Today at high noon, UCLA students staged a protest of the November 14th tasering of fellow student Mostafa Tabatabainejad by University Campus Police officers. As reported by pretty much every media outlet in the world, Tabatabainejad was using a library computer and failed to produce his student card for police, whereupon they tasered him repeatedly, an event which was captured on video.

As he was dragged away, he was heard to cry, “I’m not fighting you” and “I said I would leave.”

Let’s remind ourselves that one is under no legal obligation whatsoever to identify one’s self to police officers if one is not under arrest.

None.

There’s a large serving of “Blame the Victim” going on around the blogosphere, but let’s reduce this to the key issues:

• Tabatabainejad was a bit of a jerkoff

• that is not illegal

• Tabatabainejad was within his rights to refuse to produce his ID

• no crime was being committed, nor did the police have any reason to believe a crime was being committed or was going to be committed

• the function of the police, in the absence of an actual crime, is to maintain the peace and public order

• these particular officers could not be said to have done so in anything like an effective manner

• unquestioning obedience to the arbitrary demands of armed authority is the hallmark of a police state and contrary to the goals of the Founding Fathers of the United States; it is inherently and perfectly un-American.

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