Posted on 05/20/2012 1:35:59 PM PDT by Clintonfatigued
The case involves Malaika Brooks, who was seven months pregnant and driving her 11-year-old son to school in Seattle when she was pulled over for speeding. The police say she was going 32 miles per hour in a school zone; the speed limit was 20.
Ms. Brooks said she would accept a ticket but drew the line at signing it, which state law required at the time. Ms. Brooks thought, wrongly, that signing was an acknowledgment of guilt.
Refusing to sign was a crime, and the two officers on the scene summoned a sergeant, who instructed them to arrest Ms. Brooks. She would not get out of her car.
The situation plainly called for bold action, and Officer Juan M. Ornelas met the challenge by brandishing a Taser and asking Ms. Brooks if she knew what it was.
She did not, but she told Officer Ornelas what she did know. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “I am pregnant. I’m less than 60 days from having my baby.”
The three men assessed the situation and conferred. “Well, don’t do it in her stomach,” one said. “Do it in her thigh.”
Officer Ornelas twisted Ms. Brooks’s arm behind her back. A colleague, Officer Donald M. Jones, applied the Taser to Ms. Brooks’s left thigh, causing her to cry out and honk the car’s horn. A half-minute later, Officer Jones applied the Taser again, now to Ms. Brooks’s left arm. He waited six seconds before pressing it into her neck.
Ms. Brooks fell over, and the officers dragged her into the street, laying her face down and cuffing her hands behind her back.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ridiculous. Give her the damn ticket and send her on her way. Signature is a formality. These cops are just assholes. Send them to prison.
They need to take the tasers away from all cops. Period. And make them go through customer service training BEFORE this shit happens.
If they treat people like customers instead of enemies, all this shit goes away.
How do you know it was sarcasm? This is from The NY Times.
Therefore Barney Fife was obviously a democrat..
Lets see Seattle a mostly democrat Police Department..
WHAT COULD GO WRONG?..
** and probably fire department as well..
Around here red light running has developed into an art form of how many cars can stack up on each others bumpers and run the red light - in other words enter the intersection after it turns red. I've seen four so far.
School zones are the highway slalom where the speeders see if they can weave back and forth, in and out and get to the front of the pack. And I've started my own little study and the majority of the speeders are females.
So I do have little sympathy for school zone speeders who are females with kids in the car.
I was not at the traffic stop so I'll take the sympathetic news story with a grain of salt.
The cops should have offered her free Skittles, she would have come flying out of her car.
Apparently she was obnoxious and wouldn't listen to reason to sign the stupid citation. She was guilty of speeding near a school which endangered the children. And to top it off, she wasted valuable taxpayer's resources by playing the pregnancy card.
Obviously, this woman cared about nobody but herself.
Police use of force threads always bring out the thermo-nuclear stupid here on FR.
It you get cited for a moving violation then you must sign the citation. It is a promise to appear later in court and nothing more. If you don’t promise to appear (by signing) then you get arrested and must post bail to guarantee your later appearance. These are simple, straightforward facts that we all know.
So what exactly did the police do wrong in this case?
So what exactly did the police do wrong in this case?
So what? The police are NOT supposed to be meting out punishment.
You post garbage. America is being destroyed by stupid. Please stop contributing to the destruction of America.
A pregnant woman! WTF are these morons thinking? Are they so steroided they can’t reason? This crap has got to stop. The cops have become the enemy.
Do everything you can to avoid interaction with them. They are the enemy!
Some people hate the "pigs" because they (the "pig" haters) are ignorant, corrupt retards.
Why do you hate the "pigs"?
That's what these scumbags deserve.
My theory is that you just got played by commies.
The cops were stupid.
She’s pregnant and needed a restroom.
All they had to do was reach in the car and pull the keys.
Then the nature call would have solved their problem.
Thank you for being rational on a FR cop derangement thread.
Your service to civilization is appreciated by the non-lunatics.
You are lacking in perspective. But, that doesn’t seem to bother you. Were you, or, have you ever been a steroided cop?
The insurance companies will gladly take the premiums the LE agencies provide to insure against the claims arrising from their questioanable behavior.
The citizen-taxpayers should explore means to control their LE agencies.
Fullerton is not far from Huntington Beach, where the police shot to death a 18 year old girl, on a park ground because she held a knife.
My mind says trained officers need much better training and weapon options.
These incidents repeatedly show bad judgement by officers, and resort to shootings.
There are times that call for shootings, but not every one.
The city’s insurance settled for $40 million for the girl.
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