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infinite loser: tell me that you are playing devil's advocate in this thread...
i have spent the a significant chunk of my life doing research work (you know, sometimes looking for stuff for research, sometimes researching books that look like they'd be fun, often alot of both) in academic libraries. i have seen lots of rent-a-cops wandering around asking students for their ids because their feet were on the furniture. i have seen things get a little testy and i have seen the campus cops get called in in some cases. in most cases, the campus cops have acted reasonably--this situation would have been nothing at all had the cops acted reasonably--check the kids identity against their own databases or with the library's circulation system--give him some annoying ticket for spacing out the id and that's the end of it. that would be the reasonable way to deal with this. but i have seen some campus cops be assholes---some university cops just resent the hell out of the students--and there is a way in which i understand that because i teach the same students--they can be really officious little jerks---BUT i have seen both types of scenarios unfold numerous times in a situation where the rules were THE SAME as at ucla. these rules are THE SAME in most urban university libraries, particularly after say 10 or 11 pm. the choice of how to treat these situations then rests with the cops. they could have approached the kid any number of ways.
they had choices about how to handle this--and they obviously made a really really bad choice in this case---there really is nothing you or anyone else can say that would justify using a fucking taser on a college student because he forgot his id card. nothing at all. so there is maybe no point in continuing the conversation, because fundamentally, it no longer is one.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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