Part of the problem is the demand for INSTANT obedience. The man holding the pole was not obeying. But all he was doing was causing a delay. Delaying a cop should not put your life in danger. Are they really that busy? Perhaps they need some lessons in persuasion.

I think this is not just about time but about authoritarianism. The delay (to cops who should not be on the job) is seen as a bucking of their authority.

Craig: Delaying a cop should not put your life in danger.

Having a taser used on you is not realistically placing your life in danger. Yes, deaths do happen due to taser use, but these are too rare for it to be considered "putting someone's life in danger."

Nobody uses a taser with intent or expecting to kill someone. That's the beauty of it. It allows you to subdue someone without killing them.

On the other hand, a mentally disabled person refusing to let go of a pole hardly seems like a justifiable reason to tase someone. You can't pry his hands loose? You can't persuade him?

And tasing a pregnant woman who refused to sign a speeding ticket is outrageous. I don't know what the risks are to her unborn child (maybe none, for all I know), but I certainly wouldn't risk it.

And tasing a pregnant woman who refused to sign a speeding ticket is outrageous. I don't know what the risks are to her unborn child (maybe none, for all I know), but I certainly wouldn't risk it.

Patrick at March 27, 2016 10:07 AM

Well, that's her side of the story. When all cops have cams, it will protect them as well as the citizens. Everyone will be better behaved.

I'm in favor of non lethal force whenever possible, I also think that establishing no go areas for law enforcement because of cultural and political sensitivities, is a very poor idea.
There are some bad cops, but I think tasers are infinitely preferable to swat teams. A mistake is less likely to kill an innocent party.

Cops and many others are screwed w/this.

from the artcle:
"A federal court recently put police on notice: They could lose on-the-job immunity from civil lawsuits if they use a Taser to shock suspects in the face of nonviolent resistance."

So now cops have to determine if their actions to MAKE someone do something he does not want to do (come w/them at least) will in the eyes of a jury cause them to be jailed or sued if the worst happens (heart attack, asthma attack, etc.).

Whoa! where do I sign up for this $25K/year job?

("Sorry Mrs. Smith. I"m not going to take your 190lb. son in to the psych ward 'cause he says he doesn't want to go. Call us when he harms someone and we will come and get him then. Yes Mrs. Smith. I hope he doesn't kill himself or you myself.")

It's this way already but now, now, if they do believe he's a threat they have to worry about getting into trouble if they taser him.

On the behalf of parents w/troubled teenagers/young adults everywhere THANK YOU for your help!

We already have to wait for them to be so obviously unstable that cops can see for themselves what we are talking about.

Now those same cops have to decide if the worst happens will they themselves will go to jail or be sued. Yeah, right.

Fix the problem. Bad cops doing bad things. Morons. Would like to taser them.

"Having a taser used on you is not realistically placing your life in danger."

I guess you missed the part where people died...
Have you had one used on you? You will fall where you stood, uncontrolled...at best.

I ask because the Automated Electronic Defibrillator in the hallway at work has just one job: stop your heart. It does this after determining what the heart is doing - if it doesn't detect normal rhythm, zap!

The heart is left to restart itself.

Now, imagine I had a manual device attached to you that would apply the same shock for a period of time I selected.

Wanna volunteer? Didn't think so. Is it OK because it's "other people"?

There is no level of electrical shock that is not a health risk. You might want to harm someone who offends you, but that doesn't justify application.

Just in case you don't value my input...

I have been Tased. Twice. As part of training.

It was a horrible experience. But I would still take a Tasering, rather than a beating, because 10 minutes afterwards, I was just fine, none the worse for wear.

When I was Tased, it was on gym mats, and there were trained personnel there to help me if something went wrong. Some subjects reacted more than I did - a couple of people puked, because it causes violent muscle spasms. Some people did a lot better than I did. One (female) officer was essentially unaffected. Stayed standing, hurt like hell while being shocked, but was ready to fight as soon as the shocks stopped. She said.

So - the Taser is a good tool when less-than-lethal force is required - and justified. As I say, sooner the Taser than a baton, pepper spray or fists.

But - the Taser also has the unique distinction of being able to apply tremendous pain and suffering, without leaving any permanent injury. The 'drive-stun' mode allows the user to apply an unlimited number of shocks to the victim. There's nothing else like it.

So you would have to be naïve or foolish to imagine that a tool like this would not morph from being 'a less-than-lethal force alternative' into being 'a tool used to force compliance and/or apply non-judicial punishment.' In other words, officers are using the Taser to make people do what they want, when they want, to end discussion or disagreement, and sometimes simply to exact revenge on persons who they perceive as disrespecting them. If you set out to design a tool that would allow an officer to punish persons for 'contempt of cop', the Taser is what you would come up with.

As we see in the instant case. As Patrick notes - the guy wouldn't let go of a pole. Well, the officers are being paid by the hour. It would seem logical to take a little time and figure out if there isn't some way to persuade him to come quietly. Instead, they went to straight to 'apply massive pain and suffering'. And the Taser makes this easy to do. Most times, the victim complies, and is none the worse for the experience. You might well do the same thing, if you were short-tempered, and frustrated, and you felt you were trying to do 'good'. Again, the Milgram 'obedience' experiments are 100% on-point here.

But there are 2 questions here, and they are

- are we happy allowing state officers to apply massive pain and discomfort to citizens, simply to make them respond more-promptly, or more to the officer's liking?
- are we happy allowing state officers to use a technical tool like this, for such minor purposes, when it's becoming obvious that it's not nearly as benign as it has been made out to be?

When all is said and done, even allowing for its usually-benign outcomes, the Taser is a force weapon. The general principle is that the police may only use force in response to real and credible threats, and then only proportional to the actual threat. Hard to see how either case met this test.

llater,

llamas

Here's a thought experiment.

There's a man in the Detroit area who goes by the nickname of 'Dr Pain'. He's a first-generation Russian immigrant, and he was some sort of officer in Soviet Russia.

As his name implies, he teaches pain-compliance methods to police departments and others.

He knows about 1654 ways to apply horrible and excruciating pain to a person, using only his hands or very basic implements. As much pain as he wants, for as long as he wants. And most his techniques leave no permanent injury. Some are more-aggressive than others, and will leave you sore or temporarily bruised or inflamed. None are life-threatening in any way, but all involve physically laying hands on a person.

Here's the question - how would you feel about an officer using such techniques to obtain compliance? I'm interested to try and figure whether it is the impersonality of the Taser that makes it somehow different?

llater,

llamas

Radwaste: I guess you missed the part where people died...

Ah, yes, the pristine beauty of being a dullard. Nuance is lost on you.

Please note, child, I said, "Having a taser used on you is not realistically placing your life in danger."

This, lackwit, is not to say that no one in all the history of taser use has ever, ever, ever, ever, ever died from it. I'm not saying that, but you somehow seem to think I did.

Most people with an eighth grade education or better, would realize that by saying that having a taser used on you is not realistically placing your life in danger is to say that it is unlikely that having a taser used on you will kill you.

It would be unrealistic to expect you're going to die from having a taser used on you. A study done by the National Institute of Justice found that “the risk of death in a CED-related [conductive energy device; i.e. taser] use-of- force incident in the general population is less than 0.25 percent (one in 400).”

And please note, Radwaste, that is what a credible source looks like...as opposed to a gun-lover's blog that references a University of Chicago study without supplying the data from that study, but instead directs us to some agenda-driven book we can buy that supposedly interprets the data for us.

Does people die from being hit by tasers? Obviously. However with a less than 1 in 400 chance of it happening, it would be unrealistic to expect to die from being hit by a taser.

Get it now?

"Get it now?"

Yes, and now the police are going to "get it".

Tazing someone five times in a row is abusive, whether they're enjoying the rough cop rape fantasy or not.

Look around the world and see unarmed police forces handling miscreants, drunks, the mentally ill, traffic stops, jaywalkers, litterbugs and low-level criminals without using firearms and electrical torture devices. I wonder why our heavily-armed cops can't do the same.

Perhaps they're incompetent, or lazy, or sadistic, or poorly trained, or part of an armed gang that demands obedience at the cost of our lives and freedom with historically little or no consequences.

So yeah, we all "get it".

Perhaps they're incompetent, or lazy, or sadistic, or poorly trained, or part of an armed gang that demands obedience at the cost of our lives and freedom with historically little or no consequences.

Or power-tripping.

"Does (sic) people die from being hit by tasers? Obviously. However with a less than 1 in 400 chance of it happening, it would be unrealistic to expect to die from being hit by a taser. Get it now?

So you accept these odds. Nice to know.

I wonder: just when do you think "realistic" sets in? 50/50?

I wonder when your infantile offense will dissipate, so that you can recognize what you're doing.

Meanwhile, more bystanders die from police fire than from those defending themselves, however you hoot at a blog that points that out. Had you not had your face clouded by rage, you might have arrived at the idea that police arrive at a crime scene without the critical information as to who the bad guys are - and an intended victim has no doubt. Gee. I have over 80MB of text on 2nd Amendment issues archived from the old CNN boards on public gun possession. Since you lack street sense as well as a desire to look things up yourself, maybe I can go through that and find a Web site to make you happy.

Ahh, probably not.

I am sure that others share my relief at the idea that you are not a police officer, defending as you are their lack of care.