USA: Video-sharing places L.A.’s police in the spotlight · Global Voices
Sameer Padania

Hop over to Technorati right now and you'll see that six out of the top fifteen videos being linked to by bloggers show the same incident – University of California police officers using a taser gun on an Iranian-American student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, in the Powell Library at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles).    Here's one of those videos, from UCLA's student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, which explains the story (which contains some graphic imagery and abusive language):
For more background and reaction, take a look at Iranian group blog Iranian Truth‘s coverage of this story.  There may be more coverage in the Persian-language blogosphere – Los Angeles has such a significant Iranian population that it's sometime humorously called Tehrangeles…
The UCLA incident is one of three videos of different incidents showing police in Los Angeles appearing to use excessive force when arresting suspects.  All three videos were shot by ordinary citizens.  The first video of the three emerged on YouTube, and showed an LAPD officer punching a handcuffed suspect repeatedly in the face after a foot chase.  The second video, which has not appeared online yet, but was shown as evidence to the L.A. Times by the victim's lawyer on Monday 13th November, involved a homeless, handcuffed suspect being doused in pepper spray by the arresting officer.  The officer has since been cleared of wrongdoing, citing the officer's restraint in the face of the victim's “belligerent, threatening and combative behavior”.
Emily at PicturePhoning.com provides links to other incidents involving police captured on video by citizens both in the USA and elsewhere.  This seems to testify to a trend that can only grow as more and more people get access to videophones.  Some groups are encouraging citizens to use their phones and cameras to record abuses by the police and to upload the clips to video-sharing sites.  Sherman Austin, a founder of Cop Watch L.A., a police watchdog website, told a Yahoo! reporter that:
We urge everyone to have a camera on them at all times so if anything happens it can be documented. The concept of patrolling the police is something we are trying to push as a form of direct action.
Do you think this could be an effective form of scrutiny of the police?