
How else do you resist arrest? He refused to move while verbally abusing the cops. If he went any farther it would be assault.
The proper response to someone passively resisting arrest, which means they're just lying there and not doing what you tell them, is to cuff them so they can't suddenly fight you, and carry them away.
So, the officers are supposed to risk a lower back injury and getting kicked just so some asshole can cause a scene? Taser the fucker. His well-being is far less important than anyone else's at that point.
In California, you're not trespassing until you are asked to leave and decline.
He got asked to leave and declined by laying down on the floor and bitching about privacy and civil rights. Did you miss the first part of the video where the cops instruct him to get up about a million times before they finally use the taser?
Whining? Sounds more like he was screaming in pain to me.
The first minute of the video shows him well before he got tasered, and he was definitely whining. There are hundreds of videos of police officers getting tasered as part of training. None of them scream in pain. The taser website even has pictures of all of their executives getting tasered. None of them scream in pain.
So what? Thousands of people die every year while taking a shit. About 42,000 people in the USA die in car crashes every year. What does this prove?
Well, maybe YOU want to live in a "papers please" Amerika, but I sure as hell don't!
BTW, you might want to think about the possibility that allowing this abuse in THIS particular case will lead to it being used against YOU in the future.
Yes, you personally, for no good reason, could be abused, beaten, zapped, injured by the police. Because we let them get away with it.
Y on YRO?
So if he was just laying there being a passive resistor, why then did the cops not just carry him out? How many cops were there? Certainly enough to carry out one scrawny college student. He didn't deserve to get tased once, let alone multiple times even if he was being an asshole.
||:|::
I don't think it's up to us to determine if he's innocent. I say let this go to court. There were plenty of eyewitnesses that can testify as to how the incident escalated. Personally I think that whether he was being uncooperative or not, unless he was trying to break out of a hold or threatening violence there was no reason to taze him. But yeah, let's see this one go to a proper investigation.
||:|::
http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=39042
Hmm so let's break down what happened here. He threatened the police if they touched him while at the same time refusing to leave. That's the exact specific time police are supposed to taze someone to prevent injury to themselves or others by completely aggresive, insane people on rants about something so small as leaving a library. Then after ridiculously playing the race card he STILL refuses to leave and they warn him to get up and cooperate or they'll taze him again at least a half dozen more times and he doesn't so guess what, they taze him again! DUH! If he didn't see that coming, he's a moron. Though I'd say it's a bit fuzzy and hard to tell what's going on later so he may or may not have deserved the extra tazingins but he probably did. And the other students actually think there's something wrong with how the police handled it? Are they that used to insane, uncooperative people with out of control tempers and other serious issues at their college with no respect for rules or the police? The guy had to be so unstable to get that pissed over being asked to leave a library because he didn't have his card or whatever before they even tazed him, not the mention that the police were probably called because he was already going on a rant about refusing to leave and spewing ridiculous racial bullshit to the staff members there. Don't fall into the media crap trying to turn this into some martyr story.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The framers of the constitution would be disgusted if they'd seen this. The first thing they'd say is that they didn't launch a revolution and come up with a new system of government so that large schools could enforce quiet hours and ID requirements on unruly and obnoxious intellectuals. They wrote the thing so that unruly and obnoxious intellectuals could be secure in their God-given right to do and say what they wanted, where and when they wanted, without fear of government intervention.
They'd also be really pissed to see a crowd of educated people standing around in useless outrage as a citizens' God-given-rights are being violated, with no recourse but to take videos, ask for a badge number, and wring their hands hoping that the government will decide to regulate itself later. They would have wanted to see everyone in that crowd pulling out copies of the constituion and telling the officers in no uncertain terms that if they didn't stop what they were doing immmediately, the 80% of them who had performed their civic duty and joined the local militia would gun them down where they stood.
Freedom isn't supposed to be dished out in small doses at the convenience of large institutions or taser-happy cops.
I'm kinda surprised the mob didn't rush them. When they started going too far.
I wasn't surprised that they didn't rush them at all. If these guys are going to taser some guy for now showing student ID then they sure as hell would use lethal force on some one interfering with them performing their duties.
If the student board fines or punishes this man then they have proven both how irrelevant and how not there for the students they really are. They should be publishing the names and home addresses of these 'police' in the local student paper. Then some young enterprising and justice minded student could make his 'bones' with a baseball bat.
There they are a conga line of suck holes. On the conservative side of Australian politics. - Mark Latham
Conservative fundies such as yourself need to get your head examined. You don't belong in civilized society. You are living in the dark ages. EVOLVE, GOD DAMN YOU, EVOLVE!
Meh.
You are saying nothing that justifies the police brutality. Does somebody think the guy WAS NOT being a jerk. No. But being a jerk doesn't get you tazered. No second side of the story here, move along people.
Meh.
In the California Republic, you must have ID on you whenever you leave your house. I *think* we're the only state in the union with that one.
I haven't perused all the replies yet, but the security guy that tazered him got kicked out of the police for being an abusive dickweed. When he assaulted frat boys, that was probably fine, but we all know how the police feel when you shoot a homeless man.
No wait, I'm sure it was fine for shooting the homeless, but a frat boy might have connections with lawyers...
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
It was very hard for me to watch this. At what point should an innocent bystander step IN BETWEEN the officers and the victim? I know it's not a smart thing to do in most circumstances but here's an example of pure torture & there's 50 witnesses to the whole thing.
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-taser21no
It's off the front page now, but hopefully we can get this and some additional information brought up in a Slashback.
In my mind this is an incredibly important case. All the more so because outside of places like Slashdot and "liberal" blogs and newssources, there is the sentiment that the student "got what he deserved". This should come as no surprise, I suppose, considering how the public still blames rape victims for "asking for it" or suggesting that they "should have known better". I don't care how much of an ass this student is. That simply doesn't matter. We need to take every opportunity we can to get these thugs out of positions of authority. It is disgusting to see common people siding with thugs in positions of authority over their fellow citizens. The only way to combat this is to raise the outrage by getting public exposure of videos like these.
The cop certainly knew this guy couldn't get up after being tazed. I guess the cop's intent of shouting "Get up" was to show the bystanders that this guy was not obeying his orders, in the hope that the bystanders would thought the guy refused to get up.
> In the California Republic, you must have ID on you whenever you leave your house. I *think* we're the only state in the union with that one.
Reference please.
Just taze the cop who tazed the student. Tell him to stand up immediately, and keep tazing him until he does.
Why turn out the lights? It looks to me like most people on Slashdot are already in the dark regarding pain compliance techniques used by the police.
Living in a free country doesn't give you license to ignore the law or to refuse arrest, or to refuse to comply with the lawful orders of the police even if you are engaged in civil disobedience, non-violent protest, or passive resistance. The police are legally able to inflict pain in various circumstances to gain compliance with their orders. That includes the use of tasers to counter passive resistance, which seems to be fairly common in police department use of force policies, including at UCLA.
If you listen carefully to the video, it certainly seems that Tabatabainejad is refusing to be taken into custody, resisting arrest, at least through the third taser jolt if not longer. He kee
> They take student security very seriously here.
Right, after seeing that video, I'm sure UCLA students feel *very* secure...
speak loudly or bring in a sandwich?
I was not saying he had done either of those thigns exactly - rather I was pointing out that in order to have no less that four campus police officers around before any tazing even started, he had to have been doing something a little less innocuous that either of those two simple things - or even refusing to show a student ID (which is what he reportedly did).
It's an indication that the story of him simply refusing to show an ID is missing something.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> Living in a free country doesn't give you license to ignore the law or to refuse arrest, or to refuse to comply with
> the lawful orders of the police even if you are engaged in civil disobedience, non-violent protest, or passive resistance.
Of course you don't have license to ignore the law or refuse arrest, legally speaking!
"Civil disobedience" MEANS ignoring the law.
"Passive resistance" MEANS refusing to comply with orders.
The whole idea is that you know it's illegal, and choose to risk arrest and/or punishment anyway, because you believe the cause is just.
The video doesn't start until well after the incident has begun. I very very very much doubt the poster you quoted was a real cop. Reality: Cop gives lawful order 20+ times; 2) Spoiled brat, never told "no" in his life, refuses; 3) Tazed, as he should have been. This guy is an 18-year veteran following policy. THis little "victim" created the whole incident. How many times does a police officer have to ask someone to follow a lawful order before using force? 1,000?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
The whole idea is that you know it's illegal, and choose to risk arrest and/or punishment anyway, because you believe the cause is just.
I wonder what cause he thinks he was fighting... if any?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Well, maybe YOU want to live in a "papers please" Amerika, but I sure as hell don't!
It's not like he was on the public streets. He was IN A LIBRARY AFTER NORMAL HOURS. Police damn well better be checking IDs, I don't want my shit stolen by some hobo next time I use the library.
Yes, you personally, for no good reason, could be abused, beaten, zapped, injured by the police.
No, I wouldn't. I am not an idiot. If a police officer tells me to get the hell out, I get the hell out instead of whining about the Patriot act.
well I have never taken a good completly one way beeting, but ya the not being able to see out of a eye, ringing ear, bleeding nose, broken finger (granted nothing really permanent like broken teeth...that often happens when shocked) The advantage of a non tazed beeting is 1)adrenaline 2)visible evidence.
(in High Shcool) I fealt almost nothing while being beat (got a few good licks in before his 2 friends jumped in) thanks to adrenaline.
Then when my friends could see the results they were more than willing to settle later. Not to mention the sympathoy from the gals.
now in the case of a cop beeting, assuming it's a one way issue, you got some good evidence to get revenge (in court of course
Right, but now we get back into the discussion about HOW it is acceptable to remove someone. it is not appropriate to use violence against a nonviolent suspect. tasering him while handcuffed simply does not qualify as necessary force - it was entirely unnecessary... and the cop grabbed his arm without arresting him, which is assault whether he's trespassing or not. One crime does not excuse another.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I guess we should get out our tin foil hats too right?
very good. you win TEH PRIZE! If he actually assaulted the officer, THAT would be non-passive resisting of arrest.
I sincerely hope something like this happens to you so that you can gain some perspective. He has rights, and those rights were denied him. If the cops don't want to work, they can fucking stay home. Nothing gives them the right to torture him, which is precisely what this was.
Neither one of us saw the beginning of the whole event, because it's not in the video, but the generally accepted sequence of events has him being seized by the arm before he drops to the floor. If he has not been arrested, then seizing his arm is assault. He cannot defend himself from this assault because the perpetrator is a police officer and as we all know, the blue shield protects them well.
Therefore he took the only means available to him to defend himself from assault; he utilized passive resistance. This is exactly what Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated as a response to police violence. It's very mediapathic when a police officer is assaulting an unarmed, unaggressive citizen - just as it was here. The only difference between that and this is that those people were black and this guy is iranian.
The general consensus from eyewitness reports SEEMS to be (again, not the greatest access to these people yet) that he was leaving the library when he was assaulted, albeit slowly. I do not believe the law specifies the rate at which you must depart.
So that's sufficient cause to taser him? You should be a LA cop, you'd fit right in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Useful email addresses for complaint letters:
Officer Terrence Duren: duren@ucpd.ucla.edu
UCPD Police Chief Karl Ross: kross@ucpd.ucla.edu
UCPD Police Captain John Adams: adamsj@ucpd.ucla.edu
Show me some evidence.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Useful email addresses for any complaint letters:
Officer Terrence Duren: duren@ucpd.ucla.edu
UCPD Police Chief Karl Ross: kross@ucpd.ucla.edu
UCPD Police Captain John Adams: adamsj@ucpd.ucla.edu
Neither one of us saw the beginning of the whole event, because it's not in the video, but the generally accepted sequence of events has him being seized by the arm before he drops to the floor.
Grabbing someone's arm is police violence? What the fuck are you smoking?
I sincerely hope something like this happens to you so that you can gain some perspective.
This will not happen to me, for the simple reason that I am not a whiny self-important asshole. If a cop tells me to get out, then I will get out.
The only difference between that and this is that those people were black and this guy is iranian.
So what, you think the tasering would be OK if the guy was white? Are you racist or just retarded? MLK protested against the widespread discrimination and racism directed towards black people. This asshole didn't have his student ID, didn't feel like going back to get it, and decided to get sassy to the cops and resist arrest. Notice any difference between these contexts?
I do not believe the law specifies the rate at which you must depart.
The law specifies that you must depart as fast as the cop tells you to depart if you don't want to be arrested. It's at the discretion of the enforcing police officer.
So that's sufficient cause to taser him?
Resisting arrest? Hell yes.
That's not what I said, although it is a violent act. What I said is that it was assault, which is true. Please try to focus on things I've actually said instead of making things up due to either your agenda of persecution or your poor grasp on english (I can't tell which it is.)
Well, I'm glad you're a mindless sheep who does whatever an authority figure tells you.
He wasn't resisting arrest because at that point he had not been arrested. But I guess that little detail escaped your notice.
In fact, the only thing he resisted was assault, which is illegal. Both morality and legality were in line for this one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The on campus police for the University of California are CHP. I know, I went to a UC. Don't spout off with authority about things as if you know for sure when you are talking out of your ass.
(to the tune of "Camptown Racers")
Mohammed's not Mostafa's guy,
Du da, du da.
He's not Muslim, he's Baha'i,
Du da du da day.
Persian, but not from Iran,
Du da, du da.
Born in LA, Southpark fan.
Du da du da day.
Tasered by a bully-man
Du da, du da.
Pressed da button, said to stand
Du da du da day.
CHORUS:
Theo-cons riled up,
look'in really lame.
Jumpin' to conclusions 'bout
mad mullahs and their plans,
Lawsuit comin' to UCLA...
You should ask a cop. Or, for a better answer, a criminal justice professor.
At least that's how I heard of it.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
I'm not saying you're wrong, but cops have a vested interest in having you carry ID at all times, and cannot be trusted, and a professor can be wrong (I've corrected many on small points in their own areas of expertise.) I just want to see some evidence and hearsay doesn't do it for me. Personally I want to see it in print before I believe it. I especially don't trust police, who are typically fairly ignorant of the laws they are supposed to enforce anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think you are the one with a poor grasp of English. Here's the definition of "assault" from a dictionary:
A police officer grabbing someone's arm constitutes neither a violent physical attack nor an unlawful attempt to injure the person.
Well, I'm glad you're a mindless sheep who does whatever an authority figure tells you.
Yeah, I try to avoid breaking laws for no good reason.
That's nice. Unfortunately for you they don't give a fuck about your dictionary in court. Assault has a legal definition. You have just proved that you are not qualified to participate in this discussion.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, I had professors who would be mistaken about things, and cops, when they're not in uniform, have been open with me about knowing knowing much about laws.
Maybe this professor was mistaken, but it was a Criminal Justice intro class at the local Cal State. The prof made a point about pointing out that California was the only state that required citizens to have a state ID or drivers license on them.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
> Maybe this professor was mistaken, but it was a Criminal Justice intro class at the local Cal State.
- 1950/ab_1944_cfa_20020625_143825_sen_comm.html
> The prof made a point about pointing out that California was the only state that required citizens to have a state ID or drivers license on them.
You have every reason to believe the professor was mistaken, or possibly you misunderstood him, unless you can find a law which says otherwise.
The California Senate website has an analysis of bill AB 1944 which says (as of 2002 anyway) that "there is no requirement in California or in the United States that people carry identification with them at all times."
http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/01-02/bill/asm/ab_1901
It is a misdemeanor, though, to provide a false name or false ID to a police officer who has detained or arrested you, per California Penal Code Section 148.9.
> A police officer grabbing someone's arm constitutes neither a violent physical attack nor an unlawful attempt to injure the person.
Yeah, try grabbing a police officer's arm, and see what they call it.
Remember that video of the black-teen getting his head slammed into the car hood, while unconscious?
T*O*P*I*C Discussion Started: 07-10-2002, 2:54 PM
Attorneys for a teen who was videotaped while an Inglewood police
officer slammed him onto a squad car plan to file a lawsuit over the
incident as public pressure mounts and various law enforcement agencies
launch separate investigations. Meanwhile another man claims he too was
beaten by Inglewood police officers. What do you think about the police
brutality situation in Inglewood? Elsewhere? What, if anything, do you
think the videotape proves?
[ a woman working for the Feds was also subject to abuse by that a-hole. Really got messed with. She was yelling at the a-hole, that she was on "his side" ]
don87654 07-16-2002, 3:27 PM
Southern California cops are just plain crooked, period! I was once a
State of California Correctional Peace Officer at the California
Institute for Women at Frontera. We were taught in the Academy at Galt
how to formulate evidence to make ourselves look good and victims to
look bad. I refused to cater to this treatment and was fired by an
abusive Lieutenant that was in charge of Internal Affairs at the time.
Later because of my outspoken stances on this, charges were levied
against me involving vehicle tampering and simple assault and I was
convicted of this by what appeared to be paid police witnesses. My
attorney at the time, one of the best criminal lawyers in southern
California, told me to pack my bags and leave town, which I did. It took
him 8 long years to get my conviction erased from court records and to
get the warrant for my arrest dropped by the court so I was no longer
"wanted". It does not matter where they are at....these California cops
that completed the Academy in Los Angeles, or for the State, are just
plain crooked--they are taught to be that way
Jbp912 07-10-2002, 6:21 PM
I am a disabled military veteran. I am in my senior years and I have
become cynical of police officers and the entire judicial system. There
has been too much lying, cover-ups, and irresponsible behavior by law
enforcement persons. It seems there is a lack of proper training, poor
recruitment, and too much hubris. The bottom line is bad management and
no accountability, but we live in an age of extreme mediocrity.
Thank you, JBP
[ he just described Bush Jr in Iraq: irresponsible behavior & hubris ]
Patriottoo 07-10-2002, 4:20 PM
This is a clear cut case of a rabid, over zealous, adreinaline pumped,
and I'm suprised his eyes weren't bulging out of his head cop! The teen
was OBVIOUSLY in custody when he was BRUTILIZED with the UNNECESSARY
FORCE of SLAMMING his head on the trunk lid of the police car and then
PUNCHING him FIST CLOSED in the face, by the this cop. I don't care who
a person is, or what they have done, NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY deserves
to be treated in that manner. Once the 'cuffs' are on, all force that
was necessary to place a suspect in custody MUST STOP! I hope this
maniac of a police officer is prosecuted to the fullest extent that the
law allows, and receives the maxium penalty for his crimes! Only when
the courts get serious and start holding those in the police agencies
around the country who would engage in this type of brutality, fully
responsible for thier crimes will we see an end to it!
Patriot Too