Furor Over UCLA Student Tasered By Police
Some of the images and stories coming out of 21st Century America, although not necessarily interconnected, are not nice ones. So much for the days of Americana artist Norman Rockwell.
The latest is a story — and a You Tube video — that is truly cringeworthy. See our coblogger Michael van der Galien’s earlier post HERE. Even though some will argue that the student “deserved it” for not immediately complying with the police, these are relatively unique images from an American academic setting. The L.A. Times account:
The latest in a recent spate of cellphone videos documenting questionable arrest tactics surfaced Wednesday, this one showing a UCLA police officer using a Taser to stun a student who allegedly refused to leave the campus library.Grainy video of the Tuesday night incident at UCLA’s Powell Library was broadcast Wednesday on TV news and the Internet, prompting a review of the officers’ actions and outrage among students at the Westwood campus.
The footage showed the student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, falling to the ground and crying out in pain as officers stunned him.
First impression: it sounds like a Muslim student. So what happened next?
According to a campus police report, the incident began when community service officers, who serve as guards at the library, began their nightly routine of checking to make sure everyone using the library after 11 p.m. is a student or otherwise authorized to be there.Campus officials said the long-standing policy was adopted to ensure students’ safety.
When Tabatabainejad, 23, refused to provide his ID to the community service officer, the officer told him he would have to show it or leave the library, the report said.
Question that will come up: were they checking other students as well? If not, why? If they just checked him, why? Will some say it was racial profiling? And people will argue both ways as to whether, if it is, it was justified. MORE:
After repeated requests, the officer left and returned with campus police, who asked Tabatabainejad to leave “multiple times,” according to a statement by the UCLA Police Department.“He continued to refuse,” the statement said. “As the officers attempted to escort him out, he went limp and continued to refuse to cooperate with officers or leave the building.”
Witnesses disputed that account, saying that when campus police arrived, Tabatabainejad had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack. When an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, the witnesses said, Tabatabainejad told the officer to let go, yelling “Get off me” several times.
“Tabatabainejad encouraged library patrons to join his resistance,” police said. “The officers deemed it necessary to use the Taser.”
So was he tasered because he was trying to get others to back him up — as lesson to others? Or what? MORE:
Officers stunned Tabatabainejad, causing him to fall to the floor.The video shows Tabatabainejad yelling, “Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your … abuse of power,” the Daily Bruin reported, adding he used a profanity.
“It was beyond grotesque,” said UCLA graduate David Remesnitsky of Los Angeles, who witnessed the incident. “By the end they took him over the stairs, lifted him up and Tasered him on his rear end. It seemed like it was inappropriately placed. The Tasering was so unnecessary and they just kept doing it.”Campus police confirmed that Tabatabainejad was stunned “multiple” times.
The Daily Bruin has this piece on campus reaction. Some highlights:
An incident late Tuesday night in which a UCLA student was stunned at least four times with a Taser has left the UCLA community questioning whether the university police officers’ use of force was an appropriate response to the situation.
The article notes that he was told to stand up several times and didn’t. It adds:
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.”
Police officials counter that they have no way of knowing if someone is going to be a danger or not. AND:
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.
Tabatabainejad was released from custody after being given a citation for obstruction/delay of a peace officer in the performance of duty.
Neither Tabatabainejad nor his family were giving interviews Wednesday.
Police officers said they determined the use of Tasers was necessary when Tabatabainejad did not do as they asked.
According to a UCPD press release, Tabatabainejad went limp and refused to exit as the officers attempted to escort him out. The release also stated Tabatabainejad “encouraged library patrons to join his resistance.” At this point, the officers “deemed it necessary to use the Taser in a “drive stun’ capacity.”
“He wasn’t cooperative; he wouldn’t identify himself. He resisted the officers,” Young said.
Neither the video footage nor eyewitness accounts of the events confirmed that Tabatabainejad encouraged resistance, and he repeatedly told the officers he was not fighting and would leave.
Tabatabainejad was walking with his backpack toward the door when he was approached by two UCPD officers, one of whom grabbed the student’s arm. In response, Tabatabainejad yelled at the officers to “get off me.” Following this demand, Tabatabainejad was stunned with a Taser.
UCPD and the UCLA administration would not comment on the specifics of the incident as it is still under investigation.
A larger question here is the threshold of police response to incidents such as this. Are there proper groundrules? Or will the argument be made that regulation x, y, or z allows it if the officer thinks it’s valid?
There are some instances where what is OK in a court of law isn’t OK in the court of public opinion.
Another question: would we have seen a video LIKE THE ONE BELOW 6, 10 or 15 years ago? And expect this incident to have opened a can of political worms because the student who was stopped and tasered was apparently a Muslim student.
People will have different reactions to this 5-minute, horrorific video, but judge for yourself (and note students’ reaction to the police action):
FOR SOME OTHER VIEWS ON THIS ISSUE SEE:
Americablog, Michelle Malkin, Pam’s House Blend, Digby,
Majikthise, Nicholas’ Blog-o-rama, The Agonist, The Liberator, 3 Blind Mice, Shakespeare’s Sister, Cal From The Trenches, ACS Blog, Jumping Fish (who looks at the racial profiling aspect)
90 Responses to “Furor Over UCLA Student Tasered By Police”
those fellow students should be ashamed of themselves as well by the way. Freaking cowards.
Police: as I see it were simply trying to find an excuse to taser him.
o, near the end of the video i see that the students are getting more courageous and clearly trying to stop the police. Good.
Those police officers: they should be fired immediately and sued for abuse.
MvdG, what were the fellow students suppose to do?
Aisle:
They could also have stood between the student and the police officers as a means of protecting him.
And yes that is what i would have done.
O. I fear that with the incompetence of these officers, any physical interference by students would have led to a much more severe tragedy. I also thought that the verbal outrage by students came pretty quickly, once the abusive nature of the police actions were apparent (@”Get up” taze taze.)
I’ve never heard of tasers being used to prod active compliance. I thought they were only used to induce physical submission. (Which was achieved at handcuffing.) My sense was that the officers were too lazy to carry the man out, and too impatient to drag him off to the side to wait for extra help. What was the rush? Let him have his tantrum in handcuffs, talk him down, and lead him away. Uniformed fools.
Can you imagine Cindy Sheehan being tasered because the officers were to lazy to carry her to the squad car? Or what about the mouthy mentally ill? Jeez.
So, we can see nada from the video, and don’t know what happened beforehand, and can rush to decide the police were wrong?
That’s stupid. I’m glad the police didn’t have to deal with 80 UCLA kids going nuts. It takes only a few maniacs to start a riot, and now the mania is probably spreading.
A taser is pretty mild in comparison to how this guy would be treated in so many places in the world and so many bygone eras. If you can’t tell how far forward we’ve come, your head is screwed on wrong.
On college campuses a 23 year old is typically assumed to be a student, not a transient. At least in that nothing worse could come of it if he were a student. Personally, I often do not wear shorts with pockets so I must carry everything in my hands. This student had a backpack, so why didn’t he have ID?
For whatever reason it was asked for. Frustrating I know and it raises the question:
“What right do others have to know your identity in public?”
This was not a public library however. Law enforcement are expected to “control” situations of lawlessness. This means not letting suspects, even witnesses at times, run away (ie run to a car and get a gun). Misuse of tazers risks have that option taken away which means officers need to meet more rigorous physical requirements to deal with arrestees. Given the events and officers reaction to them, I would say that the tazers distracted from their job. Kill someone with one who is non-violent and you can forget that extra wing on the library for sometime.
What students should have done is called public law enforcement if they believed the actions of the campus officers was illegal or threatened to injure the student.
Nutters, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the effects of a taser, but let me assure you that the last thing you are going to do when stunned is get up, that’s the whole point of a taser, incapacitating the target. You don’t need to know that, since I assume you aren’t an officer, but the policemen sure as hell should have known it. If they did, they were brutal for the hell of it. If they didn’t they are incompetent.
You can see at the end of the video that the kid was already incapacitated when they gave him the last shot. Since he was already helpless the only reason to give him the last shot is punishment for not obeying the comand to get up, never mind the fact you’ve already been shot and are therefore in no condition to get up. You’re right, in other countries this would be soft treatment. Since when did we start comparing ourselves with Iran, Saudi Arabia, China etc.? Have our standards really gone so low?
The kid is racially Arab. It’s not at all a slam-dunk that this had any racial component, but it should be looked into. From his voice, he is fully American and since they probably didn’t know his name, it could be that they thought he was latino/indian or something else, so I’m giving the officers the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t think “ohhh terrorist!” when they saw him.
Michael, I think the students did the best they could. If they had tried to get between the kid and the officers the violence would have only escalated. Considering how willing they were to use their tasers, if more students had gotten involved they might have used their guns. Telling them to stop and asking for their badge numbers was lawfull and civilized, and making sure they had hard video evidence was the best they could do.
vampares the UCPD officers ARE public police officers. They aren’t rent-a-cops. Not much you can do when the cops are the bad guys, which is why police officers need to be kept to such a high standard.
Are these actually police officers or campus security officers? Is there a difference? There is in Australia.
Perhaps a different standard of care would apply.
Police officers would be trained in the use and effects of tasers. Would campus security have the same training?
What strikes me about the whole issue is not whether he was correctly tasered in the first instance. Given the quality of the footage I’m not sure any of us can make a good call on that. But what I see is the continued tasering when the man probably cannot physically comply with the requests.
It’s like smacking a one year old for wetting a nappy – they physically cannot stop doing it. Here he physically could not stand up and they punished him for it. Then again they taser him when he is in handcuffs. Why? Aren’t handcuffs used to restrain people – so he was already restrained – why taser him again? It makes no sense apart from abuse of power. He was already out numbered.
Personally I think the students did as much as they could. They filmed it and were trying to get the details of the officers to report them. If they had intervened they would have been tasered as well. It’s a tough call. But I would have done the same as them.
I hope there are no lasting effects on the student. I hope these officers have been prosecuted under the law. The first tasering may have been justified (I don’t have enough info to make an educated decision) but from what I saw (or more correctly heard) on the footage the others were unjustified and should be considered assault with a deadly weapon. How about assault with intent to cause bodily harm? The should be prosecuted.
We don’t know what happened beforehand, can see that the guy was tased after being subdued, and you can rush to decide that the police were not wrong?
I’m not saying who was wrong at the start of the incident. One story suggests that it was all on the student. Another story suggests that it was all on the officers. As usual, the truth most likely lies somewhere in the middle. However, there’s no doubt that, once the incident began, the officers went way too far and abused their power. They should be fired immediately and face criminal fines for endangering the public if nothing more.
The truth of the matter is that this treatment will ESCLATE unless something is done NOW! Im ashamed to be a former UCLA student. The students could have stopped this and didn’t because of the FEAR of the police.
The Police are supposed to be our friends and protectors right? I may have gone to jail for it, but I for one would not have let this happen. The students were cowards. Plain and simple we have no freedom or security.
Vampares said:
I don’t know – if it’s UCLA, then it’s a University of California, and that’s a public institution. The Supreme Court in 2004 upheld the Nevada law that allows police to arrest someone for refusing to give their name in public; I don’t know if California has a similar law. No matter what state you’re in, tasers are going a little far, I think.
My guess, and I say “guess” because the film is rather poor evidence, is that the officers started out in the right and ended up in the wrong. I don’t think the student was behaving properly. But I think the campus police officers handled the situation poorly. If you go to the link for Michelle Malkin, she’s got an excellent post by a police officer at the bottom. I think he’s pretty much nailed it by what I can surmise from the video. The entire thing could have taken less than 30 seconds by subduing the student and taking him out of the library physically.
had the students intervened, there probably would have been a riot. it seems to me, that by the end the officers were getting more and more in fear of their own safety. they realized it was getting out of hand, and continually tried to use a sort of grotesque bravado on the student as a show to the rest of them to stay away or they’ll get the same.
but regardless of what happened before hand, unless the guy was brandishing a weapon or explicitly threatening violence, the repeated tasering was ABSOLUTELY inexcusable.
you try to stand up on command after having 500,000 volts sent through you repeatedly.
as said before, tasers are designed to incapacitate and subdue. which is the opposite of what they were commanding him to do.
that’s torture, as far as i’m concerned.
They are often murdered.
I need to add this. I was in college during the time of Vietnam and Kent State (in fact, on the day a student was talking about it at my university Colgate, a campus newspaper editor named Howard Fineman was standing in our dining hall listening to the speech). I have never seen anything quite like this and what sets it apart is that he was apparently from the accounts grabbed as he was leaving which is why he said “get off me.” You can look at it from one perspective and say that in these times of heigtened security there was some mental profiling going on and that they considered him suspicious by his look. What is different is what seems to be a trigger happy inclination to use the taser on him. If the standard is the policeman feeling in danger his saying get away from me does not qualify. So one issue is whether in these times of heightened security police do and should have the right to act on their intuition (where any blonde-haired, all-American students stopped). And the other is their reaction including a threat to taser another student. This is one incident and not part of a generalized news story about campuses but you can see here how you have the image of an authority figure coming into a library and literally taking out a student who was not violent or apparently violating any rule. It sounds from the account as if what started the escalation was the way he was singled out and physically touched as he was leaving. Then it became a power struggle between the police who wanted him to comply and obey — and the taser seems to have been used for punishment rather than self-proection. Which is a no no. I suspect we’ll hear about a lawsuit on this, but the courts usually give the benefit of the doubt to the police. And I suspect these policemen will be working other areas and not the campus library real soon.
Actually ‘Drive Stun’ mode, which is the mode he was getting hit with, is quite typically used for as a ‘pain compliance stimuli’ and not a ‘disabling shock’ Without the probes, you don’t get the same disabling effect, and its more like a ‘cattle prod’ sort of thing.
Plus even with probes, its not ‘disabling for 15 minutes’ or whatever. I’ve been hit quite a few times with them, in quick succession in training. Yes it hurts. Yes it sucks to get hit by them. No its not long term disabling (generally speaking, presuming you aren’t jacked up on coke or something and have a heart attack).
Better Now than Never.
Ladies and Gents…I present…NWA:
I’ll repeat the two words mentioned above which are most important and relevant to this discussion: KENT STATE massacre. That’s when several students were shot dead by national guard soldiers on a college campus, and nine more wounded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
Following that tragic incident, throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s, police officers were prohibited from being on college campuses, and security guards were prohibited from carrying weapons. Also during this time, there were no substantial student protest activities, such as taking over buildings and occupying them. That all ended in 1989, 1990, and 1991. Student takeovers returned to college campuses, sparked by tuition increases and budget cuts.
The result? First, campus security officers were deputized as “peace officers” with power of arrest, and eventually they were given firearms. Suffice to say, the re-militarization of college campuses is not intended to protect the students or to maintain educational atmosphere. The true purpose is to protect college property from the students themselves.
Those other students should have taken matters into their own hands, because a felony was being committed by the officers, and their orders to the victim were not lawful. If the police refuse to respect the law, and won’t respect the people whom they are duty bound to protect and serve, then it is OUR job to MAKE them RESPECT.
A proper response would have been for all the other students to surround the victim, and order the police to stop their felonious assault. Because, were the police to taser the bystanders, a riot would ensue, which would result in the officers themselves being beaten and tasered with their own weapons. Don’t blame the populance, when the riot is incited by the police themselves. In fact, the officers actions alone probably constitute a riot, in and of itself.
This discussion is about what it takes to be a good citizen of the United States. Think Lexington &Concord. Think John Brown. Think John Lennon, vis-a-vis John Sinclair. Think Mario Savio.
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_%28abolitionist%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio
PS: You can indict public officials, including cops, judges, and even district attorneys, by taking the matter directly to the local Grand Jury. Something they’ll never teach you in school.
Honestly, deserving or not, you don’t taser a guy over and over again for being obnoxious. What exactly did this fellow do? You know what I love, that Michelle Malkin, (whose site I looked up in your links out of a sort of knowing curioisty of what she would say) immediately starts ranting off on party lines. What does this have to do with party affiliation? If that had been a pure-bred white American boy, and that had happened to him, would politics be involved in it at all? No, it’d be campus police tasering a kid repeatedly.
How is it that folks can watch that video, and all they get from it is whatever the politics is supposed to be in that situation? They’re campus police on a particularly wealthy campus. They’re barely real cops. They escort kids across the campus, stop little squabbles, catch a few fellows doing drugs and speeding. Just what in the world are these fellows doing tasering a kid over something that isn’t really particularly major?
Beyond that, one of the responders on Malkin’s site claims it was a Community Service Officer or essentially, one of the students that does the checking. In that case, you just had a student taser another student? Right, what could possibly be the problem there? People are idiots.
I don’t have a holy heck of a clue what this has to do with Republicans or Democrats. What legislation did either they or the President support that encouraged the repeated tasering of students on a campus? Were the fellows tasering him Young Republicans? It’s entirely idiocy.
“Beyond that, one of the responders on Malkin’s site claims it was a Community Service Officer or essentially, one of the students that does the checking. In that case, you just had a student taser another student?”
No. You had CSO doing the checking, evidently a fairly standard check after 11PM. Student refuses to abide by the ‘no id, leave the library’ rule so the campus cops get called in. Student escalates further and starts being a moron. Cops start to escort him out. Student goes limp, lies down and refuses to comply, so he gets zapped (stun drive). He then starts kicking and screaming and generally being stupid. Situation gets stupid all around. Would you rather them whack him with a baton? They shoulda just drug his butt out, but:
Someone on one of the UCLA student blogs said there is a campus police rule to ‘not drag’ a student out of a building, hence the reason they didn’t just pick his butt up and toss him out. IMO, if thats true, its an absurdly stupid rule.
Again, not taser, stun drive. There is a difference. One involves incapacitiation with the projectile probes. The other is a pain stimuli to attempt to force compliance.
If you have ever spent time at a university, you know that university police are aggressive and prone to over-reaction. University police depts. are populated with police-type personalities who have nothing better to do than bust people for riding their bicycles on the sidewalk, and they are desperate for any kind of action, wether imagined or real. If you give any cop a chance to use excessive force, you make their day. If you give a university cop a chance to crack student heads, you make their career. I think that university police departments should be abolished, there is no reason why normal police officers can’t handle crime, wether it is on or off campus.
Something that a friend of mine who was campus security (not campus police, but he has a police background himself) pointed out a while back about campus police: not only are they real police, they’re FEDERAL police, not local. This means that they have jurisdiction over everyone and everything and can arrest you for federal drug violations just as easily as pull you over for speeding.
Just a point of information.
They’re not “federal” police. That’s ridiculous.
Okay, I’ll take thge troll-bait.
I’m sure that you, as a proud American, is familiar with John Winthrop’s seminal 1630 sermon, “A city upon a hill”
Even if you’re not religious (I’m not), you can change “God” to “democracy” and you still get an ideal that’s been part of America’s identity since we were still a bunch of colonies along the Atlantic.
Exactly, we didn’t come all this way by looking away from unjust acts.
Well, that’s one side of the story. Not fully backed by the evidence unfortunately. The other side of the story, of course, is much different. The truth, as I already mentioned, most likely lies somewhere in between.
In texas employes of a school that are commisioned (to carry a gun) thru the state are considered peace officers so security officer at a school (or hospital, water district, city, even the federal reserve bank) are texas peace officers. Using a stun gun is legaly no different than using a comealong hold on someone. If you can do one you can do the other. The thing of it is using a comealong can leed to damage and brings the office in closer contact with the actor. Also needs to be mentioned you can’t see anything at any time that allows anyone enough info to make an informed judgment of excessive force.
MVG we usually agree on most things but on this I think your way over the top. Inciting people to break the law, get injured, and cause more problems. When people do get involed in the mannar you advocate bot sides escalate the situation and soon someone could be really getting hurt. Not just some winny kid who should know better.
Also I have been tased and stunned. It’s not so much pain, I think that is just the closest our mind can come to what’s going on. But it does not disable you as such. Personaly I would much rather be shocked than pepper sprayed anyday.
I hear some lady named Rosa Parks disobeyed an order to get out of her seat. I bet she didn’t even produce any id! Sounds like it’s time for drive stun!
Campus security is typically students working on a degree in police/security. These cops don’t use weapons and only have limited powers. In Detroit, a inner city school Wayne State, uses student cops to keep the homeless out of University buildings. It’s hard to confuse a homeless person with a student. In a serious situation local police come in to assist the student cops. A student looking person with a backpack is nothing like a homeless person or non student. The LAPD are under Federal supervision and this incident is going to keep them under supervision.
Rudi, Rudi, Rudi. The university has it’s own police force and it was they who were involved the LAPD has nothing what so ever to do with this.
Of course he looked like a student so he must be.
I mean no thief, drug dealer, or rapist would ever want to blend in to the area. Nope they would try hard to stand out and be as obvious as possible. We should stop any pretence and just target people who can’t be students. And hey it’s not like students ever break the law!!!
Also whats this thing where a taser is this giant escalation? Mind you we can’t even see what they hit him with or why, but if you can use force you can use a taser (legally, department policy varies).
People are much less likely to get injured being tasered than by cops wrestling or fighting with suspects. The kid was given a chance to comply and refused. To make me think anything was done wrong you need to show me much more than this.
Eric–
Taser them all and let campus security sort them out?
Those police officers are nothing but a bunch of low-grade, petty tyrants. Thugs, if you will. They should do humanity a favor and commit suicide.
BYG,
First it’s police not security. Important difference because when they are acting in their capasity as law enforcement you must do as they say or you are commiting a crime. This student commited a crime. They wanted to talk to him because of a compliant and he went nuts. That is plain to here. They were talking calmly he was screaming suggesting a total lack of control. Nothing shown is in any way led be to believe otherwise.
as ucla is a part of the uc school system, all facilities are public…payed for by the tax payer of california
it is policy, not law that those wishing to use the library after 11pm are students or teachers
i believe that you can here on the video an officer threatening other students with being tasered also…all the students were doing was demanding names and badge numbers
the taser is to be used for combative indivduals as a way to subdue them without causing bodily harm…it is not a tool to be used multiple times to force a suspect to submit to commands to “stand up”
the suspect was handcuffed, therefore he was already in a position of submission
the victim is planning a lawsuit…
What’s this world coming to when cops can just randomly card people like that? What will be next, the cops being able to just card people walking down the street? People need to stand up to this tyranny!
Eric–
My comment about tasering them all and letting campus security sort them out is in response to this comment of yours:
I’m so disturbed by the level of police brutality! The student was down on the ground, handcuffed, held by multiple police officers. It’s totally unnecessary to shock him repeatedly.
Why can the police use such force on the student for refusing to provide ID, when the police themselves refuse to give their ID when other students asked them to?
I’m a former UCLA student, and it really pains/disgusts me to see how students are treated there now.
It wasn’t a cop IDing anyone it was a a Community Service Officer who is a student. Whatever was said when the suspect refused to show id it made him call the cops. They showed up and tried to talk to the guy and off we go.
“Well, that’s one side of the story. Not fully backed by the evidence unfortunately. The other side of the story, of course, is much different. The truth, as I already mentioned, most likely lies somewhere in between.”
Well thats essentially the story the guy reported to the LA Times:
“He (Attorney Stephen Yagman ) said that Tabatabainejad, when asked for his ID after 11 p.m. Tuesday, declined because he thought he was being singled out because of his Middle Eastern appearance. Yagman said Tabatabainejad is of Iranian descent but is a U.S.-born resident of Los Angeles.
The lawyer said Tabatabainejad eventually decided to leave the library but when an officer refused the student’s request to take his hand off him, the student fell limp to the floor, again to avoid participating in what he considered a case of racial profiling.”
What is in dispute is whether he ‘decided to leave the library’ before or after the cops started escorting him out. The facts are otherwise pretty much as I laid them out previously — by Tadatabainedjad’s own story. So where was I wrong previously? How is the other side of the story ‘much different’? It looks virtually identical to what I posted earlier.
A stun gun is viewed as a lesser use of force than OC spray, and on a par with pain compliance techniques such as wrist locks and control holds. An air tasser is a greater use of force than pain compliance techniques, but a lesser one than punches, kicks, or the use of other impact weapons. So if the officers were justified in using a wrist lock then they were justified in using a stun gun
BYG,
that was a direct response to this by Rudi
Do I need to draw a map?
Some of you people are so bent by your own moronic political views you don’t know which way is up! This guy and people like him get exactly what they are fishing for … an opportunity to express their emotional/political views that are inherently anti-government, anti-U.S. and anti-anything.
What does your perfect world look like?
When an officer of the law, duly commissioned by the governing body of your society tells you to leave … you leave. Ahhhh, but not the gentleman in the video. He’s making a point and he’s standing up for something???
If I’ve got a beef I go through the appropriate authorities.
You think these men were abusing power? You have no idea of what that really looks like! Speaking of abusing power … what do you abuse? Do you speed on the highway? Do you support illegal activities by smoking dope? Do you steal from the government by not being honest on your tax return? Do you mock your neighbor?
You make me ache at the thought that you one day will govern this country. Your pathetic calls to stand up to tyranny! Ha! Pull yourself away from your game boy and play stations boys and girls. Dream your dreams of Amerika and an ultra-perfect world. When the mullahs come for you … then you’ll see what real conservatism looks like. Dweebs and sheep.
Eric–
Maybe a map would help us both, Eric.
I’m going to repeat that quote of yours so people here can read it for the third time:
If you’re not saying the cops have the right to stop anybody for anything at anytime, what are you saying? Spell it out for me.
You did see what that was in response to right? Do you think maybe you might get a little context from that?
Eric–
I am unable to understand any context at all for that comment. That’s why I asked you to spell it out.
You gonna draw me that map or not, Eric?
Doesn’t the 4th amendment protect you Americans from producing ID for no reason, and especially for suspected racial profiling? Or has the 4th been thrown out of the window with the wash by your moronic president?