Torture begins at home

[glaurung]

Some time back, morgan_dhu asked how it could be that Americans were not engaging in mass protests in response to the news that their government was flouting international law and giving itself permission to torture anyone they deemed to be an "enemy combatant." Maybe the answer is that inurement to torture starts at home.

On Wednesday evening, UCLA Campus police were called in to ask Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a student, to leave the library. Library use at UCLA late in the evening is evidently restricted to students with ID only, and Tabatabainejad did not have his ID with him. He wouldn't leave when asked by Library staff, so they called in the campus cops.

The campus cops arrived as Tabatabainejad was walking out the door (evidently his refusal to leave earlier had been only temporary). The campus cops tried to escort him out, putting their hands on him. He didn't like having them touch him, and by the time the Youtube video begins, he was screaming at at them, "don't touch me." At that point, the cops tasered him and put handcuffs on him. Then, in front of a growing crowd of students brought to the scene by Tabatabainejad's screams of agony, they told him to stand up, and when he did not stand up (quite possibly at that point he could not stand up), they tasered him again, at least two more times, once when he was at the top of a staircase, causing him to fall down the stairs.

The cops also threatened to taser a student bystander after the bystander demanded to be told their badge numbers.

You can't see much on this camera phone video, but you can clearly hear the entire incident, including officers telling the student "stand up, or we'll taser you again" and threatening the student demanding badge numbers.

Here's a comprehensive write-up, including the account of the bystander who was threatened for asking to be told badge numbers. And here's the student newspaper's account.

Almost certainly race was a factor in this; on the one hand, Tabatabainejad might have felt he was being treated differently than a white student would be treated, and responded by refusing to cooperate; on the other hand, library staff and campus cops might have interpreted his response as hostile or threatening not because it was but because he was not white.

One thing I take away from this and other stories of inappropriate taser use, is that while using a taser on someone is an act of violence, an assault, cops and security guards don't treat it that way: I've gotten the impression that they are much more likely to Taser someone than they are to hit them with a nightstick. It's the same fallacy that morons in the Bush Administration have applied to torture: they claim that something isn't that bad, it's not really assault/not really torture, and then use that lie to justify policies that encourage the casual use of assault and torture.

Nightsticks are physical: the wielder has to swing the stick, hard, and when they hit someone they feel the impact. With a taser, you just push a button and watch the person fall down. It seems less brutal, cleaner, and so the campus police felt it was OK to use it on Tabatabainejad repeatedly. Waterboarding doesn't raise bruises or draw blood, so Dick Cheney can claim that it's "really" torture. Sorry Dick, sorry campus cops, but it doesn't work that way. Torture is torture, and assault is assault, whether it's clean or dirty.

[ETA: I've deleted an unreadably unformatted anonymous comment by someone who pasted in an "email this to everyone you know" petition to take tasers away from the UCLA campus cops. Hello anonymous, you are a boneheaded idiot for not realizing that I am not a student and do not live anywhere near LA.]