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Friday, November 17, 2006 12:00 AM

Shocking incident

The controversial taser incident at UCLA

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  • Friday, November 17, 2006 12:15 PM

    tasers, video, threats

    Be sure to listen to the threat to a bystander at the very end: "Move over there or you will get tased too." Nice.

    One thing I notice about this is that if they had guns, they certainly wouldn't shoot him for refusing to stand up. But the bar for tasing someone is so much lower that they will do it simply for being uncooperative. This is why I'm troubled by things like tasers -- it is much easier to justify using them, so they get used, and inevitably get used too often and for too little provocation.

    There are a lot of problems with the ubiquity of video cameras these days. But one very obvious benefit is that abuses are much harder to cover up, and things which until recently could be made to go away will not. I'm very sure the cops will claim that he was "resisting arrest", but it is going to be pretty hard to argue that his lying on the floor posed a physical threat to them, or to anyone.

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