Jesus. H. Christ.
They tasered the grocery clerk? This shit is ridiculous. They handcuffed him and then they tased him?!?!? Clearly the police can not handle this weapon. I don't think I have seen a worse situation of misuse of a weapon, giving tasers to cops is like giving a handgun to a child. They simply can't handle the responsibility. This weapon is supposed to be a alternative to deadly force. It is not behavior modification tool. Congress needs to do something about this. They have to banned.
100% right, HS. Anyone remember few months back, this guy was tasered by a cop after a traffic stop, got the police cruiser dashboard video of his tasering and posted it on Youtube?
link
The thing that struck me was that, at one point, the cop told the motorist to get out of the car and walked back to his cruiser with motorist behind him, and then told the motorist to "put his hands behind his back" before he tased him.
This was a punitive use this device- if this man was a threat to the officer, why did the officer turn his back on this guy?
This does not seem to be a "weapon" as such to a lot of these cops; it's a cheap punishment device- you diss me, you show "contempt of cop", I'm gonna make you squeal and leave no marks.
Except a number of people, including healthy young people with no obvious heart conditions, seem to be being killed by these things.
I don't mean this as a general indictment of law enforcement, but as HS has noted, there seem to be some serious issues in training how to use these things and that they are not as safe as the manufacturer's marketing department would have the end user believe.
and now it's 12:50 AM here on the starboard coast and I'm off to bed
horrible. imagine being his mother and father, his siblings. the people who loved him.
banning is exactly right.
People were being beaten to death with nightsticks by cops long before the taser was even imagined, let alone placed in the hands of people clearly unfit to be trusted with that sort of power.
The problem here is not the taser!
If you allow yourself to be distracted by the bright sparky object, you're going to miss the root cause flaw. Again.
Three guesses what the root cause flaw is.
I'll give you a hint: what organ has to initiate the sequence of neural impulses that ends in a taser being discharged into the body of a helpless victim?
Stormcrow -- Are you suggesting we ban brains in cops?
that was me -- I don't know what happened to erase my identity....
I'm glad the Houston cops didn't have these things back in the 70s. They would have really abused the hell out of them.
I can't quite believe how quietly we accept these awful things.
Cops need to be afraid of US, not the other way around.
I hope that these taser companies will soon be put out of business by the lawsuits they face.
My guess would be that Republicans are preparing a shield law for them right now.
Folks, you are STILL missing the point here.
Since NOBODY seems to have caught my drift, I'll get very explicit. Even though about three generations of mathematics teachers I've learned from would get very pissed off at me if they saw me do this. You're always supposed to leave some of the logic as an exercise.
You are discussing the actions of people who have been absolutely corrupted by power which has proven beyond the elastic limits of their self-control. These people go OUT OF CONTROL when they are presented with a helpless victim and circumstances where criminality can be "justified".
They have not and will not control or even closely examine their own actions. Nor are they recusing themselves, which is what people should do when they get out of their moral depth.
And you are blaming their TOOLS????
Do you really think you're going to fix what's wrong with these PEOPLE by disarming them?
Cops in this country have to be armed.
What's left? What options for correction remain?
VERY BROAD HINT (since it seems some people need a kick start tonight): Should these people be permitted to be cops in the first place? Would they not better serve as examples of what happens when a cop breaks trust?
Damn right. Ban that cop as an example to the others.
Now we're talking.
Hubris Sonic didn't get it quite right when he wrote ...
They handcuffed him and then they tased him?!?!? Clearly the police can not handle this weapon.
The first sentence describes an action which ought to land it's author in jail. Period.
The second sentence says "the police". I think this is oversimplifying.
Not the police. Which police? The ones that made this news story sure as hell don't sound like people I'd want within ten miles of me if they were wearing badges, never mind the tasers.
Stormcrow.
I've spent nearly 22 years in law enforcement, and I've seen deputies and cops afflicted with what I call Badge Syndrome - they get the shiny object and the authority to tell the public what to do, and it goes to their heads. You're very right about that - you take a 23 year old fresh out of training (complete with classes on how to use their tools ethically according to agency policy) and expect them to act properly.
For the record, I've never used a taser and have only had to draw my duty sidearm once in nearly 22 years. Scared the hell out of me, too, and I'm not afraid to admit that either.
One thing I have noticed is the readiness people have to use tools as a substitute for actual communication. It's like, "Well, I talked to him for 30 seconds and nothing's happening, so I'll zap him and see if that works." And we train these people to USE their interpersonal skills first.
But when you get a toy (billed as non-lethal, but you're shooting electrified fishhooks into the target) sometimes you just want to use it. Very similar to the use of the baton - either you zap them, or bop them. Or you just do it because you can or because you're angry at the individual (viz., the man who took the taser to the back on a simple traffic stop).
So I agree with you. Tasers should be withdrawn until all the health aspects can get sorted out, but increased ethics and communications training needs to be done.
Badge Syndrome
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Mixes with a taser or a hickory club or a gun, for that matter, the way drinking mixes with driving.
"Badge Syndrome" is petty authoritarianism of a sort we can't afford in people who are empowered to use force in the scope of their daily work.
One thing I have noticed is the readiness people have to use tools as a substitute for actual communication.
Yes.
And this isn't just cops, this is just about everybody in this country. We are usually more than ready to use a tool as some sort of placeholder where responsibility ought to go.
We also tend to use them for scapegoats.
"It wasn't me that did that, it was the drugs".
Heard that one before? How many years have we been bearing down on the drunk driving problem? It seems like forever. We seem to be making some headway these days, but not before time. It isn't just driving, either. I've seen people lay off an entire lifetime of sociopathic behavior on "the drugs".
Some of these people have been blood relations of mine. Blood relations I've subsequently cut off like gangrenous tissue, because people like that are just plain too dangerous and untrustworthy to be be around at all. I had to learn to do that the hard way.
And we use tools for a whole slew of other purposes that a tool just isn't designed for.
For instance, instead of thinking a problem through to the root and then working back to find a mitigation that makes sense, we generally look for a shiny new tool to bash it with.
How many times have you seen some ideology or mental technique, from religion to neoconservatism to mathematical optimization to the latest management fad, used as a substitute for thinking? Yeah, silly question. These are nothing more than mental tools.
They aren't some sort of magic talisman, goddamnit.
How many times have we seen some new military gadget trotted out to compensate for failures of civilian governance or military strategy or just plain common sense? All the bloody time.
All tools break if you use them beyond their limits. All, beyond exception. ALL OF THEM.
And they're no goddamn substitute for using your brains or exercising basic responsibility.
Stormcrow -- Are you suggesting we ban brains in cops?
I'm pretty sure what he (she? sorry, I don't know your gender, stormcrow) is saying is that we should require brains in cops.
I look at it this way -- cops are one of the "shit workers" in our economy. They do work that absolutely has to be done, like day care workers, nurses, teachers, and they get paid shit for doing it. Meanwhile people are trying to kill them. So yeah, they are going to experience a seige mentality and some of them are not going to be able to handle it.
The easiest fix is, pay them twice as much as they are being paid now, give them every single bit of training and support they need to do their jobs well and do them professionally, then FIRE the ones who aren't up to it.
Right now we are neither supporting the ones who can do their jobs, nor weeding out the ones who can't. That isn't tenable. The taser deaths are a symptom of a larger problem.
And when I say "professionally," what I have in mind is something I learned as a waitress, and that is that being nice to nice people is human nature, but being nice to shitty people is professionalism. Cops are often dealing with shitty people, but they have to do their jobs anyway.
.. we should require brains in cops.
YES, Sadie. That is EXACTLY what I mean. And the brains we clearly need here are something above the norm.
Select them CAREFULLY. Pay them WELL. Support them WELL - the sort of people we need are sometimes going to get hurt by what the see and do.
And train them WELL - better than they're being trained now, both to address current shortfalls (taser deaths are just one symptom) and to prepare for future problems.
If you've been keeping up with Bill Lind and John Robb and other like-minded people, you know their take that soldiers in the next war (if we actually prepare for the next one rather than the last one) are going to look a lot like VERY professional cops.
And that if things go into the shitter in this country, as I fear they will, cops are going to have to do things we'd stupidly farm out to National Guardsmen, who were clearly unequipped by training, in earlier times.
And we have to fire the ones who aren't up to the standards of professionalism. Yeah, that includes being nice to shitty people, because that's the side of the population cops most often have to work with every day. Sadie is spot-on.
This is exactly what she called it - weeding out the ones who can't do the job, and keeping those who can.
If you select for something, that's generally what you're going to get.
This is true in police work just like everywhere else.
Oh, completely OT -
Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 ROCKS.
This does not seem to be a "weapon" as such to a lot of these cops; it's a cheap punishment device....
That's what it sounds like to me.
And a difference in framing: I thought of it as a less-lethal gun; apparently the police think it's a more-powerful nightstick.
Commenting by HaloScan
