Quote from drmarkan:
With the way you talk about cops, I'm sure we all know how you were really acting when you were incarcerated. You remind me of some of the guys I used to run with when I was in high school. They would mouth off to a cop when they got pulled over rather than cooperating like any person with half a brain would do. They inevitably would turn a speeding ticket into an arrest, because the cop now became suspicious and decided to search their car. If they just shut the fuck up, they would have gotten their ticket and been on their way. I think they wanted to get arrested though to try to prove something. The only thing they proved was that they lack intelligence and tact.
I didn't read every single post in this thread, so I'll explain how the process went down in this situation. Volunteer students patrol the campus to make sure that the students are safe. At UCLA and USC, there have been a lot of problems (especially women getting raped on campus). These students ride around and make sure that the people on campus are students. They are the ones who first confronted this student. He would not provide them with ID and was asked to leave the premises. He refused. That is when they called Campus police. The guy again refused to comply with the request when the police made it. This is where the guy fucked up. Regardless of why the student volunteers called the police (maybe they are bigots, I don't know), the police handling the situation do not know this. All they see is a guy who does not have ID like he is supposed to, and is refusing to comply with their demands.
All he had to do was walk out of the library with them and explain his side of the story. If he felt that being kicked out was unjust, then he can take it up with the school board. This is not the choice that he made. I agree with Rearden Metal as to why he did not take this route. That doesn't justify his doing it though.
I hope that CAIR is smart enough to realize that getting involved in this is a bad idea on their part. If they start to side with this guy, it will only show that they do not believe in justice, but rather politicizing a situation that has no merit. This guy obviously acted wrong. Whether he feels that this was a case of prejudice, he did not go about it the proper way which diminishes the severity of actual cases of prejudice.
Just like the woman in the Duke lacrosse case is diminishing the severity of rape cases by falsely accusing those guys. Crying wolf hurts the real victims of these crimes because people become less convinced that the crime actually has occurred.
