The University of California at Los Angeles released August 1 an independent report that found that a university police officer violated the university police department’s guidelines for acceptable use of force in using a Taser on a student in November 2006.
The student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, is suing the university, the campus police, and six individual officers over the incident.
The report concluded that the officer unnecessarily used force when he originally touched Tabatabainejad, that the first use of the Taser was unwise and may have been an unnecessary use of force, and that two subsequent uses of the Taser were violations of the UCPD use-of-force policy, the August 1 Daily Bruin student newspaper reported. It also said that Tabatabainejad was providing at most passive resistance, the crowd of spectators was not hostile, and the situation was generally under control before the use of Tasers, although it also cited the student for not showing his ID when ordered.
The report recommended changes in UCPD’s “unduly permissive” Taser use policy, including clarifying when Taser use is acceptable and explicitly prohibiting Taser use against people who are handcuffed, passively resisting, or not aggressive, the Associated Press reported August 2.
Former acting Chancellor Norman Abrams, who commissioned the independent report, said in a statement that a separate, University of California Police Department report, which by law cannot be released, found no violations, according to the Bruin. “Having two fact-finders reach different conclusions regarding the same incident is not unusual in the legal system. Reasonable people may disagree regarding the inferences to be drawn from the same set of facts, and the facts may differ if some witnesses testify in one investigation and not in the other.”
Posted on August 6, 2007.