Police and Tasers

[Goaticus]

Great video from the folks at Reason. [yt]AKQLzmcSzZw&feature=player_embedded[/yt]

[evensgrey]

Up here in Canada we had a very high profile instance of someone dying after being tazered, and it rapidly became clear that things had gone stupid before the police ever saw the guy.

Firstly, it was the RCMP, who have in recent years managed to demonstrate that they either don't know or don't really care what they're doing.  There was an incident where four junior officers went out to arrest a dangerous, armed man who was known to have both a history of serious violence and a particular hatred of police.  They went out with no backup, and no advice from more experienced officers.  They all ended up dead.

It had recently come out that there is a severe problem with sexual harassment in the RCMP.  For many years, some male officers were able to proposition, humiliate, and create false perceptions about female officers with impunity.  This MIGHT be being dealt with now, but it's far to early to tell.

In the particular tazer incident, there was a newly arrived Polish immigrant (Robert Dziekański) who's plane landed at Vancouver's airport, and he was having some difficulties, since he didn't speak English and nobody around there at the time spoke Polish.  When he wouldn't go through customs and immigration, the RCMP were called in.  Unbeknownst to them, there was another person who got the incident recorded on his cell phone.  One of the officers was heard to ask, before being in sight of the man, if he could tazer him.  There were four officers, who repeatedly tazered the man, even after he was down and handcuffed (and, as it turned out, possibly already dead).

The RCMP appeared to try and quiet the incident by ceasing the cell phone video, but a court ordered them to return it, and it was publicly released.  It showed that a number of statements made by the RCMP about the incident were flatly wrong, in such a way as to minimize and obscure police actions.  A public inquiry determined that all four officers had misrepresented the events in their reports and in their testimony.

It also came out that many tazers do NOT work according to spec, often having much more current or much higher or lower voltages than they are supposed to, making them either much more dangerous to the target or ineffective.  It's also become apparent that police are generally not getting adequate training in the use of tazers, tazers are not being adequately maintained and tested, and police are frequently using tazers in circumstances where force is entirely inappropriate.

[Goaticus]

there was another person who got the incident recorded on his cell phone.  One of the officers was heard to ask, before being in sight of the man, if he could tazer him.  There were four officers, who repeatedly tazered the man, even after he was down and handcuffed (and, as it turned out, possibly already dead).

That's what I don't get. I've been involved in competitive grappling of one sort or another for 25 years and one thing I know to be a fact is that there is no way that 4 men with even minor training wouldn't be able to wrestle 1 man into handcuffs easily. Whether in the army or when I trained police one thing that they all admitted to other police was that when things like Rodney King happened it was always rage based punishment.

[Ibrahim90]

That's what I don't get. I've been involved in competitive grappling of one sort or another for 25 years and one thing I know to be a fact is that there is no way that 4 men with even minor training wouldn't be able to wrestle 1 man into handcuffs easily. Whether in the army or when I trained police one thing that they all admitted to other police was that when things like Rodney King happened it was always rage based punishment.

from what I understand, the idea is to avoid personal injury to the coppers: a shock would immobalize and cripple the suspect momentarily--long enough so that a single cop is sufficient to hog-tie the suspect...

...which is funny because the use of a tazer requires being relatively close to the suspect, which of course means they're more likely to be wounded in a struggle--especially if the suspect has a pistol or sth--and therefore defeating their own purpose behind using the tazer.

sometimes, I suspect the police have it because they have a thing for cool looking toys or sth. which is unfortunate in light of all the death caused by tasers.