Posted on 11/23/2007 7:47:05 PM PST by Revtwo
STAT! is a U.S. campaign to curb law enforcement's use and abuse of Tasers and equip local organizers with tools to take action in their own communities. This website serves as a clearinghouse for individuals and communities concerned about Tasers and Taser International and the danger they pose to our safety and our human rights
A typical force continuum looks like:
1. Officer presence - officer shows up and the misbehavior stops
2. Verbal commands - officer yells at the perp and takes control of the situation
3. Empty hand control - guiding, holding, restraining, up to kicking/punching the suspect
4. Pepper spray, baton, taser
5. Less lethal - beanbag guns and such
6. Deadly force
What we are seeing lately is that many officers, especially smaller/weaker/female/cowardly/lazy officers, skip #3 entirely and deploy the taser. Often the motive cited is a fear of engaging in a physical confrontation with the suspect, an unfounded fear that the suspect could pull out a concealed weapon, etc. They use the taser in situations where they would never even consider using OC spray or the baton, and this unprovoked escalation in force is troubling. Individuals who get the “jitters” easily and are prone to overreaction do not belong in law enforcement.
Cases have also been reported where the taser is used to punish mere passive noncompliance, rather than active resistance. This hardly seems reasonable, as the device temporarily paralyzes the suspect’s central nervous system and he is likely to have trouble moving at that point. Tasers are best used to neutralize a threatening situation, not to inflict punishment on a subject who is already under control.
The taser-related deaths are a bit of a red herring. As you have mentioned, most of these suspects were under the influence of narcotics and most likely gave police a very good reason to deploy the weapon. The real abuses, while still somewhat rare, ironically almost never result in mortality.
“Their video of “peaceful” protesters being Tased is actually a bunch of violent anarchists with their faces covered.”
For them, the police should be using bullets and fragmentation grenades, then shooting the survivors.
PC keeps people from facing the reason tasers are wanted, anyway.
Police used to handle resisting arrest by kicking butt. But now we have to have women “police officers” who are physically incompetent to handle matters correctly. They have to have an alternative to just hauling out their revolvers and shooting the person resisting. Thus, tasers.
The solution is simple: stop pretending that it is appropriate to put women in a police officer’s uniform, and go back to true non-lethal force.
How much does it cost to reload it?
>>>>I’ll bet more people die from being tazed by the police than from being shot by them.
I’ve got $100,000 that says you are wrong.
Wake up, smell the linseed oil. In the 1960s, batons were used 100 times a night in every major city in America.
Beat up on your wife? Working class men didn’t go to jail for that. They got a tune up.
Local punk shoplifts from the corner grocer? He walks funny for a while.
Worse.... local punk decides to beat up an older person? He gets a “50 percenter.” (50% of dead.)
Such street justice was rarely needed twice.
“Never? You must be illiterate. I sure don't read much, but I remember the city of Boston paid out $600,000 for scaring a retired minister to death inside his own home minding his own business.”
The incident occurred March 25th 1994. A SWAT Boston SWAT team misread a floor plan given to them by a confidential informant, and entered the wrong floor and apartment. The SWAT team was serving a warrant for the Boston Police Drug Control Unit, they went in and secured the apartment. The 75 yoa minister that was in the apartment went into cardiac arrest and died. This caused allot of racial animosity among citizens as the minister was African-American. The widow sued the City, and asked for $600,000.00 and was awarded $1 Million.
Even though I am illiterate, I am aware of this case, as it changed many standards in writing search warrants not only in Boston, but the Country. In my field I write allot of search warrants, and because of incidents like this, allot more detail has to be put into the description of the residence that the warrant will be executed at. Some agencies even require pictures of the target residency for the illiterate folks like me.
Now this has nothing to do with the thread topic of getting tasered, as this man was not tasered, but you ventured off and brought up the story of the man being scared to death, not tasered.
As to your comment “You could go to the CATO institute and check out their statistics on police raids that killed innocent people. You could read the news and see stories where children and old people get tasered.”
The standards are always going up on training, on those on entry teams, the evidence needed for probable cause to obtain a search warrant is always getting more difficult, and the reasons are for peoples protection. The negative incident where innocents are being harmed are going down. Now, those that swallow the main stream media will not know this, it is like the War on Terror being fought in Iraq. Follow the news stories and you would believe that that the troops are over there to occupy a nation, to murder civilians, rape the women and cause hatred for us in the region. So sure, you can find some a story sometimes of an Officer making a mistake and entering the wrong residence, and I can bet my illiterate butt the media will give allot of coverage every time it happens. The rest of the ninety nine point whatever percent of the successful raids where allot of good men take a risk and the bad guys are caught are not news worthy, and certainly not commented on these threads. Same goes with the ninety nine point whatever percentage of good successful taser deployments that are proper and successful. The Officer and prisoner both end the day free from injury. Those don’t make good headlines or fit your anti-police point of view.
I have been on many dozens of scenes where a tasers are deployed. A few of them the general public had a misconception of why a taser was deployed, and critics like you sound off with their anti-police rants, but they don’t see the other side of the story. They don’t see a doped up offender that got tasered, they see a victim of the Police. Not an disease infected crack whore spitting at Officers, just some young lady getting tasered by a bully cop. Every story has two sides. More often then not, the Officer had good reason, and in the cases that the Officer did not have just cause, that has consequences. Good Officers have been fired, fined, and even jailed for a spit second decision that they made to deploy a taser that a good of people argued over for weeks and decided it was a bad decision on the Officers part.
I personally do not carry a taser on duty for two reasons: I am in investigations, so I don’t answer calls involving unruly people, and I am illiterate as you pointed out, so I cant read the directions on the weapon.
If I could grant you one wish, it would be that you could live your life in an area free from Police Officer involvement, so you could be free from their life threatening and oppressive ways. I wish you could be guaranteed that not matter the situation, you would never see an Officer on your street, at your home, or anywhere around. But I am afraid that isn’t realistic, but the ACLU, and the MSM are there for you 24/7.
Maybe someday the tyranny of Police Officer violence will stop and you will no longer be bothered by all the Unbiased and Accurate News Reporting of Law Enforcement abuses.
“You could read the news and see stories where children and old people get tasered. These stories show up every week on Free Republic.”
Ive wasted enough time on you and your post. I have to get back to my Hooked on Phonics book, I don’t want to be illiterate all my life, I want to read those stories of old people and little children getting tasered.
Fast forward to today when the police are using them against grandmothers in wheelchairs and drivers who act wild about not signing speeding tickets, ultimately killing some 150-odd people per year with electric shocks.
Give it another ten years when police departments will be wanting funding for the Taser company's new basketball-shaped model full of electrified fishhooks that they can just roll into an elementary school cafeteria to zap everyone in the room.
Do you have an opinion on the Derek Hale case? (Unfortunately the internet coverage of this case seems a bit one-sided.)
Do you believe it is OK for an officer to taser an unarmed, nonviolent suspect without attempting to use empty hand techniques first?
I believe that the problem is deeper than simply the use or non use of tazers. Much of the problem, it seems to me, is the attitude of many local police departments. There has been a movement for a number of years toward “in your face” police work. This hyper aggressive attitude leads to very bad feelings between the citizen and the cop as well as over use of so called nonlethal weapons — simply from a crappy attitude on the part of the officer.
All of you local yokels out there need to watch an Andy Griffith marathon and start thinking about what you are supposed to do for US — the taxpayer — and dump the black uniforms, hard hats, shaved heads and cop toys. Be cops and not Nazi Brown Shirts.
You are creating enemies when very conservative folks like me (an ex Marine) are getting disgusted with your actions. Now comes the Houston PD with a military drone to fly patrol over the city a la Bagdad, peeking in windows and back yards as a new way of improving our “security”. This follows the recent revelation that you folks are following us around via our cellphones on the thinest of legal excuses — unsupported accusation with only the slightest of court overview.
While some of this is justified in the very, very rare case of terrorism, these attitudes and methods are spilling over into day to day police work and it makes you guys look very ugly. Worse, it will eventually make you the enemy of the general population and, thus, make our country ungovernable.
One other thing — if the “copettes” can’t handle the job without the tazer then they should get out of the work. There is no room for PC attitudes when the basic job at hand is the use of controlled violence in the pursuit of the common good.
In the interest of truth I found more on this which gives a different slate from the first video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkfkQcb45Lo
Woman gets tased for being a bitc.......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb1FWt81lS4&feature=related
Personally I don’t think tazers should be used for traffic violations and the video backs up the officer how unruly she was should they want to press more charges!
“Personally I don’t think tazers should be used for traffic violations”
Call me a Luddite; I’d rather see them using their sticks.
Nice job.
You had me cracking up on this one. I swear, with some of these folks, one might as well be preaching to a commode, where there are more active brain cells. But what would I know, as I too belong to the illiterate club. ;>)
Retired Detective Sergeant, Major Crimes & Spcl Ops... after 26 years of proud survice.
Stay Safe.
“Enjoy!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkfkQcb45Lo
Have you seen this one? Jared Massey, with his pregnant wife and 15 month old baby, was stopped for speeding. He felt that he was in the right and refused to sign the ticket. Yes, he probably should have gone to court to protest it, but he didn’t. The highway patrolman asked him to get out of the car. Massey said he thought that he wanted to talk to him about the speed limit sign in question so he got out. What transpired next lead Massey to demand and receive, under the freedom of information act, the dashboard video which he subsequently posted on youtube. As of yesterday it’s supposed to have had over 400,000 hits. The Utah Highway Patrol has expedited the investigation into the incident. I can’t see a reason here to taser this person, but maybe I’m being naive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZRm8Gk1hI
And I'll bet more people are in wheelchairs because cops shot them than from being tazed
The elderly, sickly and drug addicts weren't part of the initial trials for these things. If so, the statistics would have been very different.
Aside from being able to identify the elderly, the pharaceutical state of a given individual's a tough read for an officer trying not to get killed. I think the taser has a place in the field, but I agree far more restraint should be used before one is fired.
Reminds me of the Rodney King episode. Media just kept showing the beat-down, and conveniently left out the perp’s actions leading up to the event. Amazing how that changes the story.
Please shoot fleeing crackheads with 9mm FMJ. Saves court costs and an all-too-brief period of “criminal school with free room and board” (jail).
Thank you for your service.
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