Thanks man, I will look at it.
But it is disappointing at the low reaction level at UCLA and other campuses. I know it's the week before Thanksgiving, but why is there no bigger reaction? While some people did good to question the cops on the spot, I did find the student crowd on the spot to be a bunch of sheep. There were some cries of stop, but not enough. A lot of people just stared. If you cannot muster any passion to stop injustice as a teen, how pathetic are you going to be once you start a family?
Even if you believe in tasering certain individuals(I personally would condone it for IMMINENT self defense and NOTHING ELSE ), how can one say the UCLA guy deserved it? THe guy was UNARMED!!!! Geeez man. I wonder if some of these people so blase about this incident would feel if cops started tasering people for every little incident. The cops were CLEARLY in no danger. They outnumbered the guy four to one. Even after they tasered him, the student said he was going to leave. And they tasered him again.
Here is what I am going to propose in a diary I will write over the weekend:
I agree tasering has enabled bully cops to act out their sadistic authoritarian bent without consequence, but don't support a movement for all out tasering every damn thing that happens, even if it's meant to teach us a lesson about granting police too many powers over our behavior.
Someone on dkos proposed that for every discharge of a taser on a civilian, a randomly selected cop in the same department must also submit to tasering within a certain period after the incident, in effect causing the officer to realize "I'm doing this for your own good but it hurts me as much as it hurts you." Seemed like a good idea to me but didn't go over so well with the gang there.
I've often wondered how long it would be before street thugs armed themselves with tasers and started using them pre-emptively on cops (or anybody else for that matter), since they're legal for civilians. They're not easy to obtain first of all, but the idea of equalizing the playing field does have its appeal.
Your item #2 was already shockingly demonstrated in Aaron Russo's Freedom to Fascism film, which I also highly recommend. The full-length film is free on google video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid= -4312730277175242198&hl=en
Didn't read the responses at Kos, but in a sociology course I took on deviant organizational behavior, we learned that shocking/hurting someone as part of their training RAISED the likelihood that they would then go on to harm/shock persons in their care.
You are desensitizing them in many ways. The standard way the taser training is done doesn't help either. A police recruit is tased, but in front of all the other recruits, so that an "it was nothing" macho front had to be kept up.
It also brings an air of superiority to the taserer over the taseree. "I withstood this and could handle the pain. You cannot, therefore you are weak and worthless. Unlike me."
The most effective thing I've found to say to people is that a judge wouldn't be allowed to sentence a child molester to being tased as punishment. Why are police allowed to tase anyone they want without oversight or accountability?
Note: this issue is very personal for me. My husband has a seizure disorder and has been beaten by the police and almost shot for basically staggering around and drooling.
