Just yesterday there was a news story about how a camera phone recording of abuse inside Malaysian jails sparked an outcry. Today it's abuse inside the UCLA library.
The Crooks and Liars video is shocking. The campus police repeatedly shocked a student who was unable to produce his student ID and who did dawdled on his way out of the building when asked to leave. They tasered him to the ground, and then demanded he stand again. When he couldn't, they tasered him again. They tasered him again after he was handcuffed.
The campus cops threatened to taser witnesses who asked for their names and badge numbers.
The laws are only as good as the people who enforce them. And when those people are idiots, aggressive, scared, poorly trained, or exercising bad judgement, even the best laws can't fully protect the people from abuse. But when the political climate is one in which campus cops believe that it is not only acceptable to repeatedly taser a kid with a backpack working in a computer lab, but also threaten witnesses, something has gone seriously awry.
And this kind of abuse needs to checked.
The ACLU is already on the case. I hope that college kid gets the nastiest lawyer in California, and that he or she will put the campus police through the wringer, and take the state of California for every red cent he or she can. That's the only way the message will be heard.
And I hope that this video goes viral on the internet, and that it spreads to the MSM.
The government is going after college kids. No, it's not an organized roundup, but those cops are state employees. They are messing with people's kids.
And why? Because that kid was acting like a kid. What student do any of us know who wouldn't footdrag on the way out of the library? What harm in asking for other ID? Why not be patient and let the student snigger and trail out? Because the campus cops couldn't take the challenge to their authority. Why else would you taser a student lying helpless on the ground, surrounded by dozens of people begging to leave him alone, when he yells that he has a medical condition?
Do I even need to tell you that the student's name was Mostafa Tabatabainejad, or had you guessed already?
But according to a study published in the Lancet Medical Journal in 2001, a charge of three to five seconds can result in immobilization for five to 15 minutes, which would mean that Tabatabainejad could have been physically unable to stand when the officers demanded that he do so.
"It is a real mistake to treat a Taser as some benign thing that painlessly brings people under control," said Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney at the ACLU of Southern California.
"The Taser can be incredibly violent and result in death," Eliasberg said.
According to an ACLU report, 148 people in the United States and Canada have died as a result of the use of Tasers since 1999.
During the altercation between Tabatabainejad and the officers, bystanders can be heard in the video repeatedly asking the officers to stop and requesting their names and identification numbers. The video showed one officer responding to a student by threatening that the student would "get Tased too." At this point, the officer was still holding a Taser.
Such a threat of the use of force by a law enforcement officer in response to a request for a badge number is an "illegal assault," Eliasberg said.
"It is absolutely illegal to threaten anyone who asks for a badge �" that's assault," he said.
Tabatabainejad was released from custody after being given a citation for obstruction/delay of a peace officer in the performance of duty.
So which is a greater violation of the law? Delaying a peace officer? Or a campus cop abusing a student and threatening a citizen?
It puts me in the mood for making a contribution to free democratic society.
UPDATE: More from the LATimes via AmericaBlog.
Posted by binky at November 16, 2006 01:43 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Media | The Academy | The Ever Shrinking ConstitutionHere here. That's appalling. Just appalling. Just -- nothing else I can think to say -- appalliong, in the strongest sense of that word.
Whatever their justification for the original request for ID and detention, and even if by some strained reading of their rules their first use of the Taser was legitimate (and if so, the rules themselves may not be legitimate), the way they proceed to use the Taser over and over, with dozens of people watching them in an era of cameraphones, betrays a brutality and ignorance beyond comprehension.
The more things like this pop up, the more I question the wisdom of the Taser. At least as between a billy club and a handgun, a police officer had to make a hard choice about the appropriate degree of force to a given circumstance. Too many are using the Taser too indiscriminately.
Posted by: moon at November 16, 2006 02:55 PM | PERMALINK