Mostafa Tabatabainejad, 23, was in a library computer lab around 11:30 p.m. when a community service officer asked for his campus ID as part of the library’s policy of requesting identification from patrons after 11:00 p.m. Tabatabainejad refused, and the officer soon returned with members of the University of California Police Department. “He continued to refuse,” read a November 15 UCPD memo. “As the officers attempted to escort him out, he went limp and continued to refuse to cooperate with officers or leave the building.” The statement claims that “Tabatabainejad encouraged library patrons to join his resistance” and confirms that he was stunned with a Taser and arrested for resisting a police officer.
But witnesses told the November 16 Los Angeles Times that Tabatabainejad was on his way out of the library when police forcibly stopped him. In the roughly six-minute video, Tabatabainejad’s screams of pain are clearly audible, as is his shout, “Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your fucking abuse of power.” The video also captures patrons asking for the officers’ badge numbers, as well as a patron being told to move away from an officer “or you’re going to get Tasered, too.”
According to the November 17 Times, attorney Stephen Yagman plans to file a civil rights lawsuit on Tabatabainejad’s behalf, charging the UCLA police with “brutal excessive force” and false arrest. Yagman said that his client, who is a U.S.-born citizen of Iranian descent, felt he was a victim of racial profiling and therefore went limp after being taken hold of as he was leaving the library, so as to “get the beating, the use of brutal force, to stop by shouting and causing people to watch. Generally, police don’t want to do their dirties in front of a lot of witnesses.”
A November 15 statement from Interim Chancellor Norman Abrams confirms the UCPD’s assurance that the matter is under investigation.
The incident came one day after Paul Allaire, 42, was forcibly taken from the University of Missouri at Columbia’s Elmer Ellis Library. Allaire reportedly kicked one of the eight police officers summoned to the scene by library security. He was restrained, arrested, and charged with resisting arrest, threatening to assault a library security guard, and assaulting a university police officer.
“[The library] had some past problems with him,” Doug Schwandt of the campus police told the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune. “He had stayed in the library one night last week when it closed.”
Posted November 17, 2006.