UCLA Police Tasering and the Free Hand of Law Enforcement, Part 1:
Take a few minutes and head over to Americablog to catch the video of the UCLA student being tasered multiple times by UCLA cops for failing to show ID at a library computer room and then leaving more slowly than the cops might have liked (the UCLA police say he was refusing to leave altogether). Listen to the student's screams and the cop's threats to tase other students if they don't knuckle under to the campus cops' authoritah.

Then check out this report from the Northern California ACLU from September 2005 on the misuse of stun guns by California police officers. Scroll down a bit until you reach the section on "Standards for Taser Use." Check out how while some police departments only allow taser use for "credible" and "imminent" threats, others allow its use if verbal commands by officers are not followed. And how, despite Taser's own admission that it can affect breathing, very few departments have standards for how many times you can taser a person. And how out of 54 departments surveyed, only 8 had a policy for when not to use a taser. Many of the rest use the phrase "potentially violent," which means, one assumes, that police have to rely on their super-psychic abilities to figure out if a passive resister might go all Incredible Hulk on them.

More later on this despicable, but not unexpected, and not isolated, incident.