Now I know many people won’t want to agree with me here, but to me there is one germain question: Was the girl subdued without any lasting harm?
If so, assuming that the cops had exhausted all other, less stringent methods of subduing her and she was as out of control as reports indicate, representing a danger to herself and others, then I’d say what they did was entirely appropriate.
It’s not acceptable to simply say “She suffered no lasting harm, therefore the cop behaved OK” - the question is was there any significant risk of her being harmed. Which is why I asked earlier about the knowledge of the effects of tasers on kids - which seems to be limited to primate testing and anectodotal evidence from accidental discharges (the latter on the Taser website).
It sounds like an acceptable standard to me, if the choice was a small risk from the taser vs. the significant risk to herself or others of letting her continue to thrash around.
When you invent a “straightjacket gun” that can instantly put someone in total restraint, let us know.
You know, every once in awhile an extraordinary circumstance pops up and requires taking a course of action that hasn’t been extensively tested. How about when that guy had the collar bomb, or when a dude flips out with a samurai sword? Sometimes we have to trust the judgment of the professionals at the scene, or at least give them the benefit of the doubt until the facts come to light.
I disagree. What weirddave is saying is, “We do not know whether the taser will harm the girl. If the taser harms the girl, the the cop acted incorrectly. If the taser didn’t harm the girl then the cop acted correctly.”
The outcome of the argument is dependent on factors that no one can know before the test (in this case zapping the girl) is applied. This is not logically sound.
RNATB has a point.
For instance, if someone were to shove a taser up one’s ass, it would do a world of harm, especially to a 9-year old.
More details are coming out…
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=local&story_id=052804a4_tasing
http://www.fox11az.com/news/local/stories/KMSB-20040528-dsbp-tase.2078b6ac7.html
I wasn’t there and didn’t see what happened, but I do think that “innocent until proven guilty” should apply to everybody, including the police.
EZ
You are correct, but you misreaed what I wrote. It has already been demonstrated (by QTM and others) that the chances of the tazer hurting the girl are slim. If the girl was in fact not hurt, and the desired result, her being subdued, was achieved, than the action was not only the correct one, but people second guessing it here are doing so from nothing more than a “My God! That’s horrible!” stance. I agree that it may be sound horrible, but almost 2 pages into this thread, no one has suggested a course of action better than the tazer. It’s about analying the facts with one’s brain rather than jerking one’s knee with emotions. If the tazer is the solution likely to do the least harm while still achieving the objective of subduing the girl, that it was the right choice for the cops to make, even if the girl has an unexpected injury or adverse reaction to the tazer. “Most likely to cause the least harm” is no guarantee that the result will always be “no harm”, yet people often seem to expect cops to have superhuman powers to see the future and determine this. If 99 times out of 100 a tazer is the correct response, while it sure sucks to be the 100th person, it’s not the cop’s fault.
If those of you who think the cop should be disciplined or fired for this can think of a better way for a wild, out of control youngster in the back of a cruiser to be subdued, would you please post it?
Humm - well, according to one of the new reports, the girl WASN’T handcuffed when they zapped her. One officer was trying to put restraints on her and she was trying to get away. Also, in both later reports is says that the girl was warned to calm down or get zapped.
Finally, both reports indicate that once police returned her to the school/home, staff there injected her with a sedative.
I dunno - I’m beginning to think that the police did ok here.
I don’t know if the police have instruction similar to what we learn in the social services field, but I’m pretty sure the facility employees did, and when that didn’t work, the police were summoned and it looks like they did the best they could before the taser was introduced to the girl’s thigh (the best place to put it w/o causing long-term injuries). I have seen adults and children with “special needs” in my business and some are quite capable of causing extreme personal injury and damage to property.
Someone pointed out that they are “caged” if they are in a facility that they don’t like, and hence their acting out. That may be true in some cases, but not all. It could be triggered by even a simple reaction to substituting peas for carrots for a dinner, FAIK. Not all facilities are “institutions”, some are actual residential homes amongst the population. So, to blame the facility for the child’s acting out is a little overgeneralized. The child could also have missed her medication time or even ditched/threw away her meds that may have controlled her temper. Hell, it could have been a small hole in her bed sheets, it could have been anything that she’s not used to. Should someone be her punching bag because of this? NO. From what I read, there was a point of escalation and the staff and police tried non-violently to de-escalate it, but sometimes it doesn’t happen, and more extreme measures were taken to create a safer situation. Since they didn’t just whip out the taser and “let her have it”, I see no problem here but a journalist that is unable to tell the whole story and people like reeder and his ilk getting sucked into the dramatics of it all, and then incorrectly pop off incessantly and make his cumulative posting credibility suck out loud.
Reeder, take a deep breath, count to ten, and then make a rational OP next time. The hamsters will thank you and the rest of us will thank you.
So if you jump a red light, don’t hit anyone, and get pulled over, can you argue “I didn’t hurt anyone, so I did no harm”?
It shojuld be failry obvious that Reeder has no experience dealing with violently-emotional outbursts from someone with the mental age of nine.
Well, except his own, of course.
See the difference between that and running a red light?
Thanks to ElectricZ for the linked updates. They helped a lot to give a clearer picture of what happened. I do understand Reeder’s initial shock at what certainly sounded terrible, and I am compelled to admit that my own reaction was more emotional than reasoned (something like “that department must have selected from ‘special needs’ troops”). Now it is beginning to look as if the police acted properly, and that they had good reason to fear that the girl could injure someone, including herself.
The description of the girl (4’7" tall, 85 pounds) helped to put a different face on the situation, too. Keep in mind that a bobcat only weighs about 45-50 pounds, and it is capable of resisting two strong men trying to subdue it with physical force. This girl weighed nearly twice what a bobcat does, and with adrenaline promoting the “fight or flight” response she must have been at least as dangerous. The taser was probably a reasonable tool given the circumstances.
We could all learn a lesson from this - that emotional responses need to be allowed to cool before we make assertions we will only have to retract later. I’ve gone a little overbard myself in the past. I’d supply links, but some of you probably remember anyway, and there’s always “search.” 
Wow, that would be a totally fair and accurate interpetation of my post in every way except that it’s neither fair nor accurate. Darkhold handled it pretty well, read his post above.
Sorry, your frame of reference doesn’t fit here. I never claimed and don’t claim that all cops do these things, in fact I’m sure most don’t. But SOME cops do these things, and it seems reasonable to assume that for every cop that is caught doing these things, many do them and get away with it. As a practical matter, when you have evidence that Cop A has done something bad, it raises the credibility of claims that Cop B did something bad, since it’s now demonstrable that some cops do bad things.
Last week, I was in a railway station when an (admittedly older) schoolgirl decided to go berko with the cops. A teenager yes, but still a child. There were two small policewomen (which is probably much more than equivalent to one large policeman -same bodyweight maybe, but two brains, guns, sets of hands, etc). The schoolgirl was not subdued until the policewomen threatened her with capsicum spray, and other officers arrived. The girl was absolutely full of rage and adrenalin and was thrashing, lashing out spitting, and screaming like a cornered wild animal. The station concourse was virtually cleared by this one girl. Grown men were getting the hell outta there.
We don’t have enough information to pass judgement on the cops in the OPs case. We do, however, have enough information to pass judgement on the OP: he’s a fucking obsessed moron.
We assume that the policemen are large individuals. But how do we know? Is there a size requirement for male officers?
spooje, I’m not sure about the US, but can only speak for my own jurisdiction (New South Wales, Australia). Traditionally, there was a minimum height requirement, and most cops were six-footers. This has been reduced or abolished in the last couple of decades.
These days, I don’t notice cops being especially big, like I used to. The two female officers I mentioned were noticeably small. Unusually so.
Not that I disagree with your point, but this is an inaccurate comparison. Muscle capacity increases with the square of length, volume with the cube. That is why a flea can jump some ridiculous multiple of its body length and you can’t. The bobcat is proportionally much stronger than the girl. The bobcat is also a lean, well honed killing machine. Ashley Olsen isn’t.