Spewing invective at people who were there, when you weren't, is cowardice. Look at the video - quite a few other students were in the police's face and demanding that they stop. You must be living in fantasy-land to suggest bum-rushing the cops. High-tailed it out of there? They would have shut the whole place down and called in the LAPD.

This is big-boy stuff. Being an idiot and refusing to comply with completely innocuous rules designed to protect the students and library, and then directly challenging police officers will bring about a detrimental result. The repeated Taser application sure as hell looks unneccesary, but we are the peanut gallery and this will get the full light of day treatment by the press and Yagman.

This is how our society works. The '60s were a different time and place, and the real civil rights issues demanded the kind of upheaval that occcurred. We just had our upheaval - too late for almost 3,000 servicemembers, but it did happen. You don't bum-rush cops, you hold them responsible for their actions. They don't strap on the Taser without a policy and training, so protest the policy. The very fact that there were multiple cops, one a corporal or sgt., means what they were doing was probably by the book. The book may be wrong. Tasers were brought in to reduce the need for a baton, and it may look nasty and may very well have been abusive, but it wasn't police dogs and firehoses on people sitting in the street.

This is an important debate, and the use of force by police should be closely monitored. We had an 18-yr. old girl with a knife get shot 18 times in a park in Huntington Beach. The criticism? They didn't have or use a Taser or pepper spray. Should adjacent neighbors or passers-by open fire on the cops? No. The DA presses charges. Robert is 100% correct about the fact that cops used to take pride in defusing situations without resorting to force. Policing today is more dangerous than back then. But lets not blow this out of proportion until we know the facts. Calling for the officer's jobs is premature.

HOW NOT to get tasered...

-- No ID, no library. Leave library quietly. Period.

HOW NOT to get tasered multiple times...

-- No ID, no library.

-- Make rant about lack of freedoms and refuse to move.

*!* Zap *!*

-- Apologize and leave library as soon as possible, basically...follow instructions given to you from security personnel.

Jeesh! And he has a college education?!?!?!

I am just dying with laughter that some yokel thinks that a random poster from Tucker Max's message board, of all places, is a valid and believable eyewitness to this occurence.

For those of you who haven't been exposed to the estimable Mr. Max and his gang of ex-frat burnouts, take a look at his site, and his boards, and weep for the future of the American college male. His groupies remind me of the fraternity at my college who threw paint-filled balloons at black students, ran around campus with Confederate flags, and finally got their charter revoked when two of their members were convicted of rape in the same semester.

They're the sort of guys who would think a non-white student getting tasered into a pulp was the funniest damn thing they had ever seen. Not exactly the most unbiased of sources.

My $.02 here. Regardless of what the man did or didn't do the police are there to protect themselves, other students and staff, and also THE SUSPECT. Any police officer will tell you that you have to consider the suspect's safety as well as all others in a situation. The man was being verbally abusive, he may have even been verbally aggressive. So you get backup, clear out the damn floor, and make sure he leaves in your custody. The fact that two officers attempted to resolve this situation on their own speaks VOLUMES about the threat level they felt this guy posed.

Bottom line: Unless he was an immediate physical threat to an innocent, the taser should not have been used. This is the problem with less than lethal force alternatives. When you can cause tremendous agony to someone at the push of a button but not have to worry about killing them you are much more likely to use it, same with pepper spray. If someone is non-violent, the use of violence, and thats what this is, should not be an option. Once violence or an immediate threat of violence is evident overpowering force should be applied. If I hit a cop I expect to get beat until I can't resist. If I don't make a threat but I protest, I expect to be arrested, but in one piece.

Just me though, I could be naive about the future we're heading into, and the morality I expect from fellow Americans.

There are now reports that students asking the cops for their badge numbers were told to shut up or they'd be tasered too.

The taser does it's job at immobilizing a person. Asking him to stand up when he couldn't and then tasering him repeatedly again is asinine. Further, he was handcuffed. It's a bit difficult to stand up with your hand tied behind your back. Go ahead, try it right now-put sit on the floor and put your hands behind your back as if they were handcuffed. Now try to stand-see what I mean?

And blaming the victim is a bum argument. Saying he should have just showed them his ID and acted nice to the cops is like saying if someone doesn't do that, the door is wide open for the cops to torture and abuse you. It doesn't work like that.

It is the job of the cops to deflate a situation, not aggravate it. 4 cops can't lift and carry out 1 guy and instead resort to repeated tasering? That's just not logical.

They were completely incompetent and remiss in their duties and should be fired.

The sad thing is this type of thing probably goes on all the time but we seldom hear about it because no one was there with a camera. Had this incident not been videotapes, I'm certain it would have been completely ignored by the University of California. That's higher education for you.