The Los Angeles Times reports today that the tasered UCLA student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad,
has hired a civil rights lawyer and plans to file a lawsuit against the UCLA police:
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.
This story hasn't even gotten started yet.
For background information on this story, you may want to visit
the original LA Times report as well as this
recommended diary.
As far as I can tell, Tabatabainejad has not spoken on the record with reporters, but his account is being shared through his civil rights lawyer:
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."
As with the other recent accounts of alleged police brutality, UCLA is still conducting an investigation. We can expect this investigation to be lengthy. Whether it is actually thorough is a matter of personal opinion.
There are a couple sides to this story. From today's LA Times article, we can see that Tabatabainejad believed that he was being racially profiled. He apparently responded by being uncooperative, in part by falling to the floor. This likely instigated the officers, who were already annoyed that they had to report to the scene.
But you do not respond to an insect on your wall by firing a cannonball inside your house. That is the problem with the UCPD's response. After all, these are trained police officers. I don't see why they felt sufficiently threatened to the point where they had to use their tasers, multiple times, to eliminate the threat. And isn't that why you use force: to eliminate a threat? The officers probably shouldn't have used force to eliminate an annoyance. Unless, of course, they felt that the race of the individual in front of them was a sufficient threat. In which case, they should find a new career.
I also feel that these officers may not have been appropriately trained in the effects of taser guns. It seems odd that the officers would be yelling at somebody to stand up while tasering him, considering that a taser is intended to incapacitate an individual. It may render him unable to move for multiple minutes. Did the officers know this? If so, bring in Donald Trump: "You're Fired." If not, then UCLA is liable. As a Californian taxpayer supporting this university, I am not amused.
Of course, we should be concerned about more than taxes here. Civil liberties. Police brutality. Torture. Fascism.
I am ashamed that my first diary at Daily Kos has to be about an event that should have never happened.