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Dromedary Apothecary
This is the weblog of Kit Kemper. It is generally about marketing. Marketing in the sense that pretty much everything you do as a company and more often as a person these days devolves into marketing of some sort or another. It is also about tech in much the same way as it is about marketing, technology touches more of our lives every day and where people, marketing, and technology converge there are some pretty interesting things happening.
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The Bad: Treating your Students Like Criminals
One day when returning from class on my bicycle at Indiana University I got flagged down by a campus police officer. Being in a pack of other bicycles, I figured that there was nothing wrong and that he just had a quick question. He then asked for my ID and indicated that I was going the wrong way on a one-way street (a street that went for a good 200 feet and was essentially dedicated to foot traffic). He then issued me a ticket for $35, which seemed especially high to me since I was a college student and it was the equivalent to charge to “parking on landscaping” so presumably I could have driven my car into the middle of campus left in the yard and been charged the same amount. To this day, I have always wondered what would have happened had I refused to show my ID, since you A) Do not need to be a student to be on campus and B) Do not need a license to ride a bike.
I don’t think I will stew over that anymore, as a 23 year-old student at UCLA, Mostafa Tabatabainejad was tasered as many as five times by the UCPD for failing to present his student ID. You can see the horrific video here. While it seems the student resists a bit and is pretty outspoken (invoking the patriot act, claiming a medical issue, and generally being a 23 year old college student), it is my understanding that tasers are to be used in place of deadly force, and not to coerce someone to follow orders such as “stand up!”. In fact, I am pretty certain that the at least three officers could have helped the already tasered student to his feet without much trouble. In fact, that large group of students looking on shows that he clearly is not much of a threat. Since he did turn out to be a student who had simply forgotten his ID, the police were completely unwarranted in their actions and it certainly did not merit this level of force.
Amnesty International has called for an inquiry into the use of tasers, because 61 people died due to their use in 2005 alone and over 150 since their widespread adoption by law enforcement in the U.S. and Canada.
Update: From the CBS news story: “If he was able to walk out of here, I think he was okay,” the sergeant said.
Clearly they don’t get it.
technorati tags:UCLA, taser, the_bad
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