Police need good people skills. 99.9% of police work is dealing with people in a way that _prevents_ the situation from becoming violent. Any moron can grab a taser and stun an unruly person into submission, but we taxpayers should expect something a bit more sophisticated from our employees.

Every justification of police with tasers that I've seen has hinged upon one argument: Wouldn't you rather be hit with a taser than shot with a 9mm? Police departments claim that they only use tasers as a replacement for deadly force, but you don't have to spend too long reading the police blotter to realize that isn't true.

Tasers in the hands of trained, competent police officers aren't the problem, just like handguns. The problem is putting this much power in the hands of lazy cops. Yeah, it takes a lot of work to calm down an angry drunk, or to break up a fist fight, or to get a student to leave the library. It's a demanding, demeaning job that involves a lot of cajoling and hand holding and touching surfaces covered in vomit.

It's a whole lot easier to hit 'em with a few thousand volts and drag their thrashing body into a squad car. ESPECIALLY if there's no real oversight mechanism for taser use.

Can campus police be thugs? Sure. However, you get what you ask for when you refuse to comply with instructions. What were the officers supposed to do? Walk away? Is that all it takes to get the cops off your back? Even if the UCLA coppers violated every rule in the book, you still are better off cooperating. This student, in spite of the incomplete video, is way too into drama and gave the officers little choice. I've felt antagonized by the police and resisted and was arrested--I look back at it as dumb. By being a dick, the student permitted the cops to be dicks.

Idiot cops answer the idiot mating call of an idiot student. Both sides sides did an exceptional job of making something huge out of nothing it all. I give each side 9 out of 10 idiot points, making the battle of idiots a tie.

The officers repeatedly tell the guy that he'll get tazed again if he doesn't stand up. Regardless of whether the student could have stood after being tazed, why wasn't he just cuffed, picked up, and dragged from the library, which seems to happen at the end of the video clip anyway? Why was it necessary to keep using the tazer? Repeatedly threatening the student with the tazer only makes the cops sound like sadists.

Or such incidents (think Rodney King) would simply be denied by cops trying to cover up their acts of brutality. I'm trying to figure out what this guy did to deserve being tasered 5 times. Did he attack the police or someone else off camera? He was noisy and rude, but so what? So now the police can physically brutalize people for being cheeky?

I hope he gets millions. And the police are fired (or better yet put in jail). I have absolutely no tolerance for brutality - especially when it is targeted at unarmed, nonthreatening people - even crazy ones - such as Mr. Tabatabainejad. Had the police had an ounce of intelligence, they would have simply arrested him (how many cops does it take to arrest one man?), charged him with resisting arrest, WITHOUT tasering him in a public setting with scores of onlookers. Looking forward to the lawsuit.

We would have jumped those cops. The kids outnumbered them. We never would have stood by and let them do that to another student. They couldn't taser everybody. The students have cellphones. They should have called their friends on campus and told them -- get your asses to the library and help us pull the cops off this kid.

There would have been a riot goin' on....

Cops didn't need tasers to remove people from antiwar demonstrations years ago. The students went limp, the cops picked them up by the arms and legs and removed them. There was no need to taser the guy. End of story.

I had violent patients. I had obstreperous patients. I had snide, sarcastic patients. I had mentally ill patients in the midst of psychotic episodes. I had patients going through the DTs who threw me against walls. I had drug-addicted, addled patients who only wanted to argue about what a bitch I was for not giving them more drugs. I got a knife away from a demented patient. I had a former cop (from the days of Al Capone) who grabbed my hand, twist the skin on my wrists in an "Indian rope burn" and tried to break my fingers. All of those patients were strong men (and a few strong women), not frail terminal cancer patients.

Never once did I ever have to resort to violence. Not that I could.. I'm a tiny person. When you don't have the luxury of tasers, you use your head. It's called "common sense." In the cases where I had to call security, the security guards never resorted to violence. They overpowered patients, but not violently. It was just a case of two strong men and a tiny nurse non-violently subduing a patient. No tasers. No sucker punches. No finger-breaking. No constant threats.

Now you tell me that those campus cops HAD TO violently subdue that student because he was such a threat. You can't. Those of you who say the student was an asshole, therefore he needed to be repeatedly, painfully stunned, are much bigger assholes than that student was. And yeah, he was an asshole. But he was a minor asshole. To heartily approve of violenty, deliberately harming a minor asshole who could have easily been dealt with by those campus police shows what lowlives you are. I hope, if you ever devolve into a state of violent dementia or drug-addicted belligerence and need to be hospitalized, you get a nurse like me and sane security guards.

Because even though you are smug, sadistic lowlife assholes, even you don't deserve what they did to that student.