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The police tasered the student after he went limp.

Yeah. Non-lethal force is used when there is a threat. This is as stupid as when the police used pepper spray on non-violent protesters in Richard Pombo’s office. There is some indication the problem started when the random check of IDs was random to only the Iranian looking guy. That part needs to be figured out by an investigation.

However, that the police claim force was used when the student went limp is a major violation of police practices. In such cases you pick up the kid and put him in a cruiser–you don’t beat him, spray him with pepper spray, hit him with eletrical jolts.

Also, when other students came to his defense, they threatened to taser the objecting students.

Worse yet, Josh Marshall reports that UCLA only investigated after alum reports and the officers are not on administrative duty or leave.

“Stand up or you’ll get tased again” Then they tase him. They then scream at him to stand up again and tase him again. Finally the students move in to try and stop it and the police threaten to tase them after the intitial student has left and the students are attempting to gain information to report the incident.

UCLA is going to face the mother of all lawsuits on this one and the individual officers will almost certainly face criminal charges with significant prison time.

In college I saw more than a few incidents of students getting out of control—and none of them involved a student begging security to stop and going limp. I remember one particular jackass who beat his girlfriend and then after being sat on by 3 300 pound+ security guys screaming that he was going to kick their asses for 30 minutes while flailing.

I knew security so I walked up and chatted with the fourth guard standing up calling for the police for a minute and the entire attitude was completely different. It was one of annoyance, but indifference. They controlled the situation and didn’t particularly care for the kid on bottom–it wasn’t the first incident, though it was the last—but they weren’t wanting to beat him up. They were stopping him from violence against another. And even then they didn’t lose their temper and try and hurt the kid, they simply restrained him. It’s not terribly difficult to restrain someone going limp.

These guys weren’t police, they were security guards and they had pepper spray that they never even contemplated using under the circumstances because they were trained to deal with the situation, not make it worse.