Mostafa Tabatabainejad should have been clubbed with a nightstick
Background: On the evening of November 16, 2006, UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad was repeatedly tasered by UCPD officers in the library despite the fact that he posed no threat to the officers or to the surrounding students. Later that week, an estimated 400 UCLA students protested the incident. A similar but less populated demonstration followed the following week at UC Berkeley, where the president of the University of California–an official with direct oversight and influence over all UCPD branches–resides. I originally wrote this as a response to Larry Suh’s editorial in the Daily Cal and to promote a resolution that was being put forth before the ASUC Senate. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get it in before break.
Mostafa Tabatabainejad should have been clubbed with a nightstick, without the police taking taking so-called mercies and precautions by using their new gadgets. At least, then, presented with the bare image of the brutal use of force, we would not have been engaged in this deceptive talk of lesser evils and “better” applications of force.
Would we have responded differently if Mostafa was beaten with a club instead? Why?What would have been the difference? The police, by their own testimony, did not apply Taser guns to incapacitate him, but rather used the painful stun-drive mode to win his obedience. Even they concede that he was not dangerous. Their application of the gun was part of a technique called “pain-compliance”–a technique by which force is used in order to “encourage” the subject to submit to the will of his “superiors.”
If the use of the Taser gun, then, deludes us into believing that such an application of force is permissible or less abhorrent than the more crude image of an officer choking a student with a club–as Officer Duren, the same officer who attacked Mostafa, has done on a previous occassion (not to mention previously shooting an unarmed homeless man in a university restroom)–then we, the student population and the community, are better off without them because we are no longer applying them as mere tools of law enforcement. Instead, we have made them false symbols of civility, mental roadblocks allowing us to ignore the power dynamic that was made apparent at Powell Library last fall.
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