I have to disagree. IMO, the officer had no good reason to tase him, other than the fact that he could. Especially more than once.
I still don’t get how tasing someone, an act designed to incapacitate, is going to get them to jump right up and hop in your back seat.
Or a gun. Would you defend the officer had he whipped out his gun and said “okay, last chance–if you don’t get in the car, I’m going to pistol whip you.” Failing that, how about a “no, really–if you don’t get in the car, I’m going to shoot you in the foot.” Neither is particularly lethal, after all.
No one’s disputing that. But, when someone doesn’t do what the officer says, a taser shouldn’t be employed to extract compliance anymore than a gun should.
Quoted for truth. The suspect has been secured in handcuffs and is seated. In hindsight, maybe you shouldn’t have cuffed him on the ground if you weren’t certain he’d comply with your orders afterwards. But there was no need to employ the use of a taser here–the officer is clearly aware of the option to call for backup (he asks for its availability, and then later requests it–and another officer joins in under 2 minutes) for physical assistance.
Clearly, someone arrested should comply with directives given by the officer. But if they don’t, I don’t think the taser should come into play at all. By all means, get as many officers as you need to pick him up and physically relocate him, but don’t use a damn taser to extract compliance.
Your cites are all for sleeper holds, neck holds, choke holds and/or carotid holds. None of these are by definition “come along” holds. These holds are designed to produce unconciousness. Which I assume the police officer in this case did not want.
Also, your cites referred to a either individual cases, or did not provide any numbers, or were a review of 14 cases since 1882 in Judo. They are not what I asked for. They do not tell us anything about the matter in hand. Your cites are a complete red herring.
You have failed to produce any evidence that a come along hold is more dangerous than a Taser.
Then why did he warn him? Since he could, and needed no other motivation, why not just whip out the Taser and start zapping away?
Why did the officer keep saying “get in the car or I’ll Tase you”? Do you believe that, if the arrrestee had complied, the officer would have Tased him anyway, just for kicks?
If you watch the video all the way to the end, it did seem to have had that effect, at least eventually.
Right, right - there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between shooting someone and Tasing them. :rolleyes:
Reminds me of that Simpsons episode. “I’m gonna start walking and swinging my fists… and if you’re in the way and happen to get hit, it’s not my fault.” (or something to that effect)
That way, after the fact, the officer can just say “well, I warned him!”
No. Hence why I believe he was just using the taser as a tool to extract compliance.
After backup arrived to help, you mean?
So you draw your line somewhere between tasers and guns. I draw mine somewhere between picking the guy up and tasers.
Bikers and police officers are apples and oranges, and no good comparisons can be made. Police officers often have to respond to traffic accidents that occur on icy roads or in similar horrible weather conditions that bikers would not be out in. That means they’re out of their cars on a road where weather and road conditions have already caused one accident and are likely to cause more. That alone makes this comparison invalid.
Yes, he was certainly using it as a tool to enforce compliance. Hence your earlier assertion that he Tased the guy for no other motive than that he could do it was wrong.
Furthermore, police are not empowered to punish wrongdoing. They are empowered to detect crime and prevent crime when possible. They are empowered to identify those they believe have committed a crime and bring them to Justice, but they are neither judge or juror. They don’t determine guilt under law. Until the justice system determines guilt, no punishment is authorized.
So why not prohibit road side stops late at night? Why put cops in such an inherently dangerous situation for what, on average, amounts to a few bucks in the city’s coffers? Why not just mandate that they pull of the road completely in areas where it is possible to do so?
I am not saying that bike riding is the same. My point is that most people do not consider things like bike riding or horseback riding to be “inherently dangerous” despite there being a decent risk of injury.
And the reason I did not attempt your “back of the envelope” math is that it would not at all determine how dangerous either activity is considering you made several assumptions on the road to your shaky conclusion. We don’t know the total number of police stops each year, total number of bike trips or miles traveled, number of injuries prevented by helmets, etc., etc.
Either way, you are missing the point. Do you consider any of the things mentioned “inherently dangerous”? I don’t mean to keep harping in the use of that one phrase, but it seems to me that anytime a cop behaves like a thug or a sociopath, people seem to bend over backwards to justify their actions based on the dangers and stress of their job.
It isn’t just the night or even the busy street. Among other things, there is the fact of the non-compliant stopee sitting outside his car. You can’t know who is going to have a breakdown and sit down behind their car and refuse to move before you make a stop.
Moreover, your cost-benefit analysis is silly. Police don’t enforce traffic laws just to make money for the city. Though that is obviously one benefit. They do so because enforcement of those laws increases everyone’s safety.
We ask police to do some things that are dangerous because that’s the price we’re willing to pay to enforce the law. But that doesn’t mean police therefore assume all dangers and cannot use reasonable means to reduce the danger in a particular situation. Tasing the guy was a reasonable idea for achieving compliance which would have reduced the risk to everyone. It failed. And I think the subsequent tasing was excessive force.
I am not sure what your point is meant to be at this point, but there are risks involved in pretty much everything. What is often useful is to compare a given course of action with its reasonable alternatives (not to things as unrelated as bike riding is to police work).
There is, obviously, a certain danger involved in being on the side of a busy road. After all, every month (on average) a police officer dies from it. I would assume the figures to be at least as high, or higher, for civilians, especially ones as rather clearly dysfunctioning as the arrestee was in the video. I have no hard figures on how many homeless, destitute, sobbing people are killed by being hit by cars, but it seems a safe assumption to me.
A reasonable alternative to allowing such a person to loll on the side of the highway lamenting his fate to an uncaring universe would be to get his sorry ass into the back of the squad car. Again, I have no hard figures at my fingertips, but it seems reasonable to assume that both he, and the officer, would be a lot safer inside the car than out. After all, we mandate seat belts on the theory that being inside a steel shell designed to absorb impact if hit by another car is safer than trying to block the fender of the oncoming vehicle with your pants.
So there are at least two of the alternatives - we can get his butt in the cruiser where it belongs, so he can be whisked off to the safe familiarity of a jail cell, or we can spend twenty minutes attempting to reason with someone behaving in a way no sane parent would allow in a six-year-old.
So feel free to compare apples and kumquats. As soon as you are done, we can go back to a discussion on how the police are big meanies every time they do anything beyond saying “Pretty please with sugar on top”.
I do want the police to be effective at their jobs. I don’t want them to use a device that has been shown to cause death when there is no need to do so.
Let me know if you can grasp this complex reasoning Shodan, without using exaggeration for effect. Or whatever it is that you were doing.
The thing for me is even if you view compliance as a legitimate use (which I personally dont) at some point it has to be seen to unreasonable to continue its use when the person being tasered is reacting unexpectedly.
There presumably is some level of responsibility to recognise when the reaction is due to psychiatric or other issues and that there is some kind of issue preventing compliance. As a result the desired effect of compliance is not occurring and risk is being increased by its use rather than decreased. Ie if we watched the officer use the device 20 times in a row, at some point in that series of 20 uses it cant be argued to be a legitimate use of compliance any more.
To me in that video that should have been pretty obvious by the second use at the very most, and really the first. Anything after that was the officer not recognising that this was not a situation where further use of the item was warranted unless the situation changed in some way, eg it looked like the person was going to stand up or the like.
Okay, you can’t throw something like that out without expanding a bit. How did the man strike you? Did he have a streak of the bully in him, or was this more a bad call on his part?
Closed fist, but he did pull back a bit just before impact. Kidding.
He is actually one of the nicest people I have ever met. Very intelligent and kind, always ready to help. He would be 30 right now, which would make him around 25 at the time of the incident, and he probably wasn’t very seasoned. I honestly think he had a momentary lapse in judgment. Just my opinion.
That would fit for me, he looks quite distressed at times, maybe a sort of real life Milgram in some ways, where compliance is so important you’re doing things that just dont make sense.
Of course many terrible things are due to lapses in judgment so it doesnt excuse him, but does make it a more complicated than a simple ‘cop gone bad’ situation.
Compliance would be based on ability to comply. This guy had a meltdown and just ceased being a functional human being.
My personal take on this is that officers are taught to quickly take control of a situation to keep it from spiraling out of control and this was a knee-jerk response to training. The officer failed to recognize (or did not believe) the man was comming apart at the seams. It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to bullshit their way out of a ticket. However, since he was already cuffed and showing no signs of harming the officer then he should have been further restrained (to keep him out of traffic) and left alone until backup arrived.
Fair enough. He was inexperienced. So, while it doesn’t excuse him, it means he shouldn’t be drawn and quartered either. I interpret your words as meaning there was no malice or “power trip” thing going on, he was just young and inexperienced.
As far as “sleeper holds” and come-alongs go, I’m not an expert. I only held a second blue belt in Tae Kwon Do. But seems to me a come along would be more like a wrist lock, arm bar, “chicken wing”, or grabbing him by the ear and dragging him. You want him to go where you want him to. A choke hold or sleeper hold would sort of defeat the purpose. He won’t go where you want if he is unconscious. I also understand many police departments now frown on choke and sleeper holds because of the risk.