4 - Wednesday, November 22, 2006 The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com 74 ittcid'&gan4:atily Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890 413 E. Huron St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104 tothedaily@michigandaily.com EMILY BEAM DONN M. FRESARD CHRISTOPHER ZBROZEK JEFFREY BLOOMER EDITOR IN CHIEF EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS MANAGING EDITOR Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors. Taser use stuns country UCLA police should not skirt responsibility The repeated use of a Taser on University of California at Los Angeles student Mostafa Tabatabainejad last week in the Powell Library on the UCLA campus has created an uproar over police brutality, not only in Los Angeles but across the country. The incident is an all-too-perfect example of excessive police force and demonstrates why even nonlethal weapons should be used rarely and with extreme caution. The future of Lebanon was assassinated today." - JOHN AKOURI, head of the Lebanese American Chamber of Commerce, on yesterday's assassina- lion of Pierre Gemayel, an anti-Syrian politician in Lebanon, as reported yesterday on freeptcom. KIM LEUNG I - $ VAT Sl I Credit card robots A The details are still unclear, and UCLA is holding an independent investigation to determine if the officers' actions were war- ranted. Eyewitness testimony suggests that even though Tabatabainejad failed to pro- duce student identification to the library staff, he was on his way out the door when a police officer grabbed his arm. The University of California Police Department claims that officers only used a Taser after Tabatabainejad "went limp and continued to refuse to cooperate with offi- cers or leave the building." It seems obvious the Taser's effects on Tabatabainejad's body hindered his ability to comply with police orders. The incident was partially captured on a cell-phone camera, and the video evi- dence shows he was having difficulty stand- ing as police demanded he exit the building. It is also troubling that one of the police officers who used the Taser on Tabataba- inejad has a history of excessive violence throughout his career - such as choking a bystander with a nightstick in 1990 and shooting a homeless man in 2003. UCLA is right to seek an extensive investigation, and if the investigation confirms stunning Tabatabainejad several times with a Taser was excessive and avoidable, the officers responsible should be fired. The school can- not seta precedent that unwarranted police brutality against its students is excusable. Tabatabainejad has since filed a lawsuit against the campus police, alleging not only police brutality but also racial profiling. Being an Iranian-American, Tabatabaine- jad believes his ethnicity played a major part in his treatment that night. Officials contend it is not uncommon for library police to request identification after 11:00 p.m., as UCLA library facilities are for the exclusive use of UCLA students, faculty and staff during that time of night. Nev- ertheless, Tabatabainejad alleges that he was targeted for an ID check because of his appearance. The independent investigation needs to determine to what degree race was a factor that night. Even if the investigation is able to justify shocking Tabatabainejad the first time, the repeated assaults were clearly an exces- sive use of force. Furthermore, the fact that police didn't realize stunning Tabatabaine- jad once would effectively render him inca- pable of obeying their commands to stand up suggests their training regarding Taser use was severely inadequate. In any situation, power can give way to abuse. Equipping officers with Tasers lends itself to this type of excessive brutality. Here on campus, the University's Depart- ment of Public Safety does not carry Tasers, though the Ann Arbor Police Department does. Given the AAPD has deemed Tasers an essential police weapon, oversight and extensive training of AAPD officers is cru- cial to avoid a similar incident here. Equipping police officers with Tasers is not inherently bad - used properly, such nonlethal weapons can prevent fatalities. But the incident at UCLA demonstrates that police officers armed with Tasers must be both extensively trained and sub- ject to oversight. Using a Taser on a stu- dent who fails to show identification at school library is simply excessive, as the independent investigation of the incident at UCLA will likely prove. dizzying pantomime plays out in a new TV commercial: To a hip jazz tune, short-order cooks twirl and flip their products out on trays. Toasters depress their own toast, shooting them up when complete. Smoothie makers of all colors churn while sales clerks toss colorful sodas across the deli to customer after customer. The whole charade has a mechanical feel as an endless line of customers files in and out of the restaurant. RAFI Then, alas, one poor schmuck MARTINA ruins the whole gig: Unlike all the savvy customers around him paying with their Visa cards (never mind that they file in and out like mindless automata), this average Joe has the audacity to pay with cash. Imagine that! Cash? How parochial. The catchphrase: "Money shouldn't slow you down." I simply couldn't believe my eyes after witnessing such a bold procla- mation by Visa. Stigmatizing cash? I mean, sure, it's entirely consistent with what the credit card industry stands for - the romantic delusion of endless consumerism, an emphasis on credit as an everyday necessity, the basic assumption that Visa and stores that take it should be ubiquitous. But it seemed a line had been crossed some- where. How can you disparage the very commodity credit was formed to compensate for? Moreover, in light of this country's growing problem with debt - both at the personal and national level - where does Visa get off glorifying the abjuration of cash in even the most prosaic moments (i.e. paying for some- thing as paltry as lunch) in favor of instant and unnecessary debt? To me, the whole ad campaign is like Smirnoff putting out an ad admonishing water in light of vodka's "fantastic thirst- quenching effects." The catchphrase? "Hydration shouldn't sober you up." A study last year by Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer's office found that the average student at a four-year state college in New York owed more than $2,300 in credit card debt. I can't imagine the figures differ much for Michigan students. Nonetheless, we're bombarded daily with offers from credit pushers. In the mail, on the phone, the credit card industry waits impatiently for our next moment of seeming buyer necessity. Credit card companies undoubt- edly argue that credit comes with responsibility, that accepting a line of credit obviously involves a mature decision on the part of the credit card holder - and with it the commitment to manage one's funds (and inevitable debts) responsibly. But credit cards don't fit the profile of caveat emptor essentially because you're not a buyer; credit cards aren't something you buy, they're some- thing you buy with. The sense of the credit card as something other than an object but as something with which we pursue objects remains an important distinction. Indeed, if we superimpose any analogy to credit card addiction, the card doesn't rep- resent any drug; the real drug figures as materialism and consumerism in general. Rather, credit cards stand to facilitate an addiction, to extend our material desires beyond the param- eters of our actual buying power. To be sure, much like the abstract credit the company affords its cus- tomers, the card itself becomes some- what intangible in that, unlike cash, you aren't ceding possession of the card when you use it to purchase something. The task of buying some- thing becomes so easy that it feels like theft. While that plastic rectangle certainly hasn't lost its palpable qual- ity (I haven't yet seen someone wave their hands magically in front of a cashier and walk off with their goods Since when did cash become worthy of our scorn? without being assailed by a clerk), the ease with which we use it - the trivi- ality, or at leastthe nonchalance of the transaction - diminishes the respect we have for credit. It's this seeming disrespect for credit, something that we all possess to a degree, that has- tens our victimization by it. And that's just what the commercial encourages us to do - to take credit so cavalierly that we march like robots withitinhand. Sureitcanbe awkward at times to stand in front of a cashier while you count your bills and watch as the cashier recounts them and gives back your change. Sure, the process can take a little time. And yes, a credit card makes the process a whole hell of a lot faster and perhaps less awkward. But consider the cost of that conve- nience. It's beyond possible double- digit interest rates. It's consumerism run amok, plumped up by easy plastic, devoid of deliberation and, ultimately, financial responsibility. Rafi Martina can be reached at rmartina@umich.edu. 4 Change the laws Overcrowding is a symptom of misguided drug policies perhaps the third time will be the charm for those seeking an expansion to the Washtenaw County Jail. Last Wednesday, the county Board of Commissioners approved a $21.6-million bond issue to add beds to the county jail and improve the district court. The move comes after two other proposals for expanding the jail failed in the last 19 months. Tongue tied on the Middle East The current proposal is certainly better than some of the alternatives - particularly a $314-million jail and courts millage put before voters in the county's first attempt to expand its jail, an idea that earned the enmi- ty of an ad-hoc activist group, the No Giant Jail Committee. Nonetheless, the county's insistence on expanding its jail reflects a dangerous mentality toward criminal justice that has led our nation to have some of the highest incarceration rates in the world. The coun- ty's most recent proposal deserves the fate of its last two. Reforming a flawed legal system that inevitably leads to prison over- crowding is a worthier goal than building ever-bigger lockups. Should the most recent bond issue go forward, the county will add 96 beds to the existing Washtenaw County Jail, which is chronically overcrowded. Residents have about five weeks to object to the bond issue - as they did last year, when 17,000 signed a petition seeking to force a vote on a $30 mil- lion bond issue the board had approved, put- ting an end to that idea. Overcrowding is not a problem unique to the Washtenaw County Jail. Nationwide, there has been a roughly four-fold increase in the number of people being incarcerated since 1980, necessitating the construction of new prisons and jails across the country. The driving force behind this increase is not some long-term crime wave, but rather the fundamentally misguided, decades-long war on drugs. The American obsession with cracking down on drug use has led us to waste count- less millions of dollars spent locking up non- violent drug users. Meanwhile, the illegal yet lucrative drug trade is the core cause of many violent crimes. Mandatory mini- mum sentencing laws have stripped judges of the discretion to distinguish between the truly dangerous and the merely misguided - while adding those with unnecessarily long sentences to the ever-growing list of the incarcerated. The nation seems not to remember its failed experiment with Prohibition, a pol- icy that was singularly ineffective at keep- ing those determined to drink from finding alcohol but that did wonders for organized crime. With Republicans always eager to cut taxes and Democrats afraid of being labeled as tax-and-spend liberals, there's no politi- cal will to raise the funds needed to operate the corrections bureaucracy, meaning that schools and social programs are sacrificed to pay for our penal policy. That's a point particularly salient in Michigan, where despite the state's grave fiscal woes, the corrections budget has continued to grow - though higher education has faced cuts in recent years. Expanding prisons and jails whenever they hit their capacities is a pragmatic approach, and it's probably better than forc- ing prisoners to sleep in a gym or converted office for lack of a proper bed. However, the nation - and this state, with its troubled economy - cannot afford to build new lock- ups indefinitely. Decriminalizing drugs, especially those such as marijuana that pose little risk to users, would be a far wiser poli- cy than covering the planet with prisons. n my Religion and Politics class last week, we were blessed with a gift from the academic gods: a guest speaker. Time to whip out the Michigan Daily's Sudoku and doodle the class away. However, our guest speaker, Prof. Mark Tessler, actually stirred our sleepy I0 a.m. lecture. As a leading researcher in his department, Tessler has conducted extensive stud- ies in Arab and Islamic countries like Egypt, Iran, Jordan and Palestine on the correlation between religiosity and attitudes toward democracy. But wait a moment. Was Palestine just included in that Brace yourself, political correct- ness gurus - the answer is yes. Not surpris- WHITNEY ingly, the lan- guage Tessler DIBO used offended a few of my fellow classmates. There was an uncomfortable wave of chair- shifting when Tessler mentioned "Palestine" alongside other, estab- lished countries. Tessler even dared to give the region its own information column during his Powerpoint pre- sentation and its very own bar graph, seeming yet again to refer to it as a "country." The truth is, the presentation had nothing to with the Arab-Israeli con- flict or even Arab sentiment toward Israel, and Tessler made it clear he didn't want to touch that issue. Yet congregating in the hallway after class, I was given a crash course in one version of Middle East Politi- cal Correctness 101: Palestine isn't a country; it's a territory. And it should not be referred to as "Israeli-occu- pied," but simply as "Palestinian- governed." Apparently Tessler didn't brush up on his Arab-Israeli etiquette before entering our class. Let's get one thing straight. I'm Jewish and pro-Israel, and my back goes up at any hint of anti-Semitism. But I was still disturbed to see a Uni- versity professor walk on eggshells around our class, tiptoeing in vain when trying to choose the right ver- nacular with which to speak about that certain region west of Jerusalem. Tessler was doomed from the start. No matter which phrase he chose, he was bound to offend somebody. The reality is, if we have any chance of openly speaking about the Middle East, we must drop this hypersensi- tivity. The Palestinian territories, Pal- estine, the West Bank - whatever you choose to call it - is a difficult topic, but crankingup the PC will only make dialogue impossible. What I've seen happening on cam- pus is a complete avoidance of the issue, except by people who feel pas- sionately one way or the other. Israel advocates have no problem deciding what words to choose, nor do pro-Pal- estinian activists. It's the people who have no political agenda and who just want to understand the conflict (or present a few statistics) who remain tongue-tied. Most. won't even open their mouths for fear of offending a lurking Middle East PC expert in the room. Given my position on Israel, I speak about the Arab-Israeli conflict using the vernacular most Jewish people deem correct. That is my choice. However, if someone else uses a dif- ferent idiom, whether arbitrarily or out of personal belief, that is their choice. Unless the language is bla- tantly offensive, I try to avoid sound- ing the anti-Semitism alarms. There is a difference between anti-Semitic rhetoric and language that is simply hard on Jewish ears. There is an off-Broadway play cur- rently running in New York City that is also hard on Jewish ears titled "My Name is Rachel Corrie." The play is crafted from the diary of a 23-year- old American woman who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. Unde- niably, the show looks pretty bad for Israel - just as a show written about Marla Bennett, a 24-year-old Ameri- can student killed by suicide bomber at Hebrew University, would look pretty bad for the Palestinians. The show was scheduled to open in March of last year, but six weeks before opening night, it was post- poned indefinitely by the New York Theatre Workshop. The theater cited "the current political climate" as the reason for cancellation. After months of controversy, "My Name is Rachel Corrie" finally opened in New York last month. You know it's a bad sign when even the theatre world - the stage for artistic freedom where controversy usually finds a spotlight - buckles under the pressure of polit- ical correctness. If I had the money to see some shows in New York right now, I prob- ably wouldn't buy tickets for "My Name is Rachel Corrie." It just doesn't sound like a show my New York Jew- ish grandparents and I would enjoy. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be produced, or that pro-Israel activ- ists shouldn't protest outside. Let the Middle East be aired on the stage and in the street - at any rate, we certain- ly could use a break from the stuffy political correctness of the classroom. The bottom line is that if we continue putting a gag over this issue, it will only continue to stew in silence and misunderstanding. Whitney Dibo can be reached at wdibo@umich.edu. Student Affairs Research, as of fall 2005, 70.5 percent of students at the University came from families whose income was above $75,000 per year - and 20.7 percent from families with an income above $200,000. As many people have pointed out in past letters to the editor, diversity goes deeper than skin color. Ryan Mitchell LSA senior JOHN OQUIST E DO WE EVEN HAVE ARE YOU HEY I WAS READING THAT THIS ENOUGH GAS TO HOLDING THAT DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN GET TO CANADA? MAP UPSIDE WANTS TO RE-INSTATEDON THE DRAFT! - E-" SEND LETTERS TO: TOTHEDAILY@MICHIGANDAILY.COM a new report, The Education Trust needstofoCuson - a group whose goal is to close the b ac l achievement gap - gives the Univer- eing ccessle to sity an "F" for access to low-income students. Ironically, the same report ow-income students gave the University a "B" in access to minority students. According to TO THE DAILY: these grades, I'd say the University Something I've heard about should focus more on helping low- numerous times during my career income students than fighting to at the University is the importance overturn Proposal 2. of closing the achievement gap. In According to statistics compiled by