Female Beauty

“Here’s your Patriot Act! your abuse of power!” shouts UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad, screaming in pain and using profanity after UCLA campus police Tasered him for not obeying them promptly.

“Stand up or you’ll get Tasered again!” the police shout back.

The policed repeatedly order Mostafa to stand, and either he cannot stand after being tasered, or he refuses to stand, as an act of civil disobedience and protest. The argument rages about what he did and why he did it. As well, debate rages about how the police acted, and whether they were justified in tasering him, not just once but five times – all after he was handcuffed and offering no resistance.

Further, and perhaps much worse, the campus cops are heard responding to other students who demanded their badge numbers or that they stop tasing Mostafa – the cops threaten the other students with also being tased.

Most police departments do not allow tasers to be used unless someone is violent. The LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department only allow Tasers if a suspect poses a physical threat or is acting combatively. The Sheriff’s Department policy expressly rejects Tasers used simply to move someone.
“We look for assaultive conduct,” said Bill McSweeney, chief of the sheriff’s leadership and training division “We generally don’t use the Taser on passive resisters except when an individual indicates explosive action to follow, such as a verbal threat.”

But UCLA police are allowed to use Tasers on passive resisters as “a pain compliance technique,” Assistant Chief Jeff Young said in an interview Friday. Under UCLA policy, Young said, officers can use the weapons after considering the potential injury to police and to the individual as well as the level of resistance and the need for prompt resolution. Young described Tabatabainejad as a “passive resister” who refused to cooperate with officers. He acknowledged that the student didn’t actively resist the officers. “He was 200 pounds and went limp and was very hard to manage. They were trying to get him on his feet,” Young said. The officers used the device in stun mode — which affects only the part of the body being touched — rather than the dart mode, in which tiny electrodes are fired into a person and pass a current through them, disabling the person entirely.

Controversy also rages about the start of the incident, with witnesses offering opposing explanations and accounts. The gist seems to be that the library community service officer (CSO) announced at 11pm, per well-known and established policy, that they would be checking student IDs. They did so, and Mostafa refused to produce his ID. They asked him to leave and he refused. Mostafa and some supporters claim that he was being singled out for the ID check because if his skin color – he is Iranian-American – and that he refused because he was protesting their racial profiling. The CSOs called the campus police, and when they arrived Mostafa tried to leave – the campus cops stopped him and asked him for his ID. The rest can be seen and heard on the video that is now throughout the internet. The video can be seen here.

Muslim groups are now protesting, apparently in the belief that Mostafa is Muslim - he is not. Rather, he is a Bahai, a Persian unitarian faith that originated in the 1800′s. Iranian groups are also protesting, as Mostafa is Iranian-American. Student groups are also protesting, some carrying signs saying “I’m a student, don’t tase me!”. Various civil rights groups are also now involved, and Mostafa has filed suit against the officers, hiring civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman, accusing them of “brutal excessive force” and of singling him out because of his Middle Eastern appearance.

Some UCLA students have pointed out that the computers in that lab require a student ID number and password to be entered before they can be used – thus, it should have been obvious that Mostafa was a student without requiring a physical ID check. In any case, while the university probably has a reasonable justification in making sure its facilities are used only by students, or that only students are in the building at night (rather than vagrants looking for a warm place to hang out), it is quite a stretch to believe that the CSO’s, usually students themselves, thought that Mostafa was a vagrant, or even that he was not a student, since he was using a computer.

Californians do not have to show ID to police in public areas – this was established by the California Supreme Court in a case from Santa Barbara. UCLA is a state university, so perhaps its own ID requirements are less legally founded than those at private institutions. But, it seems few would really argue that refusal to show a student ID card warrants being repeatedly tasered while handcuffed. Surprise – many do in fact argue precisely that. We have apparently come a long way since the 60′s.

Here we have, at most, a non-compliant student who only complies once the police arrive. But, according to witnesses he DID attempt to comply and leave the library but was prevented from doing so by the very cops who later tased him to get him to do what he already tried to do.

Is failing to comply with campus police orders serious enough that police can then torture someone? He was not suspected of any crime – he was not resisting or combative or violent – and he was already restrained with cuffs.

Further, can cops threaten to tase other completely innocent people who ask for their badge numbers or protest their actions?

Police are charged with controlling situations, not merely suspects – in this case their extreme actions created far more disorder than had existed before their arrival, and they could have been faced with a riot or other people getting tased, or even worse as emotions spiked.

I certainly hope that Americans have not yet become such sheep that they are ready to accept this level of police authority without vigorous response. These cops should be fired, and the campus police policies changed with regard to the use of force.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 4:26 am and is filed under Education, Personality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.