November 21, 2006

UCLA student to protesters: it's not just about public safety on campuses

Posted by Vivek Mittal at 10:40AM

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Police brutality is not exactly abnormal. It seems to have become a part of the normal run of things. It happens often and with regularity. As if the state mandates it. Just as KRS-One put it.

But my severely optimistic head never expects it. I would never expect it at all. And everytime I hear about it, I feel disgusted, angry, victimized, angry, mad, lost, hurt.

This is how I felt last week when I first heard about what happened at UCLA at the Powell Library, which was mere minutes from where I was studying. UC cops were checking undergraduate students at the Powell Library's computer lab for IDs. Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a Persian UCLA student, did not have his ID and after some time, the cops tasered him repeatedly because of his 'non-compliance.' They were asking him to stand up but kept tasering him, which immobilizes muscles and often prevents control of one's body for up to 10 minutes. Students gathered around and many people recorded the incident through their cell phones and digital cameras. After being tasered several times, the cops took Mostafa to a holding cell and later released him.

Mostafa was never asked for an alternate means to show he was a student. Is it justifiable that a person should suffer massive electric shocks for not having a small piece of plastic? How much power should police be given in regulating a computer lab?

The video can be linked to here through the Daily Bruin. Be careful, its really disturbing. I couldn't watch all of it.

There is much more that needs to be done about this. A google news search of "Mostafa, taser, UCLA" will uncover more than 100 news articles, including a few indicating that Council of American-Islamic Relations is justifiably calling for a deep investigation into all of this. The LA Times calls this a third incident in a recent wave of cell phone videos documenting police brutality.

While this was happening, Mostafa was yelling "Here's your Patriot Act … here's your abuse of power." Those who are at UCLA, pressure the UC Police Department and anyone else who has abused their power at the UCs to conduct a full, thorough, and impartial investigation into all of this.

*******

(Update:)

Last night, after I posted about what happened at UCLA, I got a text from a friend -- "Police Brutality against Houston Janitors!" Eyes widened, I took a breath, and propped myself up against a wall.

I am not startled that such brutality spans from UCLA to Houston and back. But I am startled that this is happening in my tiny world. I spent more than a year working for the Houston Justice for Janitors campaign and still feel connected to the pound of flesh I left there. A friend had told me the other day that he was considering participating in the civil disobedience to support the Janitors' strike. I was immensely supportive and tried to make him do it. So when I got that text, my fears about an impersonal, courtesy-of-YouTube police brutality -- a political set of fears -- became intensely personal. This tangled mess made me, well, a bit of a mess.

I went to the Houston Janitors website and watched the video -- people I knew in the video were getting arrested but I couldn't see my friend. I made phone calls and didn't hear back. No one was picking up. No one would answer.

I eventually got a call from him and he reassured me that he's OK. He had decided not to participate in the civil disobedience. I exhaled.

But after attending the protest today at UCLA, where the messaging was around public safety rather than police brutality and race, I realize that we do not have much time. We don't have time to obfuscate, to skate over the issues that dig deep into us and threaten to rip us all apart.

If we don't call things as they are -- that Mostafa was targeted because he was a Persian male, that he was cuffed and then tasered more than four times because he was a person of color, that the UCPD's actions have created a climate of fear for people of color all over campus, that 'safety' as a message only means more cops and no change in accountability -- then we all suffer.

We don't have time to call things otherwise because eventually we all are going to be hit by this. And it will hurt like hell when it happens to us or to someone we love.

Here are some things you can do:

Contact the U.C.L.A. Police Department and express your disapproval of how the situation was handled.

Contact U.C.L.A. Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams About the Incident at Powell Library:

Dr. Norman Abrams (Interim Chancellor) - chancellor@conet.ucla.edu
Dr. Daniel Neuman (Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost) - evc@conet.ucla.edu
Dr. Maryann Jacobi Gray (Assistant Provost) - mgray@conet.ucla.edu
Dr. Robert J. Naples (Assistant Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students) - dean@saonet.ucla.edu

Vivek Mittal is a creative writer, researcher, and law student based in Los Angeles, CA.