I’m talking about paperwork to justify an arrest and process a suspect into the jail, not paperwork about timekeeping for the cops. Again, I’m just speculating, but I imagine the processing criminal suspects has gotten more complex and time consuming, as rules about how they are treated keep getting added.
I’m curious if you have a link about this. According to Wiki (hardly authoritative, I know), this condition is not recognized by either the American Medical Association or the American Psychological Association. Here’s part of what the article says:
Okay. Since there are no studies that indicate cigarette smoke is carcinogenic, I can’t see how you could surmise that smoking is responsible for death.
Oh wait…
Yes, let’s review Mr. Hasse’s death, shall we? (Warning: PDF) In case you’re not going to read it, let me quote from this case study of Mr. Hasse’s death the pertinent findings of error with regard to the ME’s report:
Read the analysis of Hasse’s death at the end of this report. It’s good to have facts of the case.
However, you seem to be either naive or disingenuous about the way tasers work. You can’t electrocute someone with a properly working taser device. It’s not comparable at all to electrocution used in capital punishment. Whereas tasers are high voltage/low current (ampere), the electric chair delivers low voltage at very high current. As noted in the Miami-Dade report I linked above:
Bolding mine. Here’s another article that explains it in simple terms. Taser current is measured in milliAmps. That’s a big difference from the electric chair, bud.
All this thread proves is that some people will defend cops in almost any situation. Others will be distrustful of cops in most situations.
To me, this is an easy call. He tasered a 72 tear old woman. It was wrong. The escalation was of his making. The old lady was upset. There were a lot of options he had. he did not choose wisely. The cop needs retraining.
Yeah, and there are no studies that indicate electricity is dangerous. :rolleyes:. Come on. You’re starting to sound an awful lot like a sales rep from Taser International. Your source is hardly impartial and I have trouble trusting it over multiple other sources including coroners who have actually performed the autopsies on these people.
No, we can judge each case as it occurs. And in this case, the cop did nothing to diffuse the situation. His continued screaming and yelling and shoving of the woman only made her less willing to comply with his orders. Yet, when faced with a decided lack of success, he didn’t ever try another tactic, he just got more and more aggressive with her.
I don’t deny that she was wrong. I don’t deny that she was being belligerent and obnoxious and should’ve signed her ticket and gone on her way. I do, however, fault this officer for handling the situation poorly and never having the presence of mind or ability to try something different to try to affect a different outcome. The answer to dealing with an angry person is not to make them more and more angry. When he saw that that was what he was doing, he should have tried something different.
What happened after the fact is immaterial to the conduct of the officer during the stop.
He was right on the law, he was, clearly, not right in his approach to handling someone who was reacting in the way that this woman was acting. We know this because he had to draw his weapon. Having to draw a weapon at a traffic stop is a pretty clear sign that something was done wrongly.
My expectation of this officer is that he pay attention to the reactions to his actions, and behave accordingly so that no one, neither himself nor any civilian, suspect or otherwise, is injured or put at risk of injury. That is pretty much a basic requirement of his position. If he cannot deal with the stressor of an old lady bitching out at a traffic stop, what does this guy do with a tweaker? Or someone with a weapon? Or someone who actually confronts him physically rather than just swearing at him while standing still?
Which is appropos of just about nothing. But good for you.
It can be effective and it can backfire. When it backfires, the person who has authority needs to recognize that and try something else. And much more important, the person with authority and a variety of weapons and the power to arrest at their disposal really ought not be losing patience as quickly as this. If patience is being lost, it shouldn’t happen within the timespan of a YouTube video. This is, or should be, another temperamental requirement for a police officer.
Again, no one suggested that he was not right about the law nor his justification for requiring her signature and telling her arrest was the penalty for refusing to sign. Where he was not right, by the evidence, is in how he went about attempting to communicate his “rightness” to this woman.
And once again, I reiterate that I don’t care if the deaths can be directly attributed to the Taser. If the Taser contributed to the deaths, then it’s a problem.
See, the thing is, we’ll never know if the underlying diseases or the drug use or the arrests themselves would’ve killed those people, because of the fact that the Taser was used. It complicates the question. It complicates their health status. You can’t attribute directly, but you cannot rule it out as a factor. There is no way to know because you cannot remove the Taser from the equation.
Quite clearly, but a Taser isn’t a simple electric shock. The action of the Taser is much different than the action of, for instance, sticking a metal fork into a toaster. Or grabbing an improperly grounded microphone while in a puddle of water. Or being put in an electric chair. Therefore the reaction of the body isn’t going to be the same.
Why are you presuming that if a Tasered person’s death doesn’t mimic an electrocution death then the Taser cannot be implicated?
They do not have the right to use disproportionate force to do so.
Which is fine and dandy for you and law enforcement. Not so much for people who think that they’re talking to (or arguing) with a police officer and then get slammed with an electrical appliance.
Well then, let’s just shoot anybody who gets mouthy in the shoulder or the knee. It immobilizes them, is unlikely to be lethal, ends the resistance and gets things dealt with quickly. Wouldn’t want to waste time with all that pesky police work.
When are you going to come up with conclusive evidence? As far as I can tell, this incident is still being investigated and is far from conclusive.
So, you’re just going to ignore the science. Okay, then. Guess we’re done.
Which source?
And coroners are regular people with biases as well. Just like many other professionals, they sometimes allow their biases to cloud their work. Is it that impossible that a coroner would file a faulty report out of either bias or inexperience?
This is just embarrassing.
Wooooowww. Really? Occam’s Razor pretty conclusively says the convulsion-inducing shocks moments before death were the cause of death in this case. Sure it’s theoretically possible that something else was about to kill him at that very moment (though it probably has less than Powerball odds), but if that’s what you believe then the burden of proof is solidly on you to prove it.
You’re ignoring every source (including logic and common sense) except the one that agrees with you. The one done by an organization started by police that works with and trains policemen. The one that suports “excited delirium” which appears to be a term rooted in 19th century pseudoscience that is only used when someone dies in police custody.
No, it’s embarassing when a guy with no pre-existing condition is tasered 4 times, convulses, and then dies on the spot, and people argue that tasers didn’t kill him. Brown-eyed girl is basically using the same logic that you could use to say AIDS has never killed anyone, except there’s more evidence that tasers actually have. A stronger case could literally be made, using her logic, that AIDS is non-lethal.
It seems to me he did recognize that and moved on to something else. “Step back or you will be tasered” x 5. That didn’t work, either. But I’ll bet she’ll remember the juice the next time she gets pulled over for speeding. I’d put money on the fact that she signs that next ticket post haste.
But just because you say so doesn’t make it so.
Ah, but you can. In-custody deaths from many of the contributing factors listed above were occurring long before tasers were put into use by the police. Excited Delirium Syndrome was recognized in 1985. Drug-induced toxicity even before that. So, absence any conclusive evidence to the contrary, you can say that Tasers are not causing in-custody deaths.
No, it is the same. It is an electrical shock delivered at low current than is fatal. As noted above, house current and that used in electrocution is many times greater than that delivered by a taser. But they’re all electricity. The body doesn’t know the difference between electricity delivered by a Taser and that by a fork in an electrical box because there is no difference except in volume and intensity.
Because if a person was killed by a taser it would be an electrocution, which is what we call death by electricity, you see. It should mimic it…exactly.
I agree. But considering the lack of serious injury generally produced by tasers, I can’t see how it can be considered disproportionate. Would it have been disproportionate if he had physically restrained her in order to implement the arrest? What if that resulted in breaking her wrist or arm? As far as I know, granny walked away from that event with no lasting physical harm, other than small puncture wounds and perhaps some minor bruising. I admit I am assuming this, of course, given lack of a report of emergency medicine being administered.
It must have been such a shock for her, given that she was warned five times. Yes, I see what I did there.
Yes, let’s add more serious injuries, with perhaps lasting consequences, and further tax emergency medicine. You don’t really believe that’s even a fair comparison and you know damn well I’ve not suggested anything like that. But so long as you can inject hyperbole into the discussion, you’ve got to rely on any argument, however lame, that you can, right?
If I do it just right, I can stab a guy to death with a toothpick.
But you won’t see me equating toothpicks with 8 inch hunting knifes either.
Did you not know that stabbing has been a form of killing people since man first came down out a the trees? :rolleyes:
Mmhmm, and there’s the crux of it for you, huh? Forced compliance by electrocution. Now it’s time to turn the question around, Brown Eyed Girl: is there anytime when a taser’s use is not warranted? Can you give us a video example?
If police were poking people to death with toothpicks (but blaming it on a condition that can’t be tested for or proven and in all likelihood doesn’t even exist), I hope you would say “DUH! It’s called stabbing!”
I don’t believe the coroners name is Occam’s Razor, but can you cite the report that indicates cause of death in this case, because I just linked to the wiki that says COD is undetermined. Just how many facts about this case do you have other than what you have seen on the intarwebz, because you seem to have more information than the coroner does? I asked for conclusive evidence and I’m pretty sure that doesn’t come out of one’s ass.
I don’t have to prove shit. I’ve already posted my evidence indicating the safety of tasers. You’ve yet come up with any conclusive evidence contradicting it. But you keep posting inconclusive or disproven taser controversies that don’t amount to much. Because if you just did a little more research, you’d get pertinent information that contradicts your theory.
I’m dismissing the theory that tasers kill as unproven. I’m perfectly willing to consider evidence beyond “well, it makes sense.” But every source you link to is faulty in its conclusions. That’s not my fault. Find some better data.
You mean the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, Inc.? You mean the same organization whose mission is to provide “interested parties with objective, timely, accurate, qualitative and quantitative information, training, and operational guidance for the prevention and management of sudden- and in-custody deaths.”
Gee, I can’t believe I would quote such a clearly biased organization.
. . . :rolleyes: . . .
I’m dismissing the theories that cigarettes and AIDS kill as unproven.
If you continue to ignore everything that doesn’t support your pre-conceived conclusion and can’t bring yourself to admit that IPICD seems less than impartial, then there’s no point continuing.
Um, who was electrocuted?
I have already noted more than once that any taser use for the purpose of torturing an already restrained individual is absolutely wrong. Police abuse of any kind (and yes, I believe as with any law enforcement tool, tasers can be used to abuse) should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
I haven’t seen any, but can you link to a video in which the taser is not used to force compliance of lawful orders? Like, oh I don’t know, a cop walking up to someone and tasering them out of the blue.
No, I’d be saying that toothpick stabbing deaths, while unfortunate, are probably less lethal overall than big metal knife stabbings, or gun shots, or even beat downs to get the cuffs on.
THATS the real issue.
If someone comes up with a stat that tazers are MORE lethal on average than say a beatdown to subdue someone, I’ll admit that tazers are probably used more than they should be. Of course, that still doesnt mean they don’t have thier place.
That woman was ASKING for some sort of physical action, and she had plenty of opportunities to decline such action.
Again, equating tazers with capital punishment electrocutions is embarrassing.