Authority Issues

Bright Lines and Dark Hallows:
Investigating Revolutionary Localities in America

Tour Log:

Part4

    Los Angeles is a weird town. I can’t imagine how people can take that much driving. I had arrived in the early evening the night before and pulled up to Ava’s house in Sherman Oaks; secluded, the city and the traffic seem worlds away. I only had planned on staying till the following afternoon, and then it was off through the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas to stay with my sister Amy. In the morning Ava and I went for a walk around her neighborhood – the only people out on foot who didn’t have dogs with them. After breakfast, and a few cups off coffee, I headed off to UCLA through the Beverly Glen Pass near Ava’s house.

While doing research before the trip I came across this recent incident of a UCLA student getting tasered by the campus police at the university. Of course there was a tape of the whole thing. Fourteen years after Rodney King got his head busted in by the Los Angeles Police Department there are more camera’s on the streets of America than ever before, and now, more means of distributing the footage past commercial media outlets than ever expected. A fellow UCLA student had a camera phone and tape nearly the entire incident. In seven minutes the student in the video is tasered six times, each time after he is instructed by the police to get up, or he’ll be tasered again. Exhausted from the shock, unwilling or unable to rise up after the police command, he’s tasered again.

I walked down a dual color red and tan brick walkway in the middle of the UCLA campus, passing the Law School first. It was a Sunday afternoon, and there were hardly any students around at the time. It was pleasant, not too cold, and the sun was shining. I felt a little nervous, and the fact that I did, made me even more so.

I have never really dealt with authority very well. Seeing as school always played a large role within that uncomfortability, possibly it was the double punch of the police and the university that made me ill at ease. The closer I got to Powell Library, where the tasering took place not a month earlier, the more tactical in my thinking I got. How best to photograph the area? Still or video to begin with? Outside or inside? If I took video inside first I may be kicked out quickly, better to shoot still, drawing less attention and escalate up to shooting video. Did I really need to be thinking this way?

The faceless, or seemingly faceless, has always put me on edge. I don’t think that this uneasiness on my part is necessarily justified, especially considering I am white, and at least moderately less crazy looking and acting than a large majority of my fellow American’s. Before I left for the trip I had attended a City Hall meeting in Portland on racial profiling. There were a number of police present at the meeting, some of them none too happy to be there. The head of the Portland’s Police Union was at the hearing, and announced that he had no plans to attend any of the proposed meetings that were to take place as they began with the assumption that racial profiling existed, did not question that assumption, and would begin each meeting with that in mind. After the meeting was over I felt that I needed to speak with the cops in question. Three of them stood talking with one another and were preparing to walk down the stairs of City Hall and out onto the street. I feel like I can pretty much strike up an easy conversation with anyone, and almost anytime. But on this occasion, as I raised my voice to get the cops attention, I was more nervous than I had been in a long while. The first minute or so of the time that we spoke I was shaking, and my throat was closing up around me as I talked.

I felt more conspicuous in the library building that I possibly should have. A fair amount of the students must have considered it “casual Sunday”, as a lot of them were out in sweatpants and hoodies. I was wearing a hoodie myself, and a knit cap, but I felt like everyone was looking at me as if I were some old homeless guy lurking around and ready to cause trouble. Obviously, I thought, everyone there knew that I had an alterier motive for my presence in the library. I did not look like a student. The student who got tasered a month early got into the altercation – if it could even really be called that – because he didn’t have, or just refused to show, his student ID to the police. Where was my student ID?

Would I have felt this nervous had this incident occurred two months early? A year? Ten years? How much did time have to play in my uneasiness of being in this location? Was the collective feeling of unease within this spot what put me on edge - the recent history enveloping the area? More likely it wasn’t. The general feeling that I sense around me was that there was no unease; that the incident wasn’t being thought about. This disregard frightened me ever more. Had I walked in and seen fliers announcing meetings to discuss the event I would have felt a solidarity and connectedness with the event, the library, and the students in general. I would have felt like it was okay for me to be there. The lack of any discernable acknowledgement, save for a small sign on a bulletin board announcing that one must have a student ID present at all times to in the area, was what freaked me out the most. It seemed like, to the UCLA students, and the administering body, random organized violence was business as usual, and should be tolerated, if not outright accepted.

I leaned up against an Al-Hambra style pillar within the lobby of the Powell library building and took out my video camera. I fixed my shot on the entrance wherein the student got tag by the cops and dragged down the stairs. A security officer sat down within the frame of my shot, at a desk that I hadn’t noticed was there earlier. I shot for three minutes, my nerves on edge and butterflies in my stomach. The officer sitting at his desk for the entirety of the shot, not noticing me, or not noticing me on purpose, throughout. At the end of three minutes I packed up the camera I walked away.