More Taser Trouble v. Finnish Gentle Justice

In a statement the Sheriff’s office says, “We are confident the actions of our deputies will be found to have been both within the law and department policy.”

Then the law has to change…

I saw the story on GMA this morning, where a “former homicide detective” defended the tasering because the 64 year-old victim was “intoxicated” and officers thought he might become violent. Call me skeptical. More on the disturbing video here.

Then there’s the case of the 86 year-old grandmother “who uses an oxygen machine and can barely walk.” She was tased twice and subdued by 10 cops. Here’s Stephen Colbert’s take. Watch also for the “Future SHock” segment on the new Dazer Laser. Says Colbert, “Nothing makes me feel safer than a minimally trained police force with the power to blind.”

Lest you think all of this no big deal, tasers kill. As evidenced by there recent incidents:

Is there another way?

The NYTimes on justice in Finland, via AMERICAblog:

The [Finnish police] force is the smallest in per capita terms in Europe, but it has a corruption-free reputation and it solves 90 percent of its serious crimes.

”I know this system sounds like a curiosity,” said Markku Salminen, a former beat patrolman and homicide detective who is now the director general of the prison service in charge of punishments. ”But if you visit our prisons and walk our streets, you will see that this very mild version of law enforcement works. I don’t blame other countries for having harsher systems because they have different histories and politics, but this model works for us.”

Finland, a relatively classless culture with a Scandinavian belief in the benevolence of the state and a trust in its civic institutions, is something of a laboratory for gentle justice. The kinds of economic and social disparities that can produce violence don’t exist in Finland’s welfare state society, street crime is low, and law enforcement officials can count on support from an uncynical public.

Finns rate their criminal-coddling police #1 among national institutions they admire most. Here we tase a heart attack victims in his living room.

Lest you think the Fins started out that way, they moved to it after abandoning “a rigid model, inherited from neighboring Russia, and one of the highest rates of imprisonment in Europe.” They now “believe in the moral-creating and value-shaping effect of punishment instead of punishment as retribution.”

They also say it saved $20 million.

Does the classlessness of Finnish culture have something to do with their law enforcement successes? I believe it does. I root that belief in the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. In their book, The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better, they build a compelling case that almost every modern social and environmental problem is more likely to occur in a less equal society:

The Spirit Level shows that there is one common factor that links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their members. Not wealth; not resources; not culture, climate, diet, or system of government. Furthermore, more-unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them—the well-off as well as the poor.
The remarkable data assembled in The Spirit Level reveals striking differences, not only among the nations of the first world but even within America’s fifty states. Almost every modern social problem—ill-health, violence, lack of community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness—is more likely to occur in a less-equal society. This is why America, by most measures the richest country on earth, has per capita shorter average lifespan, more cases of mental illness, more obesity, and more of its citizens in prison than any other developed nation.

I’ve referenced the book before here, here and here. I have still more to say about it and will… in a future post.