A Good Reason to Hit a Cop

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Paint CHiPs
Viva Le Me

Registered: Jul 2000
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A Good Reason to Hit a Cop

The story about the UCLA tasing.

quote:

UCPD officers shot a student several times with a Taser inside the Powell Library CLICC computer lab late Tuesday night before taking him into custody.

No university police officers were available to comment further about the incident as of 3 a.m. Wednesday, and no Community Service Officers who were on duty at the time could be reached.

At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately.

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.

UCPD officers confirmed that the man involved in the incident was a student, but did not give a name or any additional information about his identity.

Video shot from a student's camera phone captured the student yelling, "Here's your Patriot Act, here's your fucking abuse of power," while he struggled with the officers.

As the student was screaming, UCPD officers repeatedly told him to stand up and said "stop fighting us." The student did not stand up as the officers requested and they shot him with the Taser at least once more.

"It was the most disgusting and vile act I had ever seen in my life," said David Remesnitsky, a 2006 UCLA alumnus who witnessed the incident.

As the student and the officers were struggling, bystanders repeatedly asked the police officers to stop, and at one point officers told the gathered crowd to stand back and threatened to use a Taser on anyone who got too close.

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.

Gordy was visibly upset by the incident and said other students were also disturbed.

"It's a shock that something like this can happen at UCLA," she said. "It was unnecessary what they did."

Immediately after the incident, several students began to contact local news outlets, informing them of the incident, and Remesnitsky wrote an e-mail to Interim Chancellor Norman Abrams.

The story needs the video for the appropriate context.

Now, the student is being an ass, I'm sure. But, I think it's pretty clear that the cops behavior here is outrageous.

You can't taze somebody for failing to stand up after the first time you tased them. The kid, by all accounts, wasn't fighting, wasn't struggling, he was lying on the ground. That would be resisting arrest at worst, civil disobedience at best. But, in any case, the proper response would be to handcuff him and pick him up. Instead, they taze him several times.

I had a weird experience watching the video. After about the halfway point, when he's already been tazed and is no longer even speaking coherently and the cops keep repeating "stand up or we'll taze you", I started shouting to the students surrounding the scene "Hit them! Start throwing books at them or something! Wade in there and punch the cop in the face!" I'm about as pacifist in my own life as you can get, and certainly wouldn't normally advocate a riot, but in this instance, that feels like the most appropriate response, at least in an internal sense of feeling "rightness". The cops needed to be run out of that building on rails. The students should have turned over the tazed kid shortly thereafter, but the cops needed force used against THEM at that point.

Watch the video. Besides the obligatory comments about the kid shouting "This is your fucking Patriot Act!" in the beginning, past the knee-jerk rolling your eyes at that, what's your reaction to the use of force here, and what, if any, response from the assembling crowd do you think would have been appropriate, or justified?

I've never in my life had any urge to hit a cop (or really much of anybody), and normally give them wide berth and tons of respect for doing a legitimately hard job, usually very well. But that's a case where I would have gladly taken the tazing, beat-down, and assault charges that followed for the sake of doing the right thing, which in this case would have been a sucker punch and ensuing mini-riot.

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