LAPD: STRAIGHT TASIN'

(w/same video)

obviously the force here was excessive. especially since tasers are, in theory, meant to be a substitute for deadly force. ie - you only whip 'em out in situations you would otherwise draw a gun.

however, and this is speaking as someone who has received this sort of treatment before: screaming "DON'T TOUCH ME" when the police initially accost you is probably the worst idea of all time. you just end up firing all the Nutjob switches in the cops' brains, and they are well within their legal rights at that point to arrest and cuff the shit out of you. which, if they end up tasing you, will probably happen, since bowel control's a bit of a crapshoot at that point.

Cops not to fuck with: city cops, rural cops.

...interestingly, cops in small towns (at least in the West) are usually pretty cool. "Pretty cool" in this case != "cool guys I wanna chill with," but "more likely to give you a scolding and a ride home instead of arresting you."

2. whatever happened to rioting and chucking things at the pigs?

oh, right, they weren't LAPD. my bad.

Finally a genuinely good use for the camcorder-telephone combination, though.

maybe people should just cooperate with officials who have weapons and save their mouthing off for later.

http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=38960

Tabatabainejad was also stunned with the Taser when he was already handcuffed, said Carlos Zaragoza, a third-year English and history student who witnessed the incident.

"(He was) no possible danger to any of the police," Zaragoza said. "(He was) getting shocked and Tasered as he was handcuffed."

But Young said at the time the police likely had no way of knowing whether the individual was armed or that he was a student.

As Tabatabainejad was being dragged through the room by two officers, he repeated in a strained scream, "I'm not fighting you" and "I said I would leave."

The officers used the "drive stun" setting in the Taser, which delivers a shock to a specific part of the body with the front of the Taser, Young said.

A Taser delivers volts of low-amperage energy to the body, causing a disruption of the body's electrical energy pulses and locking the muscles, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"It's an electrical shock. ... It causes pain," Young said, adding that the drive stun would not likely demobilize a person or cause residual pain after the shock was administered. Young also said a Taser is less forceful than a baton, for example.

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.

maybe officials with weapons should be fucking accountable for inciting violence once in a blue fucking moon

Fixed.

but it never ceases to amaze me how dumb people can act when faced with the possibilty of getting tased/beat/shot. that is *not* the time to start yelling about civil liberties or asking for badge numbers. If you think you're being mistreated, do what you're told and then cause a stink *after* the fact, when you're out of danger.

(xpost I reguarly took out my frustrations as a poorly paid teacher via violence)

they intervened by asking for badge numbers and stuff in whiny voices

there was a massive crowd following the cops/vic out the door, "bearing witness" i guess

at least dude is only getting a very minor charge (haha). the PD seems to recognize mistakes were made.

xpost

P.S. in standard police practice I'm actually kind of wary of taser use, because no matter how safe it might be for healthy people, the fact is that people aren't always healthy, and if you put enough voltage into a person who is (let's say) already in a panic and (let's say) under the influence of a stimulant ... if you take that as standard police practice, you're kind of accepting a certain small rate of "accidental" death due to heart failure, yes?

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050928/NEWS03/509280405/1017/NEWS

OTM. I just figured this was the new Los Angeles thread because Vic imagebombed the las one...

"You see anything, Officer Hulk?"
"No, this all looks clear, Officer Thing." *toss*

I disagree with this. I think we need acts of civil disobedience that force the government to really show its true colors. This video is travelling around the web very quickly and it embodies exactly what is wrong with the police state we currently live in.

Right now you can be secretly kidnapped and executed with no legal recourse whatsoever. The Military Commissions act just wiped out the bill of rights. There are cameras everywhere, national ID cards go into effect in 2008, habeas corpus and Posse Comitatus are gone, the cops are militarized, The Defence Authorization Act of 2007 federalized the national guard under the executive branch, and haliburton got a 385 million dollar contract to build FEMA concentration camps earlier this year. Things are getting very weird in the US these days.

Legally, Bush needs one good Pearl Harbor type event and he has the legal basis for dictatorship.

Behaving for the cops is the last thing this country needs.

i wonder what would happen if someone with a panic disorder or something similar were tasered--the ramifications could be considerable no?

"Here's Your Patriot Act!" yes, clearly the war on terror will be fought in the stacks. Rumsfeld's last orders were to purge the nerds.

Yeah, after the first zap you don't really feel the rest... or the sting of the public humiliation.

...at the start of the video, it seems like he's panicky screaming ("don't touch me," etc.). which is exactly the sort of thing that gets you in bracelets and arrested, pronto. acting like you're unhinged in front of the police is never, ever a good idea.

and i'll admit: i laffed a bit when he screamed "this is what your patriot act gets you!" c'mon dude, the cops have been overreacting to shit since the dawn of time -- the "no ID" thing has nothing to do with the police state and everything to do with UC library policy.

Well, that'd be my reaction as well, but he did not appear to have a gun nor was he overly aggressive so why fucking taser the dude? Does someone have the right to refuse showing an ID (if it's university police)? As much as he should have cooperated, they should have as well. I mean, how ridiculous is it to fucking taser someone because, as he's walking away, he doesn't really want to cooperate? You can sit down and talk. Ask why he doesn't want to cooperate.

I'm kinda lucky: I never EVER get stopped by the police (or custom control or whatever). My cousin complained about this: I would get stopped, but you... NEVAH! I could cross the border with a truckload of heroin and they'd still let me go. If the drug-dogs had a cold that is. ;-)

I'm totally baffled by the police procedure here, just on a logical level. It makes no sense to incapacitate a person with a taser and then immediately demand that he stand up and walk off on his own power. From what I could tell, the guy, after a few tasers, wasn't really speaking or moving much -- what's the point, procedurally speaking, of demanding that he stand up or get shocked again? (In the end, as it turns out, they carry him out, with his legs dragging -- they could have started this process just as soon as he'd stopped struggling.) My wild guess here is that they got deeply spooked by having that many kids watching them, and tried to hurry the situation along in a way that was procedurally stupid; they could very easily have taken a little more time in the doorway, taken some longer pauses between shocks to try and calm the situation, and led the guy out with far less fuss. (And that's leaving aside the question of whether they could have just let the guy leave angrily in the first place, before the tasers even came out at all -- it seems like he was v. agitated, but "v. agitated" doesn't necessitate the taser unless he seems like he's about to assault someone.)

Couple other notes/corrections: (1) The person asking the police for information isn't the person being arrested -- it's a bystander. He's asking pretty calmly, presumably because he feels like he should be doing something, but doesn't want to get, you know, tasered. (2) The person being arrested yells a few things about the Patriot Act early on, but that's about the end of any belligerence: after that it would appear to be all "I'm not fighting you!" and "I was leaving!" I.e., not "I'm struggling" words, but "why me?" words. (3) People should try and be ultra-cooperative with police, for their own sakes, but that's a lot easier to say in the abstract than follow through on once you're getting electrocuted. I for one am a giant pussy and can predict with 99% certainty that if I got tasered I would mostly lie on the ground bawling and cursing and probably not following orders that well. It takes active self-discipline to be able to comply with orders from people who are attacking and hurting you, whether it's right for them to be doing that or not.

the "no ID" thing has nothing to do with the police state and everything to do with UC library policy.

-- gbx (polarbea...), November 17th, 2006.

Since the computer lab is open 24 hours a day, they've always been consistently strict about requiring IDs from everyone. It's not a selective thing - security goes to every person at every computer and checks their ID. Anyone who uses the library should know that - there are signs posted everywhere. And I know campus security puts up with a lot of whiny and belligerent shit from students who forgot their IDs and are desperate to use the computers. But - this was beyond the pale. It was completely gratuitous and over the top. The one time I was witness to a late-night altercation in that lab, it was a lot of shouting and raised voices, and the student was escorted to the door without physical intervention. The way the news story reads here, the student was actually leaving when they physically restrained him for no good purpose, and then went apeshit on him when he got upset about it. Total douchebaggery.

That said, I doubt I would've been a hero and tried to physically intervene had I been present. By the end of the video it looks like there are at least four or five campus officers present (further underscoring how ridiculous this is - really, all five of you can't manage to get this guy to the door?), and they seemed out-of-control enough to attack anyone who tried to intervene. I don't know that normal definitions of group mentality really apply here - even if the guy had singled out one person to do something, what could that person do? There were already students trying to engage the cops verbally.

At UCI we require photo IDs to check anything out, but the computers can be used by anyone. *shrug*

of course not! it explains it.

oh I don't really think that's the case at all actually. sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.

Think what would have happened to this country in the late sixties if we hadn't had cell phone cameras!

(xpost: I think there is a certain amount of personal freedom and luxury you are subconsciously trading on here as a white American male that it would never occur to me to take on as a black American male. Actaully, the better way to put it is that, due to my skin color, I have NEVER felt like I've had the luxury of just reacting with the right response to any situation involving authority figures.)

The incident follows the recent announcement that four of the campus police department's nearly 60 full-time sworn officers had won so-called Taser Awards granted by the manufacturer of the device to "law enforcement officers who save a life in the line of duty through extraordinary use of the Taser." The award stemmed from an incident in which officers subdued a patient who allegedly threatened staff at the campus' Neuropsychiatric Hospital with metal scissors.

Jeff Young, assistant police chief, declined to indicate whether any of the honored officers were among the several involved in Tuesday's incident.

(and xpost you are absolutely correct, and that's a really good point. also, I didn't develop a sense of "getting in shitloads of trouble = bad" until about 25)

xpost dan i see what you're saying totally but hence the strength in numbers beyond just the numbers themselves; more-of-us weakens blame/retribution by dispersing it along more axes

Also Gandhi and MLK weren't concerned about their permanent records.

xpost

(xpost: WTF, Colin)

I believe that shit getting completely out of hand is sometimes the only thing to make the responsible bureaucrats sit up and notice a problem.

Tom, the part you're missing here is that if these onlookers had assaulted security, the "problem" bureaucrats and the public would be noticing right now is "Out-of-Control Student Riot," not "Shitty Abusive Security Procedure." If those students had in any way tried to physically prevent authorities from doing what they were doing, the original abuse would be immediately buried and forgotten within a much bigger mess (and I'm guessing predictable ILXors would be posting here with some "I sympathize with the cops, man, getting stormed by a bunch of spoiled liberal-arts rich kids" bullshit).

I would think that nabisco and Dan are not insane in there reaction to this stuff if there had been, say three students and four cops with guns, but the numbers (and the number of video cameras) were on the students' side, and they didn't do anything.

overpowering one out-of-control cop in what must be an isolated and impossible-to-predict situation requires a situational courage that admittedly i'm not sure exists among today's american college students, but which would, for reasons i am not going to enumerate here, would almost certainly not have resulted in nabisco's "students outta control!" news stories and almost certainly would have separated a violent bully from his victim

It seems to me that the lunch counter demonstrators and Rosa Parks were much more clearly breaking the written law and in danger of getting killed then a student who'd put himself between that victim and those cops would have been.

Er, xpost.

And Colin, I'm cosigning Dan's big personal fuck you, and if Rosa Parks were with us and not generally opposed to that kind of language and behavior, I'm guessing she'd put down the third signature on that one. If you can't tell the difference between sitting in place until police remove you and trying to physically restrain a police officer -- and I guarantee you you will find exactly zero evidence of anyone in the 1960s saying "hey, they're going to turn a hose on those marchers! that's unfair! we need to physically prevent those policemen from turning on that hose!" -- then you're too dumb to bother arguing with.

colin, read the OTHER part of dan's and my reasons why your analogy fails

Also funny how you guys seem to assume that most white people give a shit about most non-white people when all of the political indicators post-9/11 seem to indicate the opposite.

x-post My face is completely straight because I never said they should have tackled the cops. Give me a fucking break.

I assume people should not watch other people be shackled and forced to endure repeated electrical shocks for no reason and stand by and do nothing. Yes I know, that's naive and stupid too.

P.S. Colin by the time people were gathering round to see what all the screaming was about, police had their hands and tasers already on this person, meaning no one was going to be able to "step between them" without physically forcing police to step back first.

"working in federal bureaucracy I have absolutely no faith in the idea that you can just wait it out, let somebody be handcuffed or beat up and taken away for no fucking reason at all (except that we give guns and uniforms to total idiots on a too-frequent basis) and then expect somehow that lady justice will come along and provide that person with their comeuppance."

In actual point of fact, I don't disagree with Tom that actually doing some violence to a police officer could be (practically, morally, maybe even legally) acceptable in that situation -- I'm only distancing myself from that now because there are non-violent alternatives that are way better than taking pictures and yelling from a safe distance, and y'all seem to be basing your counter-arguments on "it's nuts (bad, stupid, illegal) to fight the cops -- so yelling from a safe distance is all you can do."

Alex -- you're wrong, but that's ok.

That's just wrong, unless you're using a definition of "clashing" I don't understand.

P.S. y'all and your "revolutionary" logic here and your comparisons of your abstract theoretical actions to Rosa fucking Parks have yet to make any sort of case for how students should have intervened or how, in the end, and in the big picture, such intervention could have led to an overall better real-world turnout (and/or Freeing Mumia or whatever else you're looking for here).

I'm also pretty positive that escalating the situation with the cops benefits absolutely no one here.

I can't believe Rosa Parks's role in the civil rights movement is still not being taught correctly!

Also cosign with nabisco's last post.

I think that that's the worst thing anyone has ever said about me. Ever. I'm quite serious, and withdraw my apology to nabisco.

Being told I don't get the concept of passive resistance by a bunch of fucking morons who don't get the concept of passive resistance, on the other hand, is no big deal.

I'm not advocating passive resistance on this thread at all, just to extract myself from that semantic whirlwind.

Genet, Burroughs and Terry Southern sitting unread in the stacks.

"After a few jury changes, the jury arrived at a verdict of not guilty for all charges except a felony count of mayhem for Williams [the main assailant], and one misdemeanor assault charge for both Williams and Watson on October 18.... As the families of the defendants celebrated the lesser sentences, Denny surprisingly approached Damian Williams' mother Georgina and hugged her. Other family members then exchanged warm embraces and words of reconciliation with him."

I remember an LA Times article that ran after the trial that had a number of surprising quotes from Denny indicating that he sympathized with the rioters frustrations, bore no ill will towards his attackers, and had developed positive relationships with them and their families.

Carry on.

I just erased a long post detailing my own experiences with the police and with violence, because it looked like dick-swinging and because I use my real name here. I hate the type of argument gbx and Alex and others have used here, that lame-o "it's the ones who talk about resistance who'd never lift a finger IRL LOLOL" crap. If you want details of my experiences with violence and cops, send me an e-mail -- I do know that when I write about violence and police intimidation I am not writing purely theoretically, and I know that that's true for Dan and probably for Tom as well, and probably for others here too. So fucking what?

I don't think that was the argument at all. I think the argument was "We think that this situation is sufficiently different from the situations you're comparing it to that it doesn't make sense to apply or even EXPECT the same strategies to deal with it". gbx's argument also included a "I have a record and it fucking sucks, so I understand why people are concerned about getting one" detour.

Argh, there is a "that" in there that should be a ", so"

I might have phrased that in a way that seems argumentative, which is not how I mean it. The gist is that I'd rather commend these people for what they did do (witness, speak out, etc.) than criticize them for what they didn't (physically intervene).

Plus I should admit one of the things that got under my skin about this argument: it's very possible that those bystanders decided that what they did was the right thing, just like Dan and I have decided. That seems like personal decision we can just respect. So if you criticize them for not physically intervening, it feels like you're (by extension) criticizing me personally -- criticizing my ethics! -- because if I were there I would still not think physical intervention was a good idea. Does that make sense?

no, she was trained in activism at the highlander school.

I can't believe Rosa Parks's role in the civil rights movement is still not being taught correctly!

it's being taught incorrectly for ideological reasons.

most people would have us believe it was a spontaneous act of individual courage because that's what america is all about by golly. mlk has also been co-opted into this individualist line of thought. god forbid we connect the civil rights movement to a long tradition of left-wing and labor activisim.

ok now back to our regularly scheduled bickering. (p.s. i agree with nabisco and dan.)

So wait Colin now I want to hear your amazing story about how spontaneously you and a pack of other people non-violently interjected yourselves between a bunch of armed amped cops and their victim and then everything turned hunky dory! Because that sounds like one hell of a fucking story.

Everyone agrees that if you fuck with the cops, you'll probably get hurt. I don't agree that you'll always get hurt, and, more importantly, I don't agree that it's never worth getting hurt or risking getting hurt. Bad cops count on citizens' fear, and it works out for them most of the time.

Colin, you are Tuomas and I claim my five.

The incident follows the recent announcement that four of the campus police department's nearly 60 full-time sworn officers had won so-called Taser Awards granted by the manufacturer of the device to "law enforcement officers who save a life in the line of duty through extraordinary use of the Taser." The award stemmed from an incident in which officers subdued a patient who allegedly threatened staff at the campus' Neuropsychiatric Hospital with metal scissors.

it might be helpful to imagine that the bully was not uniformed, but some big burly library supervisor, and did the same thing. would the same response - whatever you feel that is - be called for?

The balance sheet so far as I can tell will forever remain:

(a) they witness and protest = one person gets tasered and fairly strong record of misconduct exists

(b) they attempt to physically intervene = multiple people get tasered and police have a good opportunity to suggest they were the ones being victimized

Accepting Nabisco and Dan's critique of Colin's argument hinges on accepting this point. I'm not sure that I do.

Also, even if you accept this point: if the guy had died, been Tasered to death, would your position change? In other words, is the larger handwringing "oh, it'll be the worst excesses of 1968 all over again and we'll get backlashed" argument worth, well, a human life? This is basically Tracer's argument (i just wonder how far a uniformed person would have to go to warrant a physical response from horrified onlookers who outnumber him/her - death? or would that just pre-emptively contribute to an even more escalating situation, demanding an even more inconsequential reaction?), which no one really answered (since they were too busy falling all over themselves to lambaste Colin's admittedly-unfortunate misunderstanding of Rosa Parks) (though Amateurist totally OTM about why that myth deliberately gets propagated).

Or to put it differently:

Um other than assuring an election cycle with LAW & ORDER as the primary theme what do you think that will accomplish?

Uh, saving a life, maybe? Not in this particular case maybe, but that's a very comfortable hindsight talking. You can't watch someone getting Tasered and know if they're going to be the one whose heart stops, or the one whom the cops tortured for shits and giggles.

xpost "we also have pretty good logic suggesting it'd have created a worse one -- more people getting hurt, and a greater likelihood that the police could claim they weren't at fault." You can only say that because you know the guy didn't die. Don't overlook the role that hindsight is playing in your argument.

2) getting hurt because you're taking action to defend someone physically is a hurt that the people who are taking action are figuring into their equation, unlike the poor sap who is getting electrified over and over again

1) i was talking about the crowd's actions, not the cop's, presuming a theoretical action of "getting this bully to back down." that may not have been the goal of anyone in the room. but if it were, it was not accomplished.

0) a library supervisor seems like a much more likely person than a cop to have responsibility for access to a library. so it doesn't seem too far off to wonder how yours or my reactions would have differed had the bully in this sad story not been wearing a uniform.

That being said, I think Tombot is completely OTM in saying that part of the slow creep of authoritarianism is the conviction, on the part of authority figures, that no one will actually put their lives on the line to fight back.

Or to put it differently, I found myself wishing that one of the cops would catch a bottle to the head from an onlooker.

a lone voice of reason, alas

UCLA students and civil rights activists on Friday demanded an independent investigation into a campus police officer's use of a Taser gun on an Iranian-American student. Speakers at a news conference and subsequent rally said the shocking of Mostafa Tabatabainejad, 23, sent a chill across the campus.

"As students we feel our safety is endangered, and we do not feel safe on campus," said Sabiha Ameen, president of the Muslim Students Association.

Tabatabainejad was shocked Tuesday night after arguing with a campus police officer who was conducting a routine check of student IDs at the University of California, Los Angeles, Powell Library computer lab.

Campus police say he refused to show his student ID and refused to leave the building when asked. Police said they shocked him with the stun gun after he urged others to join his resistance and a crowd began to gather.

The incident was recorded on another student's camera phone and showed Tabatabainejad screaming while on the floor of the computer lab. It was posted on the Web site YouTube.

Students at the news conference said there was no sign that Tabatabainejad was targeted because of his ethnicity. But his lawyer disagreed.

Civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman announced separately that he plans to file a lawsuit charging that the American-born Tabatabainejad was singled out because of his Middle Eastern appearance.

UCLA's interim chancellor, Norman Abrams, cautioned the public against jumping to conclusions before a university investigation is completed.

"It would be best if everyone, within and without the university, would withhold judgment pending review of the matter," Abrams said in a written statement.

Student Combiz Abdolrahimi, chairman of UCLA's chapter of the National Iranian American Council, said he's unsatisfied with the university's conduct of the investigation so far. He said the incident would likely have been ignored if it hadn't been taped and made public.

"There were incidents before and you read about them in the paper, but it doesn't register until you actually see the reaction, hear the screams," he said.

It was the third incident in a month in which police behavior in the city was criticized after amateur video surfaced. The other two involved the Los Angeles Police Department.

OTM, actually.

sorry we couldn't fulfill your macho dreams

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-taser21nov21,0,1459046.story?coll=la-home-headlines

xpost.