The video begins in the study room of UCLA's Powell Library, a beautiful, ornate sanctuary that I inhabited as often as possible. The library looked how a library should look: Imposing, serious, grave, and somewhat holy. And in response, all of us who entered it became slightly hushed, felt an inch more intellectual, became a bit more serious in our academic purpose. Which makes it all the more jarring to hear the screaming, the yelling, the pleas for peace as a student who refuses to produce a Bruin ID card is tasered again and again and again; shrieking in pain and defiance each time.
I'm not at UCLA anymore. I wish I was. Because buildings should be occupied until there's a response to this. Classes should be disrupted, disobedience constant, the student body lit with fury. This can't happen. And every student, and every person, should be outraged that it did. Try and stomach the video, if you can. It's important to see. This is what police brutality looks like. And if this is what it looks like committed against affluent kids on a college campus packed with eyewitnesses, imagine what happens to those lacking such institutional, economic, and situational protections.
Update: And Jesus Christ Daily Bruin, show some fucking guts. If you're going to publish an incoherent weasel like David Lazar on your pages, at least lace your official editorial with some passion and outrage.
