the abuse is being affirmed by their superiors in many of these cases

That’s really the problem.  If cops who used their Tasers badly knew that they would be investigated for doing so, they would be a lot more careful to use them only in situations where they can justify them.  But when every situation is justified—up to and including Tasering an injured kid laying on the pavement nineteen times—cops will find more and more situations to use the Taser in because using it is penalty-free for them.  It’s not penalty-free for people like Darryl Turner or Brett Elder but, hey, the cops involved will never face charges for killing them, so why should they hesitate to use their Tasers in the future?

Here’s the really disturbing thing:  I Googled “teenager killed taser” and three separate recent cases were the first four entries.  WTF?  How often is this happening?

I’m a white female, which I guess gives me a bit of an advantage, but deafblind. And this kind of stuff scares the crap out of me. There have been times when I have not heard or understood instructions in security situations. For example, airport security or one time I unknowingly walked on the wrong side of the yellow tape on the sidewalk during a traffic fatality.

Its not that I don’t understand that I need to be corrected and that there will be a few minutes of confusion over my ability to hear/communicate, but because I am not mentally disabled, I am able to ascertain pretty quickly when things are escalating around me and have the ability and wherewithal to say “I’m deaf. Please give me a few minutes to understand you. I want to cooperate.”

Still, it always amazes me how fast the sort of tension/escalation occurs even in the situations I’m in when I say that. I’ve not been tazed, but I have been forcefully manhandled into the desired location and yelled at rudely. Not everyone can jump to attention when ordered to by police. Disabled, elderly, mentally ill, drunk, etc. And I’d say most of these people are not harmful. I realize the stress of having to fear that one that is harmful for police, but it seems like the steps between “citizen is not complying with orders” and “taze, beat and arrest the bastard” have disappeared entirely. What happened to trying to communicate and assess the situation and diffuse it?

It is definitely scary to be deaf around police, and I imagine it is terrifying to be mentally disabled or to have a family member who is.

I hate to say it, but it’s going to take a pretty blonde white girl getting killed with a taser, and then her wealthy parents (1) suing the police department for millions and (2) pressuring their friends in the state lege/Congress to pass bills restricting them.

Barring that, maybe if someone starts selling tasers to civilians. At that point, it’ll become a “public safety crisis.”

How can we stop the madness?

Stop insisting on having a strong state whose agents have lots of power. Then get your political opponents to agree to the same thing. Good luck on both counts. :(

I wrote about this and the other taser story on my own blog earlier today. What I find really amazing about all of these taser-abuse cases is that the use of this taser is almost always “within department guidelines” or something like that. It makes me wonder what are these guidelines that make it acceptable to use deadly force against an elderly woman or a man with aural and mental disabilities, and what do we have to do to get them changed?

We simply cannot allow any police officers to ever have any weapons or other weapon-like devices which are supposed to be “non-lethal.” They abuse power simply because they can. Take away their toys: no pepper spray, no tasers, no billy clubs. They can only be allowed to have guns, which they are demonstrably more reluctant to use.

I read about abuse of Tasers on at least a weekly basis. Something real and substantial must be done about this; it’s a blatant abuse of power and violent bullying.

Thanks so much for the link! Much appreciated. I’ve got an update on the situation here (though it’s been pretty much covered in this post).

In other situations, like suicide threats, there are in some communities teams of counselors trained in crisis intervention techniques who work with the police to deescalate confrontations and dissuade people from behaving in critically self-destructive ways, like committing suicide.

One thing that might be done is to have a different police officer take the role of a counselor or “soft cop” and try to talk the party acting out into cooperating with the police or stopping the self-destructive behavior, and then if necessary committing the person short-term for a mental health evaluation.  Of course involuntary, short-term committment poses it’s own set of concerns.  There’s a lively debate at the web page on this topic on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_commitment

Almost anything one can suggest though is only going to be implemented with a LOT more funds available for community mental health services than is already being spent in most communities, and unfortunatly there isn’t a feeling that there’s a crisis that calls for that.  Look for example after the school shootings from Columbine to date, including the Cho shooting at Virginia Tech. 

If you’d like to criticize responses to people acting out violently or self-destructively, there’s loads to criticize there, including the revival of “in loco parentis” in effect after Virginia Tech, it’s a lot more common for colleges to contact parents of students experiencing mental health crises to “help” the situation—even if it doesn’t “help” much—because that’s going to lessen the college’s liability if something does go wrong with the student.  This was done a lot back in the days of 60s student protest, to the great distress of student activists and to the extent that some joked that “in loco parentis” meant “act crazy (loco) and they’ll call your parents”.

A decent primer on “in loco parentis” is also on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis

The fine line is what behavior, or threatened or impending behavior, is serious enough to require contacting the parent—and which parent, in cases of family turmoil back home it’s often not at all clear even to family members which parent would be better able to help their child in crisis away at college, assuming it’s a serious enough crisis to warrant contacting a parent in the first place, anyway.

If cops who used their Tasers badly knew that they would be investigated for doing so, they would be a lot more careful to use them only in situations where they can justify them.  But when every situation is justified—up to and including Tasering an injured kid laying on the pavement nineteen times—cops will find more and more situations to use the Taser in because using it is penalty-free for them.

Hold on there Mnemosyne.  Make sure you have all the facts before you start pointing fingers.  Did that kid have an umbrella?

Levy said officers were justified in using force against Love since he had an umbrella.

Jesus Fucking Harold Christ on a goddamn pogo stick!  An umbrella!  I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been terrorized by groups of young black men strolling through our neighborhood with umbrellas.

I don’t really know for sure, but when the police fire their guns, and hit someone, aren’t they supposed to go on a few days mandatory leave?  I bet the Tasering rate would drop dramatically if cops had to take a few unpaid days off every time their Taser was fired.

I live in fear of being Tasered in my bed.  The cops are always in my building battering down a door in order to bring someone in.  It’s really, really, really easy to get the wrong apartment in my complex because the buildings share numbers and are identical.  I sleep like the dead, there’s no way I can give immediate compliance to someone shouting orders at me.

An umbrella is justification for the use of deadly force now?  Every pleasant summer shower must look like a mob scene to these cops.  Must suck to live in such a fearful, hateful state of mind.

Look, we need to get off this officer’s back. Some day, when you’re about to get seriously fucked up by some John Steed impersonator, you’re going to be really happy that there are police officers willing to go all the way to protect us from people with umbrellas.

“Some day, when you’re about to get seriously fucked up by some John Steed impersonator, you’re going to be really happy that there are police officers willing to go all the way to protect us from people with umbrellas.”

That’s probably why I always feared Steed…now if I could just find a good Emma Peel impersonator, that would be different…

How can we stop this?

We can’t, or, rather we can’t approach it from the standpoint of “stopping a problem”.  The reason its happening is because the majority of voting Americans want it to happen.

No politician has yet been elected on a platform of police reform, and its going to be a long time, and quite a bit of citizen education, before any are.  Politicians who, after being elected, begin attempting police reform are met with charges of being “soft on crime” in the next election and are generally voted out.

Quite simply, this occurs because from the POV of the majority of American voters this sort of abuse of tasers is not a problem, in fact they see it as beneficial.  They don’t like it when people (especially black people, but really people in general) get uppity and act as if they had rights, therefore they see a climate of fear, in which people cower before the police in fear of electrical torture, to be a desirable state.

In many ways this is related to the prevailing view on prison rape, and other prisoner abuses.  Stopping prison rape, like stopping taser abuse, is not a difficult thing, it can be done quickly if the voters want it.  Unfortunately the majority of voters don’t want either stopped.

I argue that’s the core problem.  Until the majority of voters want reform, there won’t be reform, the reform itself is if not trivial at least simple.  Our difficulty is in voter education, or otherwise changing the composition of the voting public (ie: getting more minorities to vote) so that the majority of the voting public wants reform.  Until that happens the problem will not be solved.

since he had an umbrella.  an umbrella.  he had an umbrella.  since an umbrella.  umbrella.  he had.

I have an umbrella.  let me show you it.

Am I making sense yet?

No?

That could’ve been an umbrella that shot bullets or fire! He could’ve spun it around and hypnotized someone! He could use it to parachute from tall buildings! Begorrah, Commissioner, I had ta taser him!

Begorrah, Commissioner

facepalm.

<bockquote>How can we stop this?  We can’t.</blockquote>
Defeatist.  I’d say step 1 is to write a letter to your local police department or city hall asking for a copy of the current policy on tasers.  Step 2 is to take that, and a compilation of these stories, to a neighborhood meeting.  Police aren’t going to give up their tasers, and I’m not sure they should have to.  But in many localities, changing their policies to better reflect the danger shouldn’t be that hard.

</tagfail>

I don’t think you should be allowed to use a gun or a taser unless the crime being committed not only endangers the officer and/or the public, but also will result in major jail time if convicted.

Why tase a speeding grandma, when all she’s going to do is pay a fine?
Why tase a man who’s in a bathroom too long?  That’s not a crime.  The assumption should be if someone’s in the bathroom “too long” that they may be sick or injured!  Break the door down in order to HELP them.

B/c what is the harm of someone being in a bathroom, other than inconveniencing other customers?  It’s not endangering anyone else.

Tasers are alternatives to guns.  So take away the guns if you give them tasers and let them know that it’s an equal exchange.

Chicago is giving all the cops tasers.  At least they’re the ones with video cameras, but it’s scary.  I say that as someone who is related to many Chicago cops.  They are not properly trained with them.

That could’ve been an umbrella that shot bullets or fire! He could’ve spun it around and hypnotized someone! He could use it to parachute from tall buildings! Begorrah, Commissioner, I had ta taser him!

Dang it, you beat me to the Penguin reference…

Police brass always support their officers, until there’s actual jail time or money on the line. Then they throw them under the bus. (OK, not quite always. What’s happening in boston may be a good sign.)

Alkaloid:  unless you’re an anarchist outright, that’s a meaningless statement.  There is no theory of any state which does not assign that state the right to commit violence to keep the peace.

When I first read about this I wondered at the race/ethnicity of the victim.

Now that we see he’s Black, we can all safely assume that he was belligerent, angry, and threatening the cop.

Move along now, nothing to see. The disAbled can be silenced a lot quicker than Harvard professors.

I wonder how many departments require officers to be tased as part of their training? My ex is a corrections officer, and they were required to take pepper spray to the face and be tased before being permitted to use either one, the theory being if they had experienced how painful each was and its effects they may not be as likely to use it until needed. (I have the DVD of him being tased, its a good stress reliever. -snickers-)

Of course, with the number of sadistic bastards who are still allowed to be public servants of the law… I’m sure some come out of the experience thinking, “Yeah, that hurts like a mofo… I’ll use it on that guy who told me to fuck off.”

He was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct, but officers released him and took him home after a magistrate refused to issue a warrant.

Why did it take a magistrate’s refusal to issue a warrant to let the man go?  Once they realized how screwed up this situation was, why even bother to press charges?

Disgusting.

“He had an umbrella” will now replace “he had a stapler” as my cop term of the month.

“He had a stapler” was the excuse the Mounties gave for tasering Robert Dziekanski to death—a confused Polish immigrant who got lost in Vancouver International Airport back in 2007.

they reach for the Taser, which is meant as a substitute for a GUN

I have to correct this, because I keep seeing it all over the intertubes.  The Taser is NOT a substitue for a gun, it is used, and marketed as a substitute for the baton.  If the situation calls for deadly force, out comes Mr. Pistol, not the Taser.

That said, too many of my colleagues are far to quick to use the Taser, and far to often in situations where its not warranted.