The Author – Bart Busschots
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Nov
21
The Power of YouTube? I Sure Hope So
Filed Under Polemics & Politics on November 21, 2006 at 3:17 am
In this day and age there are cameras everywhere. Between surveillance cameras and mobile phones we are seldom unobserved. Generally people see this as a bad thing, Big Brother and all that. However, when you combine it with the ability to easily publish media on places like YouTube it can actually be a good thing and serve to protect ordinary citizens from abuses of power. This was brought home to me today by an exceptionally disturbing video shot on a mobile phone in UCLA which clearly shows a student being abused by police. I warn you, this video is exceptionally disturbing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g7zlJx9u2E.
The video starts with the student clearly saying that he is leaving and asking the police to let go of him. He is quite clearly cooperating with the police but objects to be man-handled by them (a very reasonable objection). How do they respond, they Taser him! His screams of agony are heart-wrenching. Needless to say he ends up on the floor. The police then start YELLING at him to get up and when he doesn’t they taser him again, for longer. At this stage they start yelling agian but a crowd has gathered and you can hear students quite correctly pointing out that he can’t get up immediately because he’s just been tasered twice! There are already students asking for badge numbers at this stage but getting no where. In the middle of this second tasering the victim lets out a clearly audible yell “Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your fucking abuse of power”. I can’t say I disagree with him! But it gets worse and so does the abuse of power by the police. They continue to taser the victim and refuse to give their badge numbers to the many students repeatedly asking for them. The video ends with a student who is complaining about the abuse he just saw in a calm and and completely civilized tone being threatened with the taser “back or you’ll get tased too”. That is an abuse of power plain and simple, it is police brutality. There was no need for this extreme level of violence.
Before the days of video cameras in mobile phones and YouTube we would have only been able to hear this story from second-hand reports and we’d have to take those reports with a grain of salt. Now in cases like this we can all see the raw footage for ourselves and base our opinions on the hard evidence. I for one think this incident is a disgusting abuse of police power. In the past this was unlikely to ever result in any action being taken against these officers but with this video being so publicly available it will be very hard for the police to sweep this under the carpet, particularly if the students of UCLA keep the pressure on. I personally hope this video turns out to be the evidence that gets these animals ejected from the police force.
“Now in cases like this we can all see the raw footage for ourselves and base our opinions on the hard evidence.”
Not sure I’d agree with that. If nothing else, the video isn’t very clear, and appears to only start when the incident is already well underway. Not exactly “hard evidence” of anything, beyond a lot of shouting, screaming, and tasering.
I disagree Dave, if you listen to the dialogue you can clearly hear the victim saying he has agreed to leave. That’s before 6 minuets of brutal abuse. The violence is totally out of proportion considering the guy was just sitting in the library working away but had forgotten his ID card. What ever way you look at it those officers made a terrible mess of their job. They made the situation worse not better, delayed the student’s exit from the building (which is what they were there to achieve) and zaped the crap out of him for no reason. If that’s how they treat a co-operative student I’d hate to see how they deal with someone who is out on a protest or what ever. Scary stuff!
“…the guy was just sitting in the library working away but had forgotten his ID card.”
I missed that bit, whereabouts is it in the video?
Sorry, got that from the news reports.
It is a valid point though that the lead-up to these things will never make the internet, who takes out their phones and starts recording a non-event! It’s only as it turns nasty that people will begin to record it.
Quite true, hence my point re lack of “hard evidence”. If you want evidence of someone being tasered, yeah, sure, that’s there. But I’d consider there are various situations where it’s quite reasonable for law enforcement to taser someone, so I’d need a bit more evidence than that before making up my mind one way or the other.
Of course there are occasions when its acceptable for police to use weapons to carry out an arrest. Usually they are with armed or dangerous criminals. I appreciate that police are better qualified to judge who is armed and dangerous than I am, but seriously, a college student in a library?
3 guards taking a guy out of a library though? I am pretty sure they could have managed this without assault. According to the official police statement
“As the officers attempted to escort him out, he went limp and continued to refuse to cooperate with officers or leave the building”
If he went limp they could simply have handcuffed him, like police do in this country. I am sure 3 police can move student.
I guess I’m trying to figure where the balance is on this one. Out of curiosity, Bart, Des – do you think this young gentleman is entirely innocent and in the right in this situation?
No of course not. The guy is guilty of acting like a total dickhead and not following police instructions (to a point). But he was presenting no physical threat to anyone. Yes he was refusing to leave, but only by physically refusing. The 3 lads could easily have slapped the handcuffs on him and walked/dragged/carried him out of the building, which is what they ended up doing anyways. So they achieved nothing by tasering the shit out of him.
Police should use their weapons to protect themselves and others against any physical threat. A student laying on the floor refusing to move is no physical threat, it may be some form of illegal protest, but you don’t deal with those by attacking the protestor. If anything that will just make it more likely than he/she will be joined by others.
I am all for allowing cops to kick the shit out of people if they are causing a physical threat to anyone (cop or civilian). I just can’t see what the cops were thinking here. I certainly hope it wasn’t “Lets taser him, that’ll calm him down”. Tasers do stun and restrict the movement of the body, but by the polices own admission, the body wasn’t moving anyways. So I just don’t see the need in tasering in this case.
Dave, I doubt he’s completely innocent, if he was the cops would not have been called! However, just from watching the video we can see that the violence was totally pointless. You clearly hear the guy telling the cops he is cooperating and will leave. At that point if the police were any good at their jobs they would have stood back and followed him out. Problems avoided, violence avoided, disruption to study avoided …… you get the idea.
Imagine if this happened in the library in Maynooth, would you be out protesting for a change in security practices? I know I would.
Just a little aside, tasers have the impact of temporarily paralysing the victim.
So leaving aside whether the police over-reacted or not, to taser someone and then immediately say
“Get up or you’ll be tasered again”
is showing an ignorance of the technology, and considering they get training to use these weapons it can only be assumed that they are intentionally inflicting harm on the victim. And thats not even getting to the point that they tasered him after he was handcuffed?
He was obviously a terrorist, I mean he wasnt white, so they had to go hard on him.
Dave seriously, WTF are you on about. It was clearly an over the top reaction to the situtation by the cops. Sure they tasered him when he was handcuffed on the ground. What sort of danger did he pose then?