Tasers take Manhattan

KDS passes a link from the NYT. What do you do when you realize that your city's cops are shooting too many people? Give them tasers and tell 'em to fire away. Remember, tasers don't kill people (except sometimes).

Police recruits and veteran officers could benefit from more frequent firearms training and a wider use of Taser stun guns, according to a study of the New York Police Department’s shooting habits released on Monday.

The study, by the RAND Corporation, was commissioned in January 2007, about seven weeks after a Queens man, Sean Bell, died in a hail of 50 police bullets. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at the time that questions about the department’s effectiveness and training required an independent review.

RAND researchers raised the phenomenon of “reflexive shooting,” or contagious shooting, in which one officer’s gunshots spur a fusillade of bullets by others in the area.

Though they could not say whether the phenomenon occurred more often than in the past, they recommended that the department add “reflexive shooting scenarios that include a stimulus or the sound of gunfire, to sensitize officers to cues that may not be reliable, and to teach them that such cues may generate unwanted responses.”

Damages

Jared Massey, who was tasered in Utah during a routine traffic stop in September, has been awarded $40,000 in damages, according to the Associated Press. This after the cop car dash camera showed him shocked twice before being told he was under arrest.

The crazies are not going to be happy about this.

Raw Power

At least no tasers were involved.

From the Baltimore Sun:

A Baltimore police officer was suspended Monday after a YouTube video surfaced on the Internet showing him berating and manhandling a teenage skateboarder at the Inner Harbor.

On the video, the officer, Salvatore Rivieri, puts the boy in a headlock, pushes him to the ground, questions his upbringing, threatens to “smack” him and repeatedly accuses the youngster of showing disrespect because the youth refers to the officer as “man” and “dude.”

This pales in comparison to last year's debacle in Little Rock, where a cop went totally nuts on a couple of skaters.

Via Cynical-C.

And for dessert, we have electrodes

Tasered on Thanksgiving. Maybe the hastiest use of a taser I have yet seen.

From the Austin American-Statesman:

After an investigation, the department’s Internal Affairs office saw no need for disciplinary action. http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifBut then-Acting Chief Cathy Ellison reviewed it and ordered a three-day suspension for O’Connor, who served it and then returned to duty.

When Art Acevedo, the new chief from California, saw the video, he strongly disapproved of O’Connor’s action but saw in the footage what some would call “a teaching moment.” He released the video, told officers to watch it, and made it clear that any officer who did the same as O’Connor would be in serious trouble. The chief’s warning was appropriate and welcome.

Via Cynical-C.

Taser Happy

More tasers.

An internal police investigation is under way after a formal complaint was filed against a Utah state trooper who was videotaped Tasering a man who refused to sign a speeding ticket.

The officer’s conduct has been called into question after a videotape of the incident was posted on YouTube.

The video, taken from a Utah Highway Patrol dashboard camera, shows Trooper John Gardner using a Taser on Jared Massey during a traffic stop on State Road 40 in Uintah County on Sept. 14.

“We do have an open internal review, or investigation, of the case,” Sgt. Jeff Nigbur, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Public Safety, told FOXNews.com. “We’re trying to expedite that to get that done as quickly as possible. If the trooper acted inappropriately we will definitely, absolutely, take the appropriate measures to resolve that.”

Via Cynical C.

UPDATE: A commentator at Cynical-C provides a link to a truly horrifying discussion of this video by police officers. Yikes.

More tasers

Your daily taser-death story. Via Thomas.

A 20-year-old man died Sunday after being shot with a Taser device during a scuffle with a sheriff's deputy in Maryland, a spokeswoman for the Frederick County Sheriff's Office said.

Amnesty International blames dozens of deaths on police use of stun guns.

Cpl. Jennifer Bailey said deputies responding to a report of a fight in progress arrived at the location in Frederick, Maryland, just before 5 a.m. ET and found four people fighting.

A deputy used a Taser device on one of the men, who fell unconscious, Bailey said.

The man was taken to Frederick Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. His identity was not immediately released, pending the notification of his family.

And here's a link to Amnesty International's page on Taser abuse, including reports from 2004 and 2006, as well as recent Taser-related news. Here's the blurb on the page:

Since June 2001, there have been more than 270 TASER-related deaths in the United States. AI is concerned that TASERs are being used as tools of routine force--rather than as weapons of last resort. Rigorous, independent, impartial study of their use and effects is urgently needed.

Tasers Tasers Tasers

Tasers in the news, via Gerry.

A mentally-ill, 82-year old woman was tasered on Tuesday.
A 40-year-old Polish immigrant was tasered to death on Oct. 26th, 24 seconds after the police arrived.
And a 68-year-old stroke victim was tasered yesterday on suspicion of double parking.

It's getting sillier and sillier.

Taser Sales Up; Police Competence Down

The Lede has a couple of good posts today, one about the findings of the LAPD about their mishandling of a May Day protest last year, and another about everyone's favorite non-leathal weapon, the taser. Of course these postings seems natural right next to each other since it's hard to think about police brutality and incompetence and not think about tasers. According to the Lede, taser sales are going up despite the cries against it of late, especially the very public tasering of a student in Florida. According to the statistic's of the Lede's article, recent studies of tasers have shown that the weapon is as non-lethal as TASER International has avowed all along.

So, here's a question: If we presume for a second that taser are not lethal and do no serious harm to a significant portion of the population, does that justify their use? That is, if science deems tasers humane, does that change our attitude about the reasonableness of their use? It is on the strength of the argument that tasers are humane, after all, that sales are up and tasers are proliferating.

I feel that what is fundamentally at issue with the use of tasers is not the danger they pose to civilians. Yes, very few people die after being tasered; yes, most can get up and walk away (after a few minutes of utter decapacitation and intense pain). The question is whether law makers and communities feel that they help promote more humane means of policing. What the experience of the LA riots last May show is not that tasers injure people, but rather that they are a crutch on which undertrained, poorly supervised, unaccountable, and power-hungry police officers inflict pain upon civilians. It is precisely because tasers are non-lethal weapons that they can be used so widely so flagrantly against civilians. The issue isn't weather or not tasers are dangerous, but rather whether or not we want police to be given such free reign to inflict violence on the population, especially as a shortcut to adequate training.

Here's an idea: give all cops a taser, fine. But tase them first so that they remember what it feels like. That might significantly cut down on the incidence of grievous abuses of weaponry in this country.

In the news

• A flaming object has fallen out of the sky in Peru and is making people ill.
• Yet another fringe benefit for those who will not immediately perish from global warming: the receding ice has opened up the Northwest Passage.
• And, yes, we do live a police state. As I understand it, it's not technically illegal to ask John Kerry a question, but you will be tazed if you go over your allotted time. Yet the latest installment of my favorite youtube video genre, "police go crazy and taze the shit out of a good citizen." Via the Lede.

By the way, does anybody happen to know what happened to the cops who savagely tazed the UCLA student last January?

Do Cameras Makes Us Safer?

Of all the youtube videos I have seen in the last two years, the one that shook me the most was the one that captured UCLA police officers repeatedly tasering a student in their library last November. In part, my response to that video was conditioned by witnessing a similar scene of police brutality six months previous, when four friends of mine were pepper sprayed and arrested (one was tased twice) because they were verbally confrontational with a cop who had pinned a man down , handcuffed him, and then pepper sprayed him. Naturally, all four were acquitted of the piddly little crimes there were supposedly arrested for. At least in Albuquerque, such behavior by police is a form a crowd control since it is virtually impossible to hold an officer responsible for wrongful arrest, use of excessive force, or any other type of misconduct.

So when I saw this morning that skateboarders in Arkansas got photos of a cop strangling one of their friends, and video of the same cop brutalizing and arresting a few more, my heart beat immediately began to quicken. What were the skateboarders doing? Well, you know, skateboarding. And being a worried about their friend who had just been strangled by a law enforcement officer. That's a crime, you see.


This video is not nearly as brutal as the UCLA one, and I'm glad for that. But it's a good reminder for me about the potential good cell phone cameras contain. I have a general ambivalence about the proliferation of cameras in public and the extreme ease with which we are all potentially broadcast. Ambivalent because such a proliferation could portend an Orwellian surveillance state (it's not as hyperbolic as it may sound), and yet the power seems to swing both ways, since the ability to capture true acts of injustice can, and does, happen. I don't know, ultimately, whether we are better off with this technology, but I am glad that it helps keep people who brutalize others human beings in check.

Since the UCLA incident, I have been feeling the need to acquire a camera phone. I see it as a way to protect myself, and my friends, from the police, odd as that sounds. I wonder now how things would have been different if I had had one last year when my friends were arrested.