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

"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.