OK. Take another deep breath, RT, and try to follow. There are >230 posts about the potentially excessive force from the cops here. Including a post by me which is not very supportive of the officers.
There is one post about the silliness of college students who think they know everything.
OK, now here comes the difficult part, so put your thinking cap on. Just because somebody makes one post about the silly college students, does not mean that person is not also concerned with the potential excessive force. Ya see? I can be concerned about the excessive force, as my prior post shows, and still think that college students are silly. And me thinking college students are silly does not mean that I think police brutality is OK. Those are not mutually exclusive views. Understand? I know it’s difficult, maybe there is someone nearby with higher than a room-temperature IQ that could draw you a picture.
Because I’m at work, meathead — I said so in my very first post. I couldn’t watch the video from here if I wanted to.
And in either case, we need to establish rules which aren’t disturbing. The 4-cops-per-suspect rule doesn’t fit that bill, and yet everybody keeps crowing “just drag the guy out!” as if 3 cops always respond to every call.
I don’t get the police report, just the radiology report. I get no specifics on the incident.
Not. Commenting. On. The. Video.
I live in America, and I can’t believe Americans seem to be suggesting that the solution is more cops. Nobody has said this outright, no, but they keep saying “well, just drag him out” as if that’s the ideal solution for all suspects and all situations.
I can’t. Besides, what’s the point? Guidelines or no guidelines, you’ve made up your mind that you don’t like what the video shows. You’re stuck in the moment of blame: punish the cops if they’re wrong, or change the rules so the cops are wrong. I’ve moved past that to, “What should the rules be, then?”
I’m sorry; it’s evening here, so my automatic reaction was “they’re home now, and they haven’t watched it but rushed to talk about it anyway?”. I blame time zones.
Not so. I’m saying guidelines should be changed so that if three cops do show up, tasers shouldn’t be used. If this case had gone exactly as it had but only 1 cop turned up, I doubt my argument would be the same.
Then how do you know how many are cases of passive resistance and how many are cases where the suspect went berserk?
Well, i’m a Brit, and i’m not suggesting that. There WERE more cops there, in this case. If there had been less cops, it would be different. But there were not. In this case, three cops turned up. The guidelines should say if enough cops are there to drag a suspect out, then they shouldn’t resort to pointless tasering. If there aren’t, then it should be up to the cop. No new cops needed. Happy?
If they change the rules after the fact, it wouldn’t make the cops wrong. Guidelines aren’t retrospective.
So i’ve offered you my suggested change; if enough cops are there to drag a suspect out when the suspect is passively resisting and does not appear a threat, then tasering should not be an option. Does that seem reasonable to you?
I don’t, and never said I did. All I’m saying is that injuries are common when police attempt to subdue a suspect physically.
What if the suspect is inciting a large crowd to participate?
How many cops is “enough?” We’ve heard from Lissa, I believe, that 4 is standard. Here there were evidently 3, and this thread suggests they struggled to control a suspect who was not actively resisting.
What is a “pointless tasering?” You later suggest that TASER shouldn’t even be an option.
But that’s not specific enough to be of much use here. I mean, technically I could say that injuries are common when playing ice hockey; is that grounds to eliminate penalty shots? No, because while a game might be pretty rough, the particular case of a penalty shoot is likely to be much less so.
Participate in attacking police? That might even be grounds to draw a baton or gun, depending on how large and how violent the crowd is. Participate in passive resistance? Nope, doesn’t strike me as grounds.
What suggests they struggled to control him? They certainly didn’t have his cooperation, if that’s what you mean. But he was still fully in their control; he was cuffed, he wasn’t attacking them, he wasn’t attached to any part of the library, he didn’t have friends hanging onto him.
“Pointless tasering” in this case would refer to the fact that they tasered him in order to gain his compliance when they did not need his compliance. In addition, the tasering failed in gaining his compliance.
What about the tasering being pointless means that it should be acceptable? I don’t see where you’re going with that last part, sorry.
I’m sorry, but as I haven’t seen the video, I can only go by how the crowd’s behavior has been characterized here — and getting into a cop’s face while he’s trying to subdue a suspect doesn’t sound “passive.” The gray areas here are phenomenally wide, and simple definitions don’t apply. The police have to have some latitude to make decisions, and know when a crowd is on the edge of breaking into a mob.
Well, the fact that they didn’t just “pick up him and drag him out” in 20 seconds, the ideal which people keep repeating, suggests that.
You added the word “pointless” to TASERing, which suggested sometimes TASERing had a point. I wanted to know what that point would have been, the exception proves the rule and so on.
I have been involved in arresting a number of people in the middle of crowds where the crowd is very sympathetic to the suspect and is borderline interfering. Take my word for it, tasering a guy who is handcuffed and lying on the ground is not the way to win the crowd over to your side.
If you’re willing to take my word on it, no students got in the cop’s face while he was subduing the suspect - or at any time. If you think I may be biased, feel free to wait until you get an opportunity to watch the video yourself.
And as i’ve said, if a crowd is on the verge of breaking into a mob, that* might * even be an appropriate time to draw a baton or gun. Nice of me to leave open some latitude there, wasn’t it?
Or, it suggests that the cops made a bad decision.
Of course tasering can have a point; I imagine it’s useful for incapacitate an attacker. It’s probably also useful in subduing a struggling, angry suspect. I’ve already said there are situations in which a taser is a useful and reasonable response to a situation; this does not appear to be such a situation.
This is another problem for me. Had the police not used the TASER and simply cuffed the suspect and dragged him out or whatever, there would be no angry students or the “threat” of mob violence. The student isn’t exactly not culpabable in the situation, but the cops certainly escalated the incident, and they simply didn’t have to.
You know, and I’m sick of hearing this condescending “Aren’t college students so goshdarn cute with their civil rights” bullshit. At least somebody has some goddamned idealism in this jaded society of ours. Helps keep the balance and all.
Simply put-> Student wrong for being a dick. Cops wrong for escalating a situation which did not need to be escalated. Is what they did criminal or otherwise illegal? I don’t know. Probably not. But it sure was stupid.
How does the crowd respond to bodily grabbing such a suspect, putting him in an armlock, and dragging him away? I can’t imagine it’s much of an improvement.
The view that dragging people around and wrestling with them is someone ideal to use of the Taser stems from their massive ignorance of the device. If people would take a step back and actually read about it a little bit, they would see it for what it is. People fear it because they dont understand it and are not used to it. This is primarily what causes the public to freak out and yell ‘brutality’ when they see it used in a way they dont understand.
You’re right, they probably would not have been so freaked out if the cops dragged him around. But that doesn’t mean their right. They obviously dont understand the situation and don’t have all the facts.
I think if I would have taken a different approach in this thread, I would have been more convincing. But it was the pit–not Great Debates–so I didn’t expect I would need to. Bottom line is that those of you who believe this was severe brutality, abuse, or torture, do so because you think the Taser is something that it’s not. We shouldn’t be arguing policy or civil rights, we should be discussing the Taser itself. Because if you truly understood the thing, you wouldn’t be reacting the way you are.
We’re not talking about one-on-one, a bouncer versus a person. Get 3-4 boys in blue wrapping up a suspect, each taking an arm or a leg, I’m not sure the crowd would be pleased.
Less pleased than tasering him? Even if it causes no lasting injury, it sounds a lot more painful than getting the bum’s rush, and is more likely to engender sympathy from the crowd. If these videos continue surfacing, it is only a matter of time until some cop gets hurt by an enraged crowd.
You know, Bear_Nenno is right. I was labouring under the false impression that a taser caused pain; I see now how silly that was of me! Thanks, B_N, for dispelling my ignorance!
I’d just like to add that I frequently have to pickup and carry people as part of my job. It is not easy at all. Patients in cardiac arrest or otherwise incapacitated (I.E. dead weight) are a bitch to carry for any distance, even with 3-4 people. Those who actively resist me (psychotic or drunk patients in most cases) usually get tackled and tied down to my bed. It easily takes 4-6 of us to pull this off, and we cannot carry that person for any real distance, we bring the bed to them. I also carry drugs to knock these patients out if we cannot restrain them, or they continue to pose a threat to themselves or others when restrained.
What I’m trying to say is picking someone up and carrying them out is at best hard, and at worse damn near impossible. Factor in the injury potential for both the patient and the responders (more EMS personnel loose their jobs to back injuries than any other) and I’m not terribly keen at carrying anyone I don’t have to.
