If I were a student at UCLA, you'd better believe I'd be in this demonstration. But in this instance, I'd rather be a juror! The photo is swiped from Raincoaster.The UCLA student stunned with a Taser by a campus police officer has hired a high-profile civil rights lawyer who plans to file a brutality lawsuit.
The videotaped incident, which occurred after the student refused requests to show his ID card to campus officers, triggered widespread debate on and off campus Thursday about whether use of the Taser was warranted. It was the third in a recent series of local incidents captured on video that raise questions about arrest tactics.
Attorney Stephen Yagman said he plans to file a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the UCLA police of "brutal excessive force," as well as false arrest. The lawyer also provided the first public account of the Tuesday night incident at UCLA's Powell Library from the student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a 23-year-old senior.
He 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. After police started firing the Taser, Tabatabainejad tried to "get the beating, the use of brutal force, to stop by shouting and causing people to watch. Generally, police don't want to do their dirties in front of a lot of witnesses."
He said Tabatabainejad was hit by the Taser five times and suffered "moderate to severe contusions" on his right side.
UCLA officials declined to respond directly to Yagman's statements, saying they still were conducting their internal investigation of the incident.
The university said earlier, however, that Tabatabainejad was asked for his ID as part of a routine nightly procedure to make sure that everyone using the library after 11 p.m. is a student or otherwise authorized to be there. Campus officials have said the long-standing policy was adopted to ensure students' safety.
UCLA also said that Tabatabainejad refused repeated requests by a community service officer and regular campus police to provide identification or to leave. UCLA said the police decided to use the Taser to incapacitate Tabatabainejad only after the student urged other library patrons to join his resistance.
Some witnesses disputed that account, saying that when campus police arrived, Tabatabainejad had begun to walk toward the door.
In a prepared statement released late Thursday, UCLA's interim chancellor, Norman Abrams, urged the public to "withhold judgment" while the campus police department investigates. "I, too, have watched the videos, and I do not believe that one can make a fair judgment regarding the matter from the videos alone. I am encouraged that a number of witnesses have come forward and are participating in the investigation."
Meanwhile, student activists were organizing a midday rally today to protest the incident, and the Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for an independent investigation.
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.
I've heard enough! Let the jury convene!
17 comments:
"extraordinary use" of a Taser eh?
Sounds like something that might occur at Abu Graib or one of those secret CIA prisons or something. . .
Is there an award for "extraordinary use" of pepper spray too?
Civilian Cams are important documents. But you can never capture the complete context of an event because something has to stimulate the user's decision to begin filming. In this instance (apparently) there was an unreasonable refusal to reasonable request to present identification. Also, I'm not sure what else can be gleaned from this cam, given the lighting, except that the instance was protracted.
This is a good article on Tasers. I would have commented on the site, were Alternet's regulations on passwords not so time-consuming to get through.
Abuses of the Taser? Abuse is a glass half-empty/half-full proposition. In any case not the point here.
But I would have commented on the Colorado case of Ryan Wilson described in the article mentioned above. This seems to me to have been a justifiable pursuit on the part of law enforcement.
Vigilante! Halt! Vhee haff to see your papers…
Show me your badge and I'll show you my I.D. Anytime, baby
I'm tempted to think he provoked them intentionally after he saw the Taser, to show the world that police will resort to unnecessary violence at the least provocation.
Easy money.
To continue to tazer him after he was cuffed is outrageous to me. This story isn't going away any time soon, and it damn well shouldn't.
OK, so, everybody has a can of floor paint and a brush. What I want you to do is to start painting untill your butt hits the wall, but make sure it's the one without the window or door.
I may want off this jury. I am okay with my opinions, but I am not entitled to my own set of facts which support them. From my reading around on this subject, the facts are not established; I may not comment further until I am satisfied the facts in this case are settled.
OK I just had a look at the video and don't like what I see at all. In fact it is pretty much exactly what I was not so subtly suggesting in my first post here. The Taser used as an instrument of torture. This definitely IS "extraordinary use" of a Taser but it does not deserve to win any awards and no lives were saved. On the contrary a whole lot of people were traumatized by what can only be considered to be police/security brutality.
Um Vigilante?
It would really help if the jury had a specific charge or two to deal with. . .
Yeah, that chaos is completely out of control. I know that there are a lot of good cops out there, but I've also run into QUITE a few who are basically socially legitmized criminally insane rednecks. The creed to protect and serve American citizens is often superceded by the creed to flaunt completely unchecked testosterone fueled power. Thank God our current president legislates and protects the citizenry from such abuses so responsibly. (That last line's sarcasm, btw.)
I wonder if a jury might be needed to decide over whether the students should have tried to stop the abusive police officers...
Once a suspect is apprehended and subdued, he should be handcuffed and taken to jail and not subjected to further unnecessary violence. End of story.
As we all know by now, if this incident had not been videotaped, no one would have been the wiser other than, of course, the suspect.
I think I might want to watch Tabatabainejad's suit as a spectator than as a juror.
I appreciate the work of all people who share information with others.
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