Or could it be on the military base, by a comrade, with a gun.
That where we are today folks. First a day of taser blogging via a campaign started at Electrocuted While Black, or blogging against Pre-Trial Execution, and a reminder on the LaVena Johnson case, a case I’ll be reminding you about at least weekly, just to jog your memory.
I’ve not done much research on tasers, their use or the stats which go along with them, so I’m hesitant to write too much. I have read enough to know they can kill and therefore should not be used in most situations.They are also used disproportionally on African Americans.
If you feel oh well if you do the crime.…, just consider it an execution without trial, because in cases where the taser causes death that is exactly what it is.
They use tasers in the public school system in this county now, it was used once last year on a public high school student in the hallway of his high school. The student in this case suffered no long term damage, but he was not with weapon or posing any threat to the officer. The policy surrounding it’s use in the schools, though being scrutinized, is still in effect.
Yup, the sheriffs office walks around the public high school with tasers, even though many have questions about their training in it’s use considering a young man died here last year two hours after being tasered by an officer of the same sheriff’s department policing the schools. The young man, tasered during a fight with four other individuals, was drunk, disorderly, he had no weapon. He was tasered and died two hours later at the local hospital, he was 20 years old. His history not withstanding there is some indication he was already down and unconscious when tasered a second time, though the grand jury which cleared the officer of any wrong doing did not choose to hear those witnesses.
A quick google news search via blogs brings up more incidents than I knew of where tasers were used when an individual appeared impaired, and death followed. The abuse of tasers is obvious if you do some scrolling. I think of a friend with type 1 diabetes who if his blood sugar goes too low from his insulin can get surly, uncooperative, even combative. I think how easy for a cop somewhere, somehow to come upon him in this state and taser him, inadvertently killing him.
These things are not safe, are not used correctly in many cases, and are used in situations where such force is not needed. The training of officers in their use seems inconsistent at best.
Saskatchewan is ahead of us in banning the use of taser.
Canadian province bans local police use of Tasers
Amnesty International’s Taser Concerns
Taser Nation
Electrocuted While Black
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I wanted to add this tonight so you have time to make those phone calls and faxes we need before Wednesday evening.
A reminder on LaVena Johnson case via What About Our Daughters,(Lavena Johnson Update: Hearing on Thursday at 10:00 AM Rm 2154 Rayburn Building)
Here is another opportunity for you to get answers from the United States Army in the Lavena Johnson case:
On Thursday, July 31 at 10:00 am, the Subcommittee will hold a hearing entitled, “Oversight Hearing on Sexual Assault in the Military.” The hearing will take place in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building and is open to the public. Oversight Committee Website
This is a subcommittee of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The full committee is chaired by Congressman Waxman. The hearing will be webcast.
Read the full post at the source and be sure to fax in your questions. Call the members of the committee and your legislators. This whole situation is beyond unconscionable.
Some of the larger progressive blogs are covering this now but I still see no MSM coverage.
LaVena, a 19 year old soldier served in Iraq for two months before she was murdered, raped and then presented as a suicide to her parents.
Thinking about cops in school hallways with tasers, as liberally as they like to use them; just makes me ill.
Thanks for again posting with us Cooper.
That is a big problem. It will not be addressed here again until this fall ‚but I am going to follow it closely.
It’s frightening because they most definitively are not used correctly, and the discretionary skills of the officers are not very good.
The public school scenario is beyond belief. To my knowledge cooper, only one board of education member ever made a complaint to have tasers taken out of use in public schools and that went nowhere.
I feel more frightened by the use of tasers by the police officers in some jurisdictions than by people personal use of tasers.
As long as it’s not their children they don’t care.
I always wonder about issues like this. I think I’d still prefer tasing to shooting. I imagine there’s data to show the disproportionality, right?
I’m glad the earthquake didn’t get you.
If you mean one study no, though a two year study by the department of justice will be out in September of 2009.
I did a two hour search last night just to get a feel for it, not scientific by any means, but it is a pretty clear picture and there is much data to prove race and poverty drive public policy and law enforcement. Police brutality, racial and gender profiling and use of excessive force are commonplace in this country, there is easy obtainable date for that.
Various police departments, Houston — where some legislators asked for but didn’t get a moratorium on taser use as 85 percent of those tasered in Houston were minorities -, San Jose, Atlanta various county systems in Florida various interdepartmental studies from various cities if you dig deep enough and the one aspect of them is minorities are clearly getting tasered more often
You can also find some data in this pdf, a shadow report by American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker human rights organization, and a coalition of more than 140 U.S.-based non-profits and organizations and 32 individuals. A comprehensive review of human rights violations in the United States ever compiled. The 465-page “shadow report” was assembled for the United Nation’s Human Rights Committee as part of its review of U.S. human rights abuses later this month. Page 16 of this report has some data.
Another problem is they are used on impaired individuals more frequently, are often used now in place of the crisis intervention techniques which used to be a mainstay of police efforts, and they have killed.
Taser international went on a marketing rampage a couple of years ago which ended in tons of police departments using their product and many not using their own training but the training taser supplied.
My own police department, the one which killed that 20 year old with a taser last year, was using Taser’s training and had not implemented their own training. They have now of course.
Tasers are supposed to be used as a weapon of last resort for subduing a dangerous (i.e. attacking the police or other people) person. But watching a single episode of COPS shows just how often they are used for something as simple as the person not getting on their knees quickly enough or being so scared that they don’t understand what the officer is saying. So many police now have a “get them before they get you, and sort it out later” mentality, and that contributes to any number of events (from a woman being arrested and strip searched after calling the police because in her upset frame of mind she accidentally gave the police her dead sister’s driver’s licence to the actions of Canadian police last year who got tired of waiting for a translator to show up and tasered a man who had done nothing wrong beyond not speaking English in the airport).
No wonder some people are afraid to call the police. I had to talk to a cop last week after someone decorated my car with some pasta, and I made sure my hands were visible at all times and that I kept a safe distance from him. I didn’t expect him to do anything, but I also didn’t want to appear intimidating to him.
Surely you’re safe in Kansas?
Many times there is a confused perp, whether it be drugs, medical condition, mental illness. To use something which has increasingly been cited for actually killing people is not acceptable.
While I think it can certainly be demonstrated that taser abuse is disproportionate against Blacks, there are a number of incidents of whites being unjustly tased and even killed. I posted video of one such incident at my blog, which you can click on my name for.
Yes it has been used all around , there is no doubt about that.
The manufacturer of the taser has done a wonderful job of hoodwinking the law enforcement agencies.
The law enforcement agencies have been negligent in taking instructions from the manufacturers as training, and also for using this almost as a first defense in some situations and with no subsequent departmental training.
I don’t have to look vr y fr to see the evident of it’s use on minorities,but it does go along with what is known about the justice system in this country.
The manufacturer has done there job, that is for sure. I can’t believe the law enforcement agncies can’t do a better job on this.
About 2 – 3 years ago around here, a number of incidents in a row involved unnecessary and quite cruel usage of the taser. The problems are pretty clear:
1) Not knowing the person’s medical history. DO they have a heart palpitations or a murmur?
2) Seizure history
3) On a drug or alcohol — and unarmed — does mean the person may act strange, but other methods should be used. (One kid had a known mental disorder in Portage, IN and got tased for his troubles…His family sued. Don’t know the results.)
4) An odd Change in body’s resistence (OHMS) results in an amperage that can be lethal. Being wet, sweating (like while drinking) or other abnormal change isn’t something most of these officers would worry about…since they are trained to trust the TASER, a machine.
5) A Taser malfunction — they obviously can happen. Anything with electricity has a possibility of that.
Most law enforcements officials play it off as, “well, in our extensive trials, our officers could handle the voltage.” Their officers, you fools! They are usually in good/great shape with med staff right there in case the sit. is fucked up.
Most that support these gadgets are paid to lessen any talking about the risks. Sending any current through a person (1 or more times, as is usually the case) is inherently risky. I mean, seriously, do doctors reach for the stimulating device first when you go out? (And they are educated enough to know…the usage of it and the complications, risks and current factors.)
As IEEE states about the heart: “A big jolt of current at the right frequency can turn the coordinated pump into a quivering mass of muscle. That’s just what electrocution does: the burst of electricity causes the heart’s electrical activity to become chaotic, and it stops pumping adequately — a situation known as ventricular fibrillation.”
Nice. But they cover for the cops, basically saying because of the taser system is set up to work below the theoretical limits and not in sequence with body’s electric mechs., it’s cool.
But they add this gem: “In the United States, about 670 people die each year under police restraint, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. These incidents include arrests and attempts to control an uncooperative person who needs medical assistance, as well as suicides after arrest. Studies have shown that stun guns were used during about 30 percent of in-custody deaths in the United States. Although Tasers were involved in a sizable fraction of these deaths, one should not leap to the conclusion that Tasers caused them…”
What other conclusion can be drawn? That they just, without any prompting, kicked off through natural causes? That it was inevitable they die, the taser was just used as, “a means of persuasion?” So 200 people die, a taser was used, and lo, it couldn’t have been a culprit?
Sadly, I didn’t do the 2 hours of work you did. But I did write the paper in (2005 or 2006) about this bullshit practice. They didn’t print it.
Good read, Coop de Ville. (Like/Dislike?)
Hey Doug,
My position is that tasers are used way too liberally. If a person is not being violent or threating, but they don’t jump down on the ground fast enough, they get tased. I guy was tasered just recently for trying to commit suicide. He didn’t have a weapon, he was standing on the edge of the bridge. The police tasering did the suicide for him. You have disabled people, death people, mentally retarded people, people who just don’t understand english, getting tased most of the time simply for not moving fast enough for the cop.
This kid in Louisiana got tased 9 times while already in handcuffs. The final three tasings that killed him is because he wouldn’t get out of the patrol car fast enough. It’s believed he didn’t do so because he was disoriented from having already been tased 6 times.
Tasers should only be a last resort before using a gun, only when some is putting others in danger of harm; not because the cop doesn’t like your attitude and wants to adjust it with a bolt of electricity
I hope that somehow her parents are able to get justice for their daughter. When I think of everything that happened to her I am just filled with such a rage and such sorrow. It speaks of all the fears that a black mother lives with everyday.
and to think they abolished the cane !!!
pretty bad when they have to employ police to keep the peace in schools :0
I went to high school in this county And they have always had a sheriff’s deputy assigned to every high school.,as opposed to having any kind of security at the high schools. It i standard and really doesn’t have anything to do with violence in the schools as much as that is how the county and the board of ed decided to deal with school security. With all but one school close to two thousand or over students it is necessary to have security for situations of evacuations, bomb threats, etc.
The tasers are not needed in the school system. Every high school in this county is in the top 5 percent of schools in the nation, th violence in these schools is minimal at best.