11.17.06 - 10:42 am

"officers, we want your badge numbers...."

why are people so ridiculous? i just watched the video of a student getting tased in a UCLA library. i watched as he drew attention to others around him, and consistently ignored the direct commands the officers gave him.

ask, tell, make.

According to news reports, he was supposed to show his ID during a routine check of students. he refused because he thought he was being racially profiled due to his middle eastern appearance. from what i can gather, from then he became loud and obstructive.

all he had to do was show his ID.

there is a middle section of events that im lacking, that transition between refusing to show ID and then the officers demanding he stand up. im assuming, once he refused to cooperate, the officers grabbed him in an attempt to remove him from the library. you can hear him yelling at the officers, "dont touch me!" apparently you can hear him make comments that he is leaving. but, i imagine he was standing, or sitting down, doing whatever he could to passively resist arrest.

all he had to do was cooperate. they are police officers.

so he didnt. he started acting like a jerk. made a scene. and after repeated demands for him to stand up, five from what i could count, you can hear a loud painful scream. this is where two barbs penetrated his flesh and expelled a warm rush of electricity into his body.

from here it just goes downhill for the officers. a huge crowd gathers, they start yelling, demanding badge numbers, pleading with them to not tase him again, accusing them of abusing their power....all while the kid is continuing in resisting his own arrest. so he was tased again. he was warned. he was asked to stand up countless times. and he refused.

i dont know how many times the kid was tased. i dont know why after the first time, he didnt just listen to them and stop making his situation worse. however, i dont understand why the officers tased him more than once. twice is ok, but really, i think they got a little excessive. were the kid to have a gun, a prior felony, a history of insurgency or pose some other threat to the other students of the library then some excessive tasering would have been understandable. after he refused to stand up, and was warned about being tased, the three or so officers present should have just immediately restrained and hog tied him. they should have dragged him out. then there are the conflicting reports of what being tased does to a person physically. that it makes it impossible to stand. that youre too disoriented or confused to cooperate. but then, people will also claim that it leaves only two tiny red marks, and that you can stand just fine afterwards.

and what is with all the students going up to the officers and describing to them what happened, from their perspective? im quite sure the officers are well aware of their actions and the actions of the asshole they tased. but now there will be plenty of lawsuits, some discharging of officers and some major anti police generalization.

suddenly all police are bad guys. they always are.

the better thing for the asshole to have done was to show his ID, and if he felt there was some problems with profiling, taken it up to the appropriate channels. such blatant disregard for the authority of the officers is deserving of his punishment.

"Here's your Patriot Act, here's your fucking abuse of power..."

as for the officers, some hog tying would have done the kid some good. he really should have walked out of there on his own. but, officers are paid to deal with idiots, and if they had to drag him out, breaking his arm in the process so be it. its a double edged sword. they would have been seen as excessive if even doing that.

just listen and cooperate with police. and you wont get tased. or shot. or beat up. or billy clubbed. it may be an inconvenience to deal with them, but at least youre not bleeding to death as a baton is smashing into your face.