Michelle is taking her usual measured, "let's wait and hear the whole story" stance, while Ace and Allah question the cops' decision to taser the student.
Naturally, the tasee has lawyered up - and as Michelle points out, a whole crowd of civil rights groups are siding with him, most noticeably CAIR. Interestingly, Tasee's lawyer has his own baggage, as Patterico points out:
The best part: the “high-profile civil rights lawyer” is Stephen Yagman, currently under indictment for money laundering and tax evasion.
Both Ace and Allah quote witnesses who state that, althought the use of tasers may have been excessive, Tasee was definitely either making trouble or was someone who would not be opposed to making trouble:
Let me start off by saying that the guy DEFINITELY was asking to get his ass kicked. He was being extremely rude with the campus patrol guys (who are college students...this was before the real UCPD got called in). He was not complying with their requests to leave the premises, and he was definitely itching for a fight. I actually know the guy and a few of his friends, and I can tell you that he's the kind of guy that loves to make trouble.
Just as a little backstory, one of the quotes the guy has on his facebook (which he now has taken down) was "I like to find the most difficult solutions to the simplest of problems".
He definitely taunted the UCPD into behaving the way they did with him.
I'm a little disappointed in Ace's moderation. Personally, from what I heard in the video and what I've read online, Tasee is just the kind of little bitch who would try to make a point about his precious "civil liberties" and have it go down this way. Bottom line, if he had just left the library when he was first asked to, therefore aoviding the need to call the campus police, his protesting ass would have remained taser-free. I would have, because for me, rules are rules and legitimate authority is just that. Does that mean Tasee got what he deserved? I suppose that depends on how you define "excessive force". In my opinion, one of the cops shooting Tasee in the leg is excessive; tasering him on drive mode to put an end to his little protest and diffuse a potential escalation by other concerned, socially aware citizens is not.
We live in a very different world than that of just a few years ago. A world where "ordinary" American citizens are capable of...who knows what? Where bizarre and questionable incidents take place on college campuses all of the time. Where the unthinkable can come from out of nowhere and change everything in an instant.
In this kind of world, perhaps the type of excessive force used by these campus police may be the difference between an "incident" and a "tragedy".
1 comment:
Regardless of how rude the student was to the authorities, it does not justify the first tasering. Even if it for some reason did, once the student went limp and promised to leave, the officers then tasered him 3 or 4 more times, rather than cuffing him and dragging him away. There is no excuse for the kind of repeated brutalization that the student underwent. You can make the contention that he was asking for it all you want, but if you were tasered 5 times for being a jerk who happened to have dark skin, I think you'd be complaining too.
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