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Thanks for this information Sean! This is truly an horrendous misuse of power by the UCLA campus police. This horrid treatment of Mostafa Tabatabainejad appears to be a direct result of Islamophobia.
i agree that it was an absolute misuse of power. i mean, the guy simply sat limp in protest after they singled him out. when he yelled at them to stop grabbing him, they busted out the taser gun.
they should’ve understood the complexity of a situation where someone feels like they’re being racially profiled and simply waited for him to make more of an ass of himself (and calm down) before pushing the matter of getting him out of the library, pronto.
it’s not like they were at the airport or a loosely guarded chemical treatment plant — it was the school library.
Watching the video of the tasering made me very very angry. When they threatened to taser the other students, I thought that if that was me - being threatened - I would have pushed and said go ahead. The tasering of a 2nd student would have been lights out brutality. Why not just threaten to shoot them if they get any closer? Isn’t there supposed to be any proportionality of response? Was the guy ever a threat?
after watching the video and reading the reports, i believe that the kid was tasered simply because he was being defiant and making a scene. the “cops” felt they needed to establish their authority, so they did. and that’s just wrong on so many levels.
i agree with you 100%, jim; that was sickening 3,000 miles away on a cell phone video. if i were there, i probably would’ve skipped the argument altogether and jumped one of them after the second tasering, hoping that other students would follow suit. those “officers” should’ve been marched back to headquarters in their own handcuffs.