Psyche, Science, and Society

The war comes home: Taser torture at UCLA library

November 16th, 2006

A new incident at UCLA illustrates what happens when you have a society obsessed with power and authority, one in which torture is legal. The campus police at UCLA repeatedly Tasered a student because he didn’t have ID and didn’t leave immediately. They then Tasered him again and again because he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, stand up. Here is video of the incident taken on a cell phone:

NBC-4 TV in Los Angeles has another cell phone video of the incident on their web site.

More information on the abuse can be found from the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Bruin campus newspaper, and on a student Diary.

Here is a comments from one student witness:

“It was the most disgusting and vile act I had ever seen in my life,” said David Remesnitsky, a 2006 UCLA alumnus who witnessed the incident.

As the student and the officers were struggling, bystanders repeatedly asked the police officers to stop, and at one point officers told the gathered crowd to stand back and threatened to use a Taser on anyone who got too close.

You know what was being done was evil as the cops refused to identify themselves, threatening to Taser a student who demanded his badge number:

Laila Gordy, a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident, said police officers threatened to shoot her with a Taser when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number.

Gordy was visibly upset by the incident and said other students were also disturbed.

“It’s a shock that something like this can happen at UCLA,” she said. “It was unnecessary what they did.”

Please call AND email UCLA to let them know what you think of their campus police assaulting students in the library. Of course, the police should be fired. But this is not enough. That such an incident could go on in a university library says that there is something truly rotten at UCLA:
Interim Chancellor Norman Abrams
Telephone: 310-825-2151
Fax: 310-206-6030
Email: chancellor@conet.ucla.edu
[Thanks to AmericaBlog for this information, and for the link to the YouTube video.]

A society that seeks to dominate others around the world and that calmly condones and legalizes torture will not escape abusive tactics being used against its own citizens. Let this be a wake-up call. A country that turns its back of freedom for some will loose freedom for all.

Entry Filed under: Psychology, Rights and Liberties, Social Change, Social Issues, Torture, War and Peace