UCLA Student Continually Assaulted by Police

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Sonnenritter

Sonnenritter

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[SIZE=-1]Mostafa Tabatabaineja, a UCLA student was continually tazed because he didn't have his student ID on him at the time. He was told to leave. About five minutes later after he finished up and was walking towards the door, police officers grabbed him. After he continually told the officers to let him go and they didn't comply, he fell limp as means of peaceful protest to the situation. From there, they continue to assault him with tasers for not having his student ID. Fuck the police.

What's even better, another student caught most of it on his cellphone. No cover-up here.
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I've been to the exact UCLA library to study there, even though I had no UCLA I.D. It's actually a great place to study. Anyhow, I think the police used excessive force there. Tasers are for self defense.
 
From the LA Times website.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ucla17nov17,1,1813095.story?coll=la-headlines-california

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'll just copy/paste my thoughts from another thread on the same video/article.

________________________________________________________

Cop: "Stand up."
Fool: "FUCK YOU!!!" *starts struggling and kicking each time they try to lift him up"


Smart move, genius. No reason at all to use a non-lethal weapon (yea, I know, in some rare cases a suspect has died) to stop his continuing struggling :rolleyes: Maybe he didn't realize that kicking cops while screaming like a banshee is a pretty fucking stupid idea, even while cuffed.

Maybe the force was "excessive", maybe not, but the article is a biased sympathy-story. He didn't get tazed for not having I.D., he got tazed for resisting arrest and assaulting police officers.

I wonder if any of the students got cuffed as well. Another bad idea: Interfering with police officers while trying to arrest an aggressive suspect.

...The video showed one officer responding to a student by threatening that the student would "get Tased too."...
...Tabatabainejad "encouraged library patrons to join his resistance."...
Click to expand...
Outnumbered by about 50:1 by pissed college kids who keep interfering with an arrest? "Illegal Assault" my ass.

Neither the video footage nor eyewitness accounts of the events confirmed that Tabatabainejad encouraged resistance, and he repeatedly told the officers he was not fighting and would leave.
Click to expand...
Bullshit, he clearly tried to wrestle himself away and kicked at officers several times when they tried to lift him up, telling them to get the fuck off of him.


Lesson learned. When you get stopped by cops, don't refuse their orders then put up a fight when they place you under arrest for resisting.

I'm not saying cops should be able to use whatever the hell force they feel like using during an arrest, but I don't see this one as "excessive" - and the bullshit article contradicts the video in nearly every sentence - clearly written to influence readers to join a P.D. headhunt.

________________________________________________________


You can't ignore/resist police just because you don't think you've done anything wrong. It's not like the cops zapped the hell out of him in an ambush, then asked for identification. He turned a routine I.D. check into a fight with the cops because he didn't feel he needed to cooperate. Dumb. Wrong. They used a defensive, non-lethal weapon to knock some of the fight out of him after he assaulted police officers, resisted arrest, and called out for a riot.

That article is typical journalist bullshit. I don't understand how anyone who has watched the video can find a shred of truth in that biased piece of trash, it doesn't even begin to describe what's really going on in the video. But the media wanted a good scandal story, and people are just eating it up. I guess they win.
 
I've watched the video a few times and never saw any direct assaults by Mostafa toward the police. He has 20,000 to 150,000 volts travelling through his body. Something that directly affects muscles and the nervous system. He never threw punches or kicks, hip tossed anybody, or anything over the top. He used a standard method of civil disobedience. He went limp. Listen to the police talk. It's "quit dragging us down" and "stand up". Not once do I hear "stop kicking me" or anything of the sort. If a leg or arm happened to graze an officer, blame that on their multiple uses of the taser.

Maybe he wasn't in the right the entire time. Does it work on the opposite? When we see a cop doing something not right, we can stun the fuck out of him?

They're not even real cops. They're rent-a-cop UCLA campus police. The same GI Joes that sit around in high schools all day doing jack shit.

The "pissed college kids interferring" never placed a hand on the police. Some asked for their badge numbers and information and was threatened with violence. Make up whatever story you want in your head. That's not legal.

This all could have been avoided by him showing his ID or someone calling Admissions. It didn't happen that way. This by no means gives officers the right to use "less-lethal", as it is referred to by law enforcement, weapons to control civil disobedience. This was a direct show of force. An example that you are powerless no matter how obscene the situation is.
 
I would like to taser BasilisK.
 
Sonnenritter said:
This all could have been avoided by him showing his ID or someone calling Admissions. It didn't happen that way. This by no means gives officers the right to use "less-lethal", as it is referred to by law enforcement, weapons to control civil disobedience. This was a direct show of force. An example that you are powerless no matter how obscene the situation is.
Click to expand...


By the same token, what gives him the right to disobey a campus rule simply because he feels he's being singled out? The tazers were a bit much, but I'd want to do the same thing. He acted like a 5 year old whose parents won't buy him a new toy.
 
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