A great-grandmother, actually. Story here.
In the cop’s defense, I must say I’ve known a few old biddies in Texas I would have loved to taser. Waterboard, at the very least.
BBC TV has picked this up – that’s where I learned she was a great-grandmother – and the video is something. She’s also interviewed, and she claims she was not in the least argumentative, but the video belies that claim. She clearly was asking to be taken in.
Justice wears a blindfold for a reason.
Normally, I take the side of tasered old ladies, but this one doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
What I’m seeing:
-The officer opens her door and has her get out for not signing a ticket (is this SOP? I didn’t think they really needed your signature)
-She says give me the ticket and I’ll sign it
-He screams at her and then pushes her
-She tries to get back in her truck (admittedly a dumb move)
-He pushes her again (pushing is nothing but an aggressive/intimidating/bullying thing to do. Serves no practical purpose)
-He tells her to get down, and she does, and then he tazes her (on second viewing, maybe he actually tazes her and then tells her to get down :rolleyes:)
The cop should do some jail time and never have another job more important than mopping a floor when he gets out.
They guy is an idiot first of all for standing pretty much right on the white line of a “particularly dangerous stretch of highway” and secondly for not being able to handle a great grandmother without shocking her into submission with his electrified projectile spikes.
At this point he’s going to take her to jail, that’s why he makes her get out. You can hear her saying how she isn’t going to jail, she’s 72, right at the start of the video.
With the screaming/push, he’s keeping her away from the door of her truck (in case she tries to escape) and the dangerous traffic. He’s saying that she has to get behind her truck when he first talks to her, then yells.
I don’t know whether he should have tasered her, but I do think he would have been criticized regardless of what he did. What do you do to someone who’s resisting arrest? If he physically grappled with her, people would have screamed about that. (And with the way she was acting, maybe he thought she’d have gone for his taser or something.) She was actively disobeying his orders at every single step, played the “I’m 72 years old” angle, yelled at him and egged him on, and more than once tried to get back in her truck. If you or I did that, we’d be in cuffs, maybe with tasering too. Just because you’re old doesn’t mean you get to resist arrest and be treated with kid gloves and have your widdle feelings soothed.
A couldn’t figure out why this got national news play. She a belligerent augmentative resisting lady like so many other tasered people. Why is this lady so special? I don’t know why they even make comments like I can’t understand how an old lady can use this language. Aging doesn’t make you a pleasant person.
Is tasing SOP now before any other kind of compliance technique? I figure it must be, otherwise we have a sad picture of a cop who can’t force a granny into handcuffs any other way.
I’m sure he could have physically thrown her down, planted his knee in the middle of her back and wrenched her arms behind her. How severe might her injuries have been after that kind of treatment? If he had dislocated her shoulder or broken one of her ribs, people would probably be baying “why didn’t he use the taser?”
AFAIK - it is SOP to take a person to jail if they don’t sign the ticket. Signing the ticket is not an admission of guilt. That woman was a belligerent old coot, and he was telling her to get back out of the traffic! He warned her repeatedly!
Stupid old lady. Sign the ticket and fight it in court.
The taser is the new way for a cop to tell you to STFU.
Though in this case, from what I can tell from the video, she deserved what she got.
But that’s exactly what I mean. I can understand that a taser would be less harmful on someone who is very strong and would require beating to get into cuffs. However, I fail to see how a 72 year old woman would require that treatment. If you can’t control a grandmother (so as to not be too general, a grandmother of her size) onto the hood of your car and get her hands behind her back without hurting her, you’re doing something wrong.
Old peoples’ bones are brittle, and the force needed to wrench her arm behind her might be equal to the force needed to break her arm or dislocate her shoulder. (Maybe she doesn’t have osteoperosis and has the bone strength of an ox, but how could the cop know that?) I don’t know if that’s a good reason to taze as a matter of procedure rather than physically throw a combative old coot on the ground, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were.
I guess that’s the question I’m after. I know we’ve had multiple threads on the safety of tazing in the past, but I’m curious as to whether or not it’s taught now as SOP to law enforcement before other control techniques.
I dunno if here is the place to debate the safety issue, but let’s at least put it in perspective. Both wrestling and jujitsu have techniques to slowly overpower a person. I don’t know how standard it is, but in the jujitsu I did, jerking or wrenching limbs to get them in the position you wanted wasn’t allowed. If we’re going to have a safety debate here, let’s not talk about throwing someone on the ground and wrenching limbs. Let’s have it be about safe control techniques versus the twitching that someone does (after falling to the ground, I might add) while being tazed. Again, I’m not saying that this is possible in all cases or that tasers should never be used. I’m talking about the strength of that cop versus the strength of that old [del]lady[/del] woman.
Like I said, I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I just want to be clear about what we’re discussing.
I’m not sure how you would handle some old lady who is belligerent and physically and actively fighting you without the possibility of her going to the ground or having her limbs wrenched.
Maybe the police should all be taught that special jujitsu that you had. They could carry around practice mats with them, throw those mats between their cars and the cars they stop, ask the drivers to get onto the mat, and then determine if they catch and retain the driver safely based on their appearance.
Or they could just taser them.
I think that he tased her for her own safety as much as his.
Did we watch the same video? That cop had 8 inches and at least 60 pounds on that woman. If you’d read my entire post, you’d know that I’m not in the “all cops are bad” and “all tazings are bad” school. I’m trying to get some concrete answers about tasers versus control techniques.
When that woman said “I’m getting back in my truck,” the cop put hands on her and pushed her back 5 feet with barely any effort. So before you go snarking about “special jujitsu,” you tell me how hard it would have been to get her face down on the hood of his car. And maybe not even the hood of the car. The ground is also fine, which as I noted above, the taser caused her to fall onto anyway. Assumedly cops learned how to do things like this before tasers were invented. I’m assuming (and hey, maybe I’m wrong, which I’ve clearly stated I might be in each of my posts) that not every perp pushed onto a police car before tasers had to be slammed into submission. I’m only wondering if other methods would be more practical in a case like this.
“Don’t taze me sonny! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”
Watching the tape, it’s clear the woman was out of control. The cop certainly wasn’t taser-happy – he warned the woman several times. When a cop tells you to calm down, only a fool tries to challenge him.
I’m no apologist for police, but this clearly was a calm, well-measured response to a hysterical suspect.
I’m now curious about what effect a Taser might have on a person with a Pacemaker. Strange, I’d never before in my wildest dreams imagined that this question might ever come up.
What do you feel was impractical about what you saw in the video? Looked pretty practical to me. I mean, if you’re vociferously not a cop/taser opponent, I don’t see what there is to argue about here. Granny’s on the ground and handcuffed with minimal injury and minimal danger to the cop. Where’s the impractality?
It’s always easy to second-guess what an officer does, but I imagine that if he had used more physical, potentially injurious control moves on her (like taking her down or striking her), and she had been injured, you’d probably have a problem with that, too, and maybe be asking why he didn’t just Taser her.
There’s no way to know “how hard it would have been to get her face-down on the hood of his car.” There’s no way to know how much she might have resisted having the officer manhandle her, or if or to what extent she might have been injured by such an event. You sound like being thrown to the ground would automatically have been a better choice; I don’t think you can assume that. Which is not to say it’s not a close call – it probably is, which is why IMO we should defer to the judgment of the officer on the scene.
On the use of force continuum, Tasers are generally above verbal commands, take-downs, and things like arm/thumb twisting, but below baton strikes, physical blows, and drawing your weapon (much less using it, which is of course deadly force). So although the officer would have been justified in manhandling the woman and throwing her to the ground, I think his decision to Taser her instead in light of her age and gender, was probably defensible.