It’s just been a little over 2 months since Boulder cops murdered a young man with their tasers simply because he had grown some marijuana in a field there. He fled the cops because he didn’t want to do jail time for something so stupid. Instead of just sluffing off such a minor ‘crime’, the cops murdered him instead. Now, this past week, campus cops at UCLA put themselves in the international spotlight for torturing an Iranian student with their taser guns inside the student library. These thugs did it in front of numerous students, whom in turn got threatened with being tasered for coming to the aid of the cops’ victim. Because this act of brutality got caught on video, it has even sparked an official protest from the Iranian governement. I think it rather obvious that the student’s accent and Mid East appearance had much to do with why the cops went after him like animals on a hunt.
Not My Tribe
The Myth of Middle Ground
Yep, this incident really illustrates so much of what is wrong with this country. We’ve gotten so accustomed to simply accepting that cops have authority (they don’t) that when shit like this happens, nobody does anything.
Did you hear the kid scream something like “Am I the only martyr?”
Sadly, on this day, he was. I still can’t believe nobody jumped in and tried to keep the cops from tasing him repeatedly. That’s freaking *torture* happening right in public, in front of a crowd… and nobody did anything.
That is very disturbing. What happened before though? Why did the police want to talk to him in the first place? Even if the victim/suspect had done anything wrong, it doesn’t give the police the right to continuously tase the guy. How was he supposed to stand up when he was being tased repeatedly and one of the officers was yelling “stand up” over and over. I imagine the poor guy must have been out of sorts, to say the least, after the first couple of stuns.
It appears as though several students are vocally protesting the police’s actions; most people don’t want to get involved for fear of being arrested–which will follow a person around forever; and if convicted they will have difficulty finding employment, especially if they are to work in legal services or with children. That still sucks though.
It seems that he was a student you just forgot to bring his ID with him to the library. The UCLA library has a policy there of asking for people’s ID after 11 pm (though not before then), and so he was asked to leave when he couldn’t produce it.
But then he tried to sneak back in and finish what he was doing. That’s when the police arrived and demanded his ID again. He started to walk away and refused to verbally answer them it was demanded that he stop walking to leave the library. That’s when the police tasers came out and they began their torture of him.