|
|
Friday, November 17th, 2006
|
1:35p - Library Policy
At UCLA's Powell Library, you'd better damn well have your ID.
In most campus libraries across the country, failure to produce an ID when asked results in being kicked out of the computer lab, possibly a citation until an ID can be produced, and for the troublemakers, being carried out bodily by campus police.
Being tasered four times, including twice while restrained with handcuffs and limp from shock, is not in any policy in any library that I know of. Except, perhaps, the University of California system. It is not policy to threaten to taser students who ask for a badge number.
I'm sure this student who forgot his ID was treated as any other ethnicity. I'm sure that a white student would have been assumed to have a weapon he could access with his hands behind his back in cuffs. I'm sure that non-Arab (actually, I think the guy was Persian, not Arab, but people weilding tasers can't tell the difference) students without IDs are properly tasered until limp, then roughed up so they'll stand. Is it better that I hear this is not because he looked Arab, and that this is, indeed, the standard policy of police? Is it worse that I hear that the only exception here is that someone caught it on camera? And because I believe the police force was not being racist, but was instead enforcing routine policy as they claim, I will no longer be considering the University of California system in my graduate school or job prospects. And I will be telling them why.
For anyone who works or goes to school in the librarian profession - I urge you to write a letter. To UCLA's newspapers. To the ALA, especially. The ALA needs to take action on this, because it is a gross violation of the idea that libraries are inviolate to thuggish oppressors who act like they wish they could have been at Abu Ghraib.
The link to the video of this incident is below, if you are not moved yet to do something about this. I warn you - in my life at the United Nations, I saw pictures and video and I read testimony of some of the most awful acts man has ever committed. But this - maybe because it's in a library, which should be safe space, but this is very difficult to watch.
UC Police taser student in library
(comment on this)
|
|
|
|