Taser review sparked by stunned student

A US university is set to restrict the use of stun guns by its campus police after a review into an incident where a student was shot after refusing to show his identity card.

Norman Abrams, who was chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, at the time of the incident in November 2006 but has since left, said campus police policy would be urgently reviewed in the wake of the report by the Police Assessment Resource Centre.

The student was shot with a high-voltage Taser gun after refusing to show his student identity card while using a university computer laboratory out of hours. The report said that the student had "brought trouble upon himself" by not obeying the request to show his identity card.

However, it concluded that the police response was "substantially out of proportion to the provocation". One officer violated university policies during the incident, it said, adding that the police policies were "unduly permissive" and inconsistent with other universities and police departments, which do not allow Tasers to be used on "passive resisters".