UCLA taser cop was once named officer of the year, but was also earlier recommended for dismissal in connection with an alleged assault (pic inside)

"If someone is resisting, sometimes it's not going to look pretty taking someone into custody," he said. "If you have to use some force, it's not going to look pretty. That's the nature of this job."

I notice that he didn't say what the student was resisting (e.g. arrest?). I didn't hear on the video or read in the police report that the student was under arrest.

Algorithm for stun application:

 fun:  

\t stun subject with taser
\t ask student to get up
\t sleep n seconds
\t if student got up then
\t exit
\t else
\t drag subject a few feet
\t goto fun

"Duren, 43, defended his record as a campus police officer and urged people to withhold judgment until the review of his Taser use is completed."

He didn't seams to "withhold judgment" when he was repeatedly shocking the poor guy on the ground with his taser. How strange that he suddenly become the greatest defender of due process.

He was also fired from a previous job as a cop.

Duren said Monday that he joined the UCLA police force after being fired from the Long Beach Police Department in the late 1980s.

This other incident is what got him recommended for termination, but instead he was suspended for 90 days.

In May 1990, he was accused of using his nightstick to choke someone who was hanging out on a Saturday in front of a UCLA fraternity.

Duren — who was back on duty at the UCLA campus Monday night — said he can roll with these punches

He caused mass protests, only to be walking around campus "upholding the law" the next day?! Apparently he can roll with a lot more than punches:

shot and wounded a homeless man

using his nightstick to choke someone

being fired from the Long Beach Police Department

But hey, that's how he rolls.

I am reminded of Million Dollar Murray:

...when the L.A.P.D. was investigated by a special commission ... more than fourteen hundred officers had only one or two allegations made against them—... A hundred and eighty-three officers, however, had four or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more complaints, sixteen had eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints. If you were to graph the troubles of the L.A.P.D., it wouldn’t look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a “power law” distribution—where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme.

...

The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren't working.

I guess it's not uncommon for a few bad apples to clump together and to perpetrate far more than their share of disruption and unrest. Heck, that's pretty much the definition of "bad apple."

We shouldn't be surprised that this is the case; it is, after all, the theory behind having a police force, justice system, and penal system in the first place - lock up the few bad apples, and the rest of us will be more-or-less OK. Yet somehow we're always surprised to see that the "a few bad apples" model also applies to those systems themselves.

"Senior Mostafa Tabatabainejad, 23, was asked by Duren and other university police officers for his ID "

This looks like a delibrate deception. That's not what the witnesses said. Witnesses said the student was on his way out of the library by the time the UCPD officers showed up, and they grabbed him for no apparent reason.

why not fire this guy? obviously he'd make a better bar thug. (he may make more money too) :P

for what it's worth: an 18 year service is a whole lot of dedication.