Posted on 05/07/2006 12:43:59 PM PDT by seowulf
Maybe if this someone would have taken care of herself before she got behind the wheel and potentially killed someone, this never would have happened. Did that thought ever occur to you?
I'm getting just a little tired hearing from apologists like you who feel the rest of us have to pick up after irresponsible people -- and we damn well better pick up after them the correct way (ie., YOUR way) or their irresponsibility is going to end up costing US millions.
And do you agree that those who don't exercise good judgement should be held accountable? Or should we make excuses for them and give them a pass?
How would you feel if the victim had been Patrick Kennedy?
You have no evidence that he tasered her to "punish" her, do you? Many are trained in "pain-compliance". That is, you ask the person to do something, if they don't comply you cause them pain while explaining that the pain will stop when they comply. I don't think it's necessarily the best way, but it's how many are trained.
From his pov it's probably like this: After several minutes of trying to communicate with her, he broke the passenger side window and gave a lawful command - one he is legally permitted to make. She did not comply with the lawful command of an LEO. She had been uncooperative and now she just looked away. My understanding is that there were EMT personnel and other LEO personnel there. We have no account of the EMTs suggesting that maybe she was having some kind of hypoglycemic crisis. In the absence of such a suggestion, in the face of her bizarre behavior and apparent defiance, he tasered her, I would venture to guess, in order to gain her compliance. The element of punishing is your contribution.
What I have experienced, and you may not have experienced, is that people who are acting strangely and even dazedly can suddenly erupt into extremely hostile and combative behavior. They bite (and the human bite can be fatal), they flip on their backs and kick out car windows and the teeth of any officer with whom they can make contact.
You characterize the Taser as sending 50,000 volts through her. As we all know from scuffing out feet on the carpet and touching the doorknob, if the amperage is low enough, zillions of volts will do no harm, but can be uncomfortable. The taser sends out two darts. A high voltage, low amperage current passes from one dart to the other through the conducting medium, in this case a PORTION of the body of the person who was tazed. It is extremely uncomfortable. One tends to produce a string of very naughty words. I mean VERY naughty. While the current flows, one also loses control of many of the muscle groups between the darts. This tends to make people fall down and sometimes tense the muscles or become rigid.
What you have here is a lady in an accident, a smell of acetone which the officer mistakes for alcohol, EMTs there but not suggesting that there might be a diabetic thing going on, non-compliance. The lady didn't just sit there all ga-ga, she turned her head away from the officer.
I note that very nearly all who think the officer is not only mistaken but culpable have to exaggerate and mischaracterize the incident to make their case. The more I think about it, the more I think it was in error, but still a "righteous" tazing, from the officers POV.
I guess I'd like to see a presentation of what you think such a team should do when they come upon an accident and one of the drivers is acting strangely and refuses to open her doors. Can someone make a realistic proposal that takes into account that the officer has to risk his health and possibly his life BEFORE he can ascertain exactly what her problem is? I bet such a line of thought is exactly what his department was doing after this happened: How do we gain compliance and stay safe, protect others and ourselves, when we have a non-compliant, strange-acting person who may be dying or who may be plotting on causing somebody else to die, or anything in between? If you have a useful answer, I'm sure they'd like to see it. I know I would.
Have you got nothing to offer on this thread other than a robertpaulsen anal exam?
Inadvertently apropos howler of the month.
She was just in an accident. How would you know she was not nonresponse due to a head injury like a concussion? Do you expect people immediately after a car accident to be always "responsive"?
But this person, the one we are talking about, the one who is the subject of this thread, the one who was tasered for being "nonresponsive", had just been in a car accident.
You did when you claimed a tasering was justified because "How was the cop supposed to know she wasn't drunk, on drugs, suicidal, or just plain whack-o?" a situation that applies to anyone on the street. If the tasering was justified because of that, it is justified at any time to anyone -- an absurd situation as you realize. You just need to realize that it follows therefore that someone's potential to be "drunk, on drugs, suicidal, or just plain whack-o" is not justification for tasering.
Her tasering was far from random.
I'm glad you realize that it is idiotic, because it is your conclusion that just being potentially "drunk, on drugs, suicidal, or just plain whack-o" is justification for tasering. It is not. It is "an idiotic conclusion". As is thinking that any random person could be someone who "could have just killed her children and was suicidal." Thanks for realizing that. That was my point.
Let me get this straight. You come across an accident scene and there is a person dazed and comatose behind the wheel. So you stand there for 10 minutes shouting commands at them before doing anything and the anything you do next is to taser them? Why not break the window and check to see if they need medical assistance (the EMTs were on the scene you know)? If the person had a heart attack, in 10 minutes they would be dead.
Such as tasering a person in need of immediate medical attention?
There is ample precedent to cover the actions of the officers and those who issued the orders. The trials of Nuremberg are replete with examples of criminal conduct under cover of authority. Punishment in the cases you allude to should begin with the police officer and be followed up to the highest levels involved.
Semper Fi
An Old Man
Yes, THIS person had been in an accident, which was why the cops where there, right? And she was acting strangely. And EMTs presumably better qualified than the average policeman to figure out medical reasons there might be for non-compliance were there and evidently they didn't come up with the notion of hypoclycaemia.
And the person failed to comply with a lawful order of a Law Enforcement Officer. And, as has been said on this thread before, a number of people hang around looking dazed and non-compliant (but not comatose - the cop spoke to her, she responded by looking away) and then produce a weapon or lunge and use their teeth, or whatever painful and dangerous (I say again: the human bit can be fatal - all the more so since AIDS)other thing.
I wasn't there, but my gut suggests it was a bad call on the policeman's part, but not a totally outrageous call.
I assume you are talking about this accident, because you got sniffy with my digressing -- but then what you say doesn't make sense since there is no statement in the story that she was comatose.
You are demonstrating my conjecture that to make a strong argument against what the policeman did one has to exaggerate or misstate the case.
And still get sued.
If a department's Use of Force Policy gave me this as reasonable in a force continuum, I'd quit. I don't see how it could be looked at as reasonable in any way.
Because, some police departments do not want their officers putting their hands on people. They want them tazered after verbal commands do not work.
Two words: Lazy management. And any person that would follow these types of orders are getting dangerously close to the Nazi, "I was just following orders" rationale. Inhumane treatment of an individual as described here has no excuse. Hopefully our parents raised all of us better than that.
The way things are going, police officers will not be able to use any force at all, of any kind, for fear of lawsuits.
Better no force than make this choice. If I am instructed to act in this manner, I turn in my badge without hesitation.
Even in this case, if the woman is having a medical emergency, she was in the car, refusing to open the door. The window was broken and she had to be taken out of the car forcefully.
This was a case of Passive Resistance in a typical force continuum. In this phase you typically engage in dialog up through handcuffs. A taser would be appropriate in Defensive Resistance or Active Resistance. A taser is designed to replace the use of a striking technique, not a restraining technique.
Regardless if it was a tazer or an arm bar or tickling her tootsies with a feather, she had to be taken out, either for arrest or for medical treatment.
In this type of scenario, handcuff the subject for hers and other's safety and allow EMS do a quick evaluation. She was in an accident. There could have been a multitude of injuries or illnesses that either precipitated or resulted from the accident. An experienced officer with common sense realizes this.
In my opinion, this is a lawyer looking for money on something which at first glance looks heinous.
If a private citizen used actions approaching this case of poor judgment and excessive use of force, the citizen is prosecuted and sued. This was no case of an officer making a split second judgment in a critical situation with lives at stake. No matter the motivation, this officer was wrong and should never carry a badge again. Period.
But it wasn't.
Yes it was.
Sounds like the OPTION to do so was police policy. I've watched people on COPS who were "dazed, catatonic and nonresponsive" fly into a rage when confronted.
You're a great Monday morning quarterback. How was the cop supposed to know she wasn't drunk, on drugs, suicidal, or just plain whack-o?
I dealt with exactly this type of subject -- and much worse -- routinely for 15 years. This use of force, as described, was far from reasonable. In fact, it was idiotic.
There is no excuse. If it was policy, then my humanity would not allow me to work for such an idiotic administration. People who would blindly follow such policy should reexamine their humanity.
It may be just too much common sense, but may I kindly suggest that you expose another part of your body for examination then? ;-)
You either stop misquoting me or we're done.
I said it was justification for the OPTION to taser, and I was specifically referring to THIS driver who was refusing to follow a valid police order following an accident WHICH COULD HAVE KILLED SOMEONE.
Let's not leave out the culpability of the driver here.
"He bashed in the passenger side window, opened the door, and immediately ordered her to open her driver side door," Egan said. "Even according to (the officer), she was dazed, catatonic, and non-responsive. At that point, he pulls his Taser out, and says if she doesn't open it, he will shoot her."Egan says the officer used his gun and hit Fuchs with 50,000 volts of electricity.
It’s pretty easy to tell the difference between a drunk and someone in a medical emergency. The drunk smells like booze.
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