Bruin Tasered

[Beta]

I would love to see them try to accuse that officer any further of racism/prejudice/profiling since he's not white.

[Gvlax]

I would love to see them try to accuse that officer any further of racism/prejudice/profiling since he's not white.

I dont think you have to be white to be a racist/prejudice/ or profile. Believe it or not a white man can commit a hate crime against someone that is white and a black man can commite a hate crime against another black man.

[Beta]

I would love to see them try to accuse that officer any further of racism/prejudice/profiling since he's not white.

I dont think you have to be white to be a racist/prejudice/ or profile. Believe it or not a white man can commit a hate crime against someone that is white and a black man can commite a hate crime against another black man.

Exactly my point..that is taboo in today's society. The "racism" in this country almost instantly brings up the thought of white against black. Unfortunately it's (for the most part) true.

[Sonny]

I would love to see them try to accuse that officer any further of racism/prejudice/profiling since he's not white.

I dont think you have to be white to be a racist/prejudice/ or profile. Believe it or not a white man can commit a hate crime against someone that is white and a black man can commite a hate crime against another black man.

Which makes so called "hate crimes" silly, IMHO. How can you criminalize "thought processes"?

[Gvlax]

Which makes so called "hate crimes" silly, IMHO. How can you criminalize "thought processes"?

Off topic but isnt that the same thing as trying to fight someone with an ideology ie terrorist groups?

[WaterBoy]

My understanding from what I read is that the police were called after the student failed to show ID, not that the police stopped an individual randomly in the library.

The police officer did shoot a homeless person, but it wasn't as though he wanders the campus looking for homeless people to plug. The reason we arm our officers with handguns is so that they can defend the lives of others, but also their own. The shooting, to me, seems less noteworthy than the other incidence in front of the fraternity.

On the whole, the use of the tazer may have been a little extreme, but I don't think by much. Clearly the student in question was lucid and able to hear the officers. They warned him expressly what would happen several times. Some people argue that tazers are only supposed to be used in the officers' self defense, but I would argue that's what the gun is for. The tazer is for less serious threats. This was a judgment call on the part of the officers involved, and I think they made the wrong decision, but I also don't think this was profoundly egregious.

[Kyle Berggren]

So if I'm paraphrasing you correctly, it's okay to tazer someone in custody if they are lucid & not listening, if you have warned them properly. Is that what you're saying Waterboy?

[Sonny]

So if I'm paraphrasing you correctly, it's okay to tazer someone in custody if they are lucid & not listening, if you have warned them properly. Is that what you're saying Waterboy?

For the record (and for everyone thinking that both sides here were equally wrong), resisting arrest is against the law.

[WaterBoy]

I think Sonny hits it on the head. I think that tazering might be a bit far... just not by much. When you consider that there really is no long term effect from tazering, it doesn't seem that unreasonable that the police put it to use.

The issue really is where is the line drawn between where we expect the Police to minimize the damage to themselves while at the same time minimizing the damage done to the victim. When you watch the video, the perpetrator (the few times he's shown) is kicking around and clearly resisting. Personally if I had a choice between getting kicked in the face or tazing someone... he's gettin a fro.

Would this be such a huge deal if the police had used mace instead? Mace has longer lasting effects and will affect both the police and all the witnesses in the area, yet mace and pepper spray have been used for years under similar circumstances. A tazer is an immediate, specific method of subduing someone resisting arrest.

I think I'm mostly worried not by the event, but by the reactions to the event. Definitely some negative points go to the students surrounding the scene. Their actions yelling at the officers certainly did nothing to control the situation, and towards the end of the video there was one student whose actions were borderline assault against a police officer. The time for asking for badge numbers is not while the officers are processing an arrest.

The way I was raised, you show respect to police officers. As a general rule of thumb, you call people carrying handguns "sir."

[Gvlax]

I am not saying the police was right but everyone needs to know how stressful that job is. They usually work 12 hours or more depending on paper work and deal with people that hate them. This is why cops become very cynical. I know on our campus our police officers are usually really nice but i have seen them go off on some kids if they are talking back and really making a scene. I know there are dirty cops out there but there are bad people in every job out there. For example 70% of all theft comes from employee theft, obvious every person at retail stores are not innocent. I am not saying that this police officer was correct but we all must remember that everyone has a fuse... his fuse might have been lit some time ago and now it explodes. We only hear about a dozen of these police beatings a year, and with hundreds of thousands of police officers out there it proves that all cops are not bad. Just remember how tough their job is next time you are getting pulled over.

[Hackalicious]

Which makes so called "hate crimes" silly, IMHO. How can you criminalize "thought processes"?

It's not criminalizing "thought processes". It's taking intent and motivation into consideration when sentencing someone convicted of a crime.

For example, premeditated murder for fun or profit is sentenced more harshly than murdering someone in an impulsive fit of anger. Yet, both crimes are still just murder.

Same goes if someone targets you and kills you because of your race or religion. I suppose the same differentiation is made for terrorism, when someone is killing for a political purpose.

Proving that was indeed someone's intent is another matter and is often difficult. There was a case in New York earlier this year where the perpetrator had called his victim a racial epithet before killing him and was convicted of hate crimes. In another case, a white supremacist drove around exclusively shooting at minorities on the street. That was pretty clearly a hate crime meant to instill fear in a portion of the population.

I don't think that it is "silly" to distinguish criminals' motivation and to punish them more harshly.

[Gvlax]

killing someone because you dont like them or for fun and killing someone because you hate their race/religon/gender etc. is still killing. Someone is still dead, so how can you punish someone more harsh just because their motivation for killing was against societies morals?

[Beta]

killing someone because you dont like them or for fun and killing someone because you hate their race/religon/gender etc. is still killing. Someone is still dead, so how can you punish someone more harsh just because their motivation for killing was against societies morals?

Our justice system is skewed a bit...in the way that killing someone in a crime of passion or in the "heat of the moment" is not as punishable as killing someone because of their race/religion etc. The free way to kill someone in this country is still drunk driving. I think it's called the "Kennedy Clause".

[Campbell]

killing someone because you dont like them or for fun and killing someone because you hate their race/religon/gender etc. is still killing. Someone is still dead, so how can you punish someone more harsh just because their motivation for killing was against societies morals?

I think a lot of this has to do with the philosophy in this country that rather than having a strictly punitive form of justice, we adhere to the idea of deterrance and reform. Otherwise why would we have a parole system, different levels of prisons, work release programs, education in prison, etc. I think the nature of the crime reflects the level to which a criminal can be reformed and return as a productive member of society.

[StrykerFSU]

It's really too bad that "hate crime" statutes have been implemented in an unfair manner. Sonny was closer on point than you guys are giving him credit. In my understanding, in order to charge a hate crime the prosecutor must prove racism motivated the crime or as Sonny put it, "thought processes". Unless someone will testify to the use of racial terms just before or during the commission of a crime, how are we to know what truly prompted it? Is it fair to assume that someone who has a history of using racist remarks without violence could have committed a crime motivated by those same feelings? I don't think you can make that assumption, at least not in a court of law. I think the burden of proof is higher.

It is also important to remember that for every Matthew Sheperd or James Byrd Jr. there is a Yankel Rosenbaum. Who is that you are wondering? He was a Hasidic Jew who was unlucky enough to be walking down the street just after a young black boy had been struck by a truck. After murdering a man for no other reason than his obvious Jewish religion, Mr. Rosenbaum's killer was not charged with a hate crime and was in fact released from prison after serving only 13 years. Why was this not a hate crime and why were there no movies made about his murder?

Or what about the torching of a white-owned store in Harlem? After the black run United House of Prayer raised the rent on the Fashion Mart owned by Jewish Freddy Harari, Mr. Harari was forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-run record store. In response, Al Sharpton rushed to the scene and spouted hateful speech like, "We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street." After hearing this rhetoric, a black man entered the store and shot seven people while burning it to the ground. No hate crime for Sharpton for inciting the killings?

I am not trying to argue that hate crime legislation is right or wrong but that it is applied unfairly. Regardless, I think the student in question at UCLA invoked the Patriot Act in the hopes that, given our current political climate, his situation would be viewed as that of a student singled out by police for his ethnicity rather than as a punk who broke the rules and then threw a temper tantrum like the child he appears to be. I also wonder if being surrounded by what looked to be over a 100 people had anything to do with the police officer's willingness to use non-deadly force in an effort to control the situation?