Legal scholar Jonathan Turley—whose blog is on my personal ‘read every day’ list—has reported today on two more extremely questionable taserings. (See also: Police Taser a Blind Diabetic Women with Cancer ‘to Facilitate Cuffing’)First, he tells of a Missouri boy who had fallen or jumped from an overpass and who was tasered 19 times as he lay there with a broken back.
Here’s what the Chief of Police said:
[T]hey hit him with the tasers up to 19 times “to keep him from getting hurt” by running into traffic. He added that “He refused to comply with the officers and so the officers had to deploy their Tasers in order to subdue him. He is making incoherent statements; he’s also making statements such as, ‘Shoot cops, kill cops,’ things like that. So there was cause for concern to the officers.” (Jonathan Turley)
Color me skeptical. My colleague has always said that she can tell when someone’s lying when they give several alternative reasons for something, none of which is quite plausible on its own.. I count three reasons right there that don’t make much sense facially.
Were they concerned that a boy with a broken back was going to kill them? And he was lying down on the shoulder when they got to him—how was he going to run into the traffic with a broken back?
And anyway, nineteen times?
He also comments on the tasering by security guards of a 66 year old minister. ‘Rev. Al Poisson insists that, while visiting a man in the hospital, he made an innocent joke about the lack of a smile on a guard’s face. Security cameras then capture at least five officers whaling on the minister — though Poisson insists that some of the film has been cut out.’ (Jonathan Turley) The Raw Story has more.
You know, I’ve seen how these things unfold. Once the police start in, the person gets in a panic and tries to fight back—giving them the reason to continue that might originally have been lacking.
And the mindset seems to be: getting tasered doesn’t do them much harm and makes it easier for us to cuff them, arrest them, etc. If you taser someone they (eventually) go all compliant. But the purpose of the taser really shouldn’t be to make it easier for police to do their jobs.
I wonder what it will take before they’ll learn that a taser shouldn’t be used unless the officer has a reasonable belief that he or she is in imminent harm from a person capable of resisting arrest. Panicky people should be allowed to flail a bit till they calm down unless those criteria are met.
I think police should be held strictly accountable if they needlessly injure someone who is elderly, ill, in poor health, injured etc. And private security guards most definitely should be.
