UCLA campus police use Taser on student
Apparently, the student refused or failed to show campus police his student ID during a “random check” in the Powell Library CLICC computer lab late Tuesday night. After the student was Tasered, the officers allegedly threated to use their weapons on a crowd of bystanders:
The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.The student began to yell “get off me,” repeating himself several times.
It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition…
Laila Gordy, a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident, said police officers threatened to shoot her with a Taser when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number.
Link (via Boing Boing)
UPDATE: Here is a more recent article, which includes video footage of the incident taken by a student with a cameraphone.
Now Blaser, you know not to quote Wikipedia in a cogent argument.
At least some of the other students there stood up for the guy and got in the face of the cops, especially when you consider that they witnessed the guy get tasered for what seemed to be no good reason at all. You can’t tell me that two cops could not get one guy to leave without having to rely on tasing the shit out of him.
And I really liked how the cops kept on saying “All we want you to do is stand up!” Well, let’s see; maybe if you stopped jolting his body with electricity, he might be able to follow orders. From Wikipedia: “According to many sources, a shock of half a second duration will cause intense pain and muscle contractions startling most people greatly. Two to three seconds will often cause the subject to become dazed and drop to the ground, and over three seconds will usually completely disorient and drop an attacker for at least several minutes and possibly for up to fifteen minutes.”
I’d like to see the cops get up from that.
The guy was already leaving when the officers grabbed him. The student got pissed about it like many of us would, and the officers decided to Tase him. Whether or not it was just is up in the air, but then they really abused their power and threatened to Tase another student who simply asked for their badge numbers. Perhaps both the Taser and the Tasee were in the wrong for different reasons, but the police could/should have shown a little more restraint to whip out that kind of stuff.
To be fair, the UCLA library’s computer lab probably sees its fair share of creeps who shouldn’t be there, which might have led to the campus police checking to make sure that a person on a computer was a UCLA student. However, if there was suspicion that Tabatabainejad was not a student, perhaps there could have been an alternate way to determine if he was (maybe by having him log into his university e-mail account, or something similar).
I don’t know how practical that would have been in this situation, or if either Tabatabainejad or the campus police were cooperative or confrontational from the beginning of the incident. In either case, the officers probably should not have resorted to using a Taser without finding alternate means to resolving the situation. Violence should be a last resort.
It should be interesting to see how this all plays out.
The police should be armed with nothing more dangerous than play-doh. Especially campus “police”.
Hell no. C’mon Leeper, you of all people should know that one has no rights of any kind when faced by DPS. You must always and in all circumstances do exactly what any DPS officer tells you to. Otherwise they collapse under the weight of their own egos. Or you get tazed.
I hope you are being sarcastic Ted.
Where are ze papers???
The most disgraceful act a man with the means of violence can do is to use that violence on someone who poses no threat.
“Police officers said they determined the use of Tasers was necessary when Tabatabainejad did not do as they asked.”
Says it all.
Great, the EPD rejects better known as DPS, who are probably even LESS trained than UCLA, want tasers too.