That’s noble in its stupidity, but unless you know of a magic device that can automatically signal when this extremely tenuous minimum is reached, your policy is a bit useless, no? I can only suggest you practice with a friend and try to subdue him with what you calculate as the absolutely minimum force necessary. I think you’ll find he could, if he wanted, put your eyes out with absolutely minimum effort unless you’re prepared to forcefully take the upper hand.
The heat-beam thing is scary. As I understand it, you can be handcuffed and heat-beamed until the batteries go dead and there will be no proof it ever even happened. Perfectly designed for abuse by authorities.
Are you speaking of the man who barricaded himself in the room at the airport, appeared to be having a psychotic episode, and was attempting to smash a glass wall with a chair? Or was there someone else tased recently for the crime of “speaking Polish?”
I thought as part of a cop’s training was to get Tasered so they’d know how much of a bitch it hurts?
Since you asked…
It’d vary on a case-by-case basis, but assuming I ran the world, thieves and robbers would get nice, long prison sentences and mandatory vocational training inside prison. By the time they get out, they should hopefully be able to (a) find a more legal and fulfilling means of making money and (b) decide to do that rather than go back to prison. Murderers and rapists would get longer and harsher prison sentences and plenty of psychological (and psychiatric, if necessary) evaluation/help on the inside. Murderists and rapists could certainly qualify for plenty of lashings (it’s only fair) on, again, a case-to-case basis. The death penalty would be obsolete, since the prisons wouldn’t be jammed full of small-time pot dealers, and there’d be plenty of room for lifers to spend their days getting violated and drinking toilet whiskey.
I, for one, would not complain if the money spent by police departments to throw social functions were redirected toward more comprehensive training. Civilian-regulated training, that is.
Or put dimebags in their pockets, depending.
This is a perfect example of why the baton is the best route. It’s a big fucking stick, and everyone is intimidated by that. All the cop had to do with that guy by his car was cock back a baton and approach him. I would guarantee that the guy would have complied.
Also, a baton leaves bruises. Furthermore, the body has evolved to withstand blunt force trauma much more than electrical shock. The lack of evidence is, luckily, less of a problem in this age of cameraphones. If a cop beats someone when he shouldn’t have then that’s up for the courts to decide.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not agreeing with the people who say that cops need to use the minimal amount of force. I think this is true in theory. But you can’t tell.
On the other side, a taser is a very poor tool for it’s use. It’s supposed to be something between aggressive words and a gun. Cops are tasering people they wouldn’t hit with a baton under normal circumstances. That I’m sure of. What’s so hard to understand? Tasers are killing people and is fucking torture. Pepper spray isn’t. I’d rather get hit with a baton before being tasered, and I’d rather get pepper sprayed before getting hit with a baton.
By the way, pepper spray sucks terribly, but I’d not be afraid to use it on people.
Then you’re advocating that cops should use more force than necessary?
You might want to do some research on this. From a quick Wikipedia search:
From: Pepper spray - Wikipedia
BUT overall, I agree with you on the principle that stupid cops are using tasers far too often, and apparently a “gottuh support teh troops” brainwashed public is willing to accept the current death rate.
A rudimentary Google search turns up a number of articles about people who have died after being pepper sprayed. Which doesn’t prove causation, any more than your claim that tasers are “killing people,” but it suggests that there’s unlikely to be a completely non-lethal method to subdue those who are resisting arrest (and I personally wouldn’t think going back to baton beatings exclusively is much of an improvement).
Maybe a bullet in one kneecap, to start. Second kneecap for the exceptionally stubborn, and third shot between the eyes.
Go fuck yourself. Seriously, If you can’t see the fucking difference between being tasered, being shot in the kneecaps, and being peppersprayed then what exactly are you trying to fucking prove here? I’d love to know…
Let me ask you this. Which would you rather have done to you?
pepperspray
batoned
taser
or shot in the kneecap?
There’s no question that all of them will stop you in your tracks, but why overdo it? Are you here to say that being pepper-sprayed is somehow worse than being tasered? Seriously? I don’t think you’ll find may people to join your side.
Seriously, why not obfuscate a little more for no fucking good reason? It makes all the sense in the world. Those of us with common sense would choose not to be fucking electrocuted, thank you very much, when a much more humane method of subduing people is available.
Actually pepper spray and tear gas have both been linked to deaths. For you it was an irritant. AIUI the fatality rate with pepper spray is high enough that there are a number of people making the same arguments that you’re using with regards to tasers. The short answer is that if someone has a respiratory condition pepper spray, or any other inhaled irritant, is much more likely to be fatal than electroshock.
One of the stats that I read when the recent shooting death in NY was discussed here in the Pit that I think is interesting is that since tasers have gone into general use in the US serious injuries and fatalities from officers physically subduing suspects have gone down signifigantly. Granted it’s only something I read on a Wikipedia article about the controversy with electroshock weapons. It’s gone from the current version of that article, and I may be misremembering it. I’m trying to find a cite for it, but nothing’s surrendering to my Google-fu a the moment.
The problem I see is that giving casually trained persons weapons that they’re told are “non-lethal” does lead to people using the weapon in a situation where I don’t think that the risk associated with the weapon is worth the control it gives. But I don’t think that removing tasers from the police arsenal is the answer. I’d far rather see officers trained more properly that a taser is a “less lethal” alternative to a firearm, not an all-purpose crowd control device. Of course I prefer the term “less lethal” for pepper spray, tear gas, baton rounds, and rubber bullets, too. All these weapons have the potential to cause fatalities.
The question is what level of risk is appropriate for the State to use while giving the police a less lethal option for controlling and apprehending suspects? I think that tasers should be being used as an alternative to a firearm, not as a routine subdual tool. And that the minimum standards for training that people have for the weapons are far too low.
But I don’t see it as a flaw in the weapon, it’s a flaw in the training and procedures for using the weapon.
ETA: Here’s an Answers.com page about billy clubs. Among other things in the article is this paragraph:
Alas, there’s no cite for this claim in the article that I can find.
Cite?
http://www.taser.com/research/statistics/Pages/FieldUseandStatistics.aspx
Taser’s web page suggests 150 - 350 incidents a year, per large city. Six people died from taser use last week.
http://www.deathbymachine.com/archives/231
Assuming each state capitol is a large city, and there are two other cities equally large per state, we have 150 * 300 = 45,000 incidents a year or 865 a week. So, last week, one in 144 tased died.
I’m sure you have better statistics than that, but … I don’t like them odds.
Well, I watched the OP’s clip. In most of the taped incidents, I was struck by how casually the officers appeared to be behaving, as they tased the victims. Whatever wrong-end-of-the-taser empathy training they may have received, they did not look like men who were thinking about how much pain they were dishing out.
For the most part, they also did not look like men who were fearing for their personal safety.
That’s actually a good point. It drives me nuts when the media throws around unqualified comparisons and then demands action. This could very well be a problem, but we’re not going to know by simply saying, “6 people died - let’s ban tasers”. The idea behind the taser was to be able to incapacitate someone without hurting him/her. To find out if they are effective, you have to examine how many people would be hurt-killed with them vs. how many people would be hurt/killed without them. If 6 people died with them, but 600 people would have died without them, then it would be stupid to ban them. Absolute numbers without context don’t mean jack-shit.
Who’s doing that? Despite whatever moral issues there may be, resisting arrest is never advisable. What I have serious logic issues with are straw men, as when the point being made is that people have died for unarmed resistance. You can lasso them. You can wrestle them to the ground. You can pile on five officers to put knees and elbows on their arms and legs. But kill them? That’s morally and ethically outrageous, and ought to be lawfully constrained.
My hunch is that the problem is with education. It may be the case that officers don’t really understand how dangerous tasing can be. And it’s for damn sure that the companies selling the tasers downplay their dangers. (See the video.) But people’s clothes and flesh are burned. They have cardiac arrests. It would be more merciful to knee-cap them or shoot them in the foot or something than to tase them.
I think it would have been funny if someone had said, “Don’t tase me, bro!” in one of the early posts. Now that the serious discussion has gotten rolling, it’s too late. Good day.
I said good day! :mad:
My eyes need a rest from computer screens, when I saw this paragraph quoted above it read briefly like a suggestion for a marshmallow weapon. Visions of a suspect slathered in pink, fluffy goodness ran wild for a second.
They all sound quite unpleasant, and I would do everything I could (even to include peacefully complying with an officer attempting to arrest me) to avoid them all. Leaving aside the kneecap-shooting, which I obviously meant as a joke, it is not as self-evident to me as it is to you that any one of the other options is clearly superior or more humane than the others, as I’ve never experienced any of them. From the screams and grimaces produced by taser victims I can tell it sucks to be tased, but from what I understand the pain ceases when the taser is stopped—unlike pepper spray, which continues to burn for quite a while, or being batoned, which could cause any number of painful internal injuries, broken bones, or death.
All but the suicidal would prefer not to be electrocuted, as that word implies death. And from most accounts, “those with common sense” are not vastly represented among people who resist arrest in the first place, so they tend to avoid these situations altogether.
I actually do tend to agree with you that there seems to be a casual overuse of tasers by law enforcement, but I don’t think it’s quite as obvious as you suggest that tasers are the most inhumane of all the methods available to subdue a resisting suspect.
That is the logic have have serious problems with. Start with the assumption that the person in question IS GOING TO JAIL no matter what. Let’s say it is a 70 year old woman who was pulled over at 1:00 am. There would most likely only be 1 officer on the scene and making an arrest. When she slaps him in the face, she just committed a serious crime. When she tries to bite him, she escalates it. Remember that she IS GOING TO JAIL right them and he has to find a way to make that happen. His choices are a baton, pepper spray, a taser, painful martial arts meant to subdue or a bullet to the heart. All of these choices except a bullet to the heart could be warranted in this case. However, the officer is put in a terrible situation. Every single one of these choices will be picked up on the car cameras and all of them can be used for an emotional outcry screaming police brutality.
I don’t understand why some people see other alternatives like like the officer surrendering and letting her go or letting her run freely into the woods. Those alternatives don’t exist nor does the officer sitting casually in the police car and assembling a team of people to take her down later. If she flees in her car at 100 mph, you them have a high speed chase with consequences that can be much worse than pepper spray and it could involve killing innocent people.
This is a true Catch-22 for police officers and the suspects bring it on themselves.
Who’s to say that lassoing (sp?) them, wrestling them to the ground, etc. won’t kill them?