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.

Don't have an ID? You have to leave. Wanna make a federal case out of it (as the saying goes)? You're going to have to be forcibly removed.

Badly trained rent-a-cops and stupid young people insisting on non-existent "rights" to prove a point. A bad combo.

Does the "tazee" come off as an a-hole to anyone else? When in college, we were required to have ID to show in the library after a certain hour. The campus police would come through and ask for your ID. If you didn't have it, you had to leave. I just don't understand the attitude of "Yes, this is the rule. I am supposed to have an ID to stay in the library. I don't have an ID however. Furthermore, I will not leave." Now you are making the campus police take it to the next level. What are they supposed to do? You are not allowed there without ID. So the rule is, you gots to go. So either you go on your own, or you get the boot. How hard is that to parse? Instead we get a lot of over the top yelling and screaming about abuse. This does a diservice to people who are actual victims of police abuse.

The best thing about the TV show "Cops" is is forces the police officers on the show to actually be good, be clean and do their job properly. I think every police unit should be filmed by cops 24/7. Who watches the watchers? Everyone - it's prime time TV!

Except, as this video illustrates, all we need now is people with video devices - they are the new "Cops" unit. Police learned that with rodney king, who knows who might be videotaping you from their house. Now police, and other "quasi-police" like organizations (security officers, etc), will learn that video cameras are everywhere, and generally people expect you to be a reincarnation of every bad police officer, so you can fully expect to be video taped.

To a more knowledgeable person - what are the specific laws on the police sizing of video and photographic devices? If I am taking pictures or videos of police activity on a street, what things can they legally do? On private property, it should be the domain of the property owner/management, correct? In public it should be completely legal, no?

So what are the cops supposed to do? Sit on the floor and have a pow wow with some idiot until the idiot feels like moving? Fuck that. The kid is not obeying a lawful order given by lawful authorities.

Cops aren't Supermen. They have jobs, frustrations, duties, tasks, obligations, and a million other things to do. How would this incident change if one of them missed a campus patrol and some student got raped because of it? What if there's an assault that they could have intervened in, but because they weren't there because they were sitting with this jackass, WAITING for him to move, the assailant kills someone?

We don't live in a motherfucking vaccuum, and while it's easy to be selfish and myopic and scream about your rights, and worry about some spoiled little shit getting tased, it's possible someone is paying for your spoiled ass's luxuries with their life. Do you think that's a good trade-off?

I don't. But that's just me. I think of other people sometimes.

That's why when some drunken jackass won't leave the fucking library and sits on the floor screaming about his rights instead of standing up (they only fucking said, "Stand up" a hundred brazillion times), I'm all for tasing the fucker until he pukes and begs for mercy. And if he won't move, I'll look the other way while they put the toe of their boot in his gut.

If the kid had been standing up and was walking out on his own and THEN they tased him, instead of laying on the floor screaming some nonsense about his rights and about Homeland Security (LMAO, WTF? -- it's a college library ... OMG),, then I'd be concerned.

But in this case, I think the little shit got off easy. Next time a cop asks him to do something, I bet he does it.

I'm really curious about how this got started in the first place. The text says that police called it "a routine nighttime library safety check." I'd be really curious to know if that is in fact a "routine" at UCLA. (And if so, why only at night?)

The video was awful to watch. I agree with a previous poster who commented on the mix between students and badly-trained cops. But it's the cops' JOB to be professional and not over-react to the behavior of a student (which, even by the admission of the police, doesn't seem to be more than an initial refusal to leave the library after he couldn't produce ID).

If he was asked to leave, and was in the process of gathering his things to go when they decided to get trigger-happy with the tazers, what else could he have done? Been more polite, perhaps, but shouldn't the bar for administering electric shocks to someone be set higher than "he said mean things to me"?