today.reuters.com — One cell phone video shows Los Angeles police beating a man repeatedly in the face. Another shows a handcuffed, homeless man being blasted with pepper spray in the face.A third grainy video has campus police using a Taser stun gun on a student who refused to leave a Los Angeles university library.
Nov 16, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountNov 17, 2006
Having your backpack and walking towards the door counts as leaving in my book. There is also absolutely no reason to think the video has been edited or otherwise tampered with.
Closed AccountNov 17, 2006
The cops could have gotten away with tasering the kid once, if they in fact were putting him under arrest. After that they should have cuffed him and then picked him up and carried/dragged him to the cruiser. Standing over him and repeatedly tasering him is an abuse of power; I don't care how obnoxious this kid was.
samuel514Nov 17, 2006
1984 (sight)
digninNov 17, 2006
Places to visit:NameLessUno and her computer.-Don't forget to bring the Taser
khiyNov 17, 2006
@meznak "Whether or not the student was being a jerk is a moot point. He was not posing an immediate threat to the officers and, therefore, the Tazer should not have been used. If you call me names, am I right to punch you in the face? No. If you're taking swings at me, you probably deserve to be punched."The whole situation was a threat. 2 officers, a 3rd arrives as backup. 60+ students and an uncooperative, unknown person in an open campus in a large city with a well documented and crazy criminal element. Their first objective was to remove this person from the library for the safety of the students. When he would not comply with the rules and then refused to id himself, the threat level obviously escalated. I don't remember any moment in all that screaming where he stated his name and told them that he was a student. He deliberately, for what ever reason, with held that information.What if he had been the attacker that is now terrorizing UC Long Beach and had just been waiting for an unsuspecting student to use a bathroom? Would you then blame the police and the CSO's for not checking for id's? It seems to me a no-win situation for the authorities. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. People are never happy. I wouldn't want to be a cop just for that.
peter78Nov 17, 2006
It's police brutality videos like this that make me understand why Nazi Germany was possible. 1) We give police the right to tell people what to do and when they don't obey it, they can use excessive force instead of common sense. (This guy could've easily been carried by 2 officers. Instead, they went on a power trip and tazed him because he wasn't standing up. Despite his attitude and non-compliance, he was no threat to them or anyone else in that library. )2) Everyone just watches. No one stands in the way. The best effort to help him is someone yelling "Stop!" You think yelling "Stop!" will stop the police? Why does this happen? Because Police = Authority and people are afraid to question it.Homo homini lupus. Don't forget it.
itsthemechanicNov 17, 2006
The UCLA video was shot with a digital camera and it wasn't "grainy" -- the quality was great. But let's not let that get in the way of a good story.
khiyNov 21, 2006
@ gimpbully "no, he did not break a law. He was leaving when he was accosted. That's from witness accounts. Also, if his screaming is all you're going on, he clearly screamed, several times, that he was leaving. It's not illegal to enter the premises if you're a student, was he not a student?"Yes, he did. CA Penal Code 148. (a) (1) Every person who willfully resists, delays, orobstructs any public officer, peace officer, or an emergency medicaltechnician, as defined in Division 2.5 (commencing with Section 1797)of the Health and Safety Code, in the discharge or attempt todischarge any duty of his or her office or employment, when no otherpunishment is prescribed, shall be punished by a fine not exceedingone thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment in a county jailnot to exceed one year, or by both that fine and imprisonment.He obstructed the Officer from doing his duty and willfully resisted any attempt of the Officer to carry out his duty, which was to secure the situation and learn the identity of the suspect. He refused to comply. You can't just walk away from an officer when he is questioning you in the course of discharging his duty.I did not say that it was illegal for him to be there and as far as the responding officers knew at the time of entry into the library that night, they had an uncooperative, unknown person refusing to identify himself in a library after 11PM, which according to the library and campus policy is against the rules. The officers were obligated to remove him from the environment and question his intentions. Had he not been an idiot, this would have been the end of it. However, he was one and it escalated. His fault.
gimpbullyNov 29, 2006
from all the articles I've read, they claim he refused to provide ID to students making rounds, not cops. He was in the process of leaving and voiced an opinion (while moving), at which point he was tased. Past that point, it was unrealistic for the cops to expect him to have the capacity to obey orders in a speedy fashion (that's the side-effect of being tased, you can't really introduce speed into a lot of common actions, such as walking). No law broken.