See, this is where I think a little dissonance arises.
For some reason people have come to associate tazers with excessive force, something going beyond throwing a person to the ground and holding them. Tazers are supposed to be the alternative to pure brute force. Their purpose is to introduce enough temporary pain to stop a person from trying to resist without causing any permanent damage. It's extremely unpleasant, but should be far preferable to having a large person tackle and hold you down.
They get a bad rap for being fatal in rare cases, usually ones where forcible restraint would probably be better but still cause serious injuries. They get an even worse rap for being used a lot in cases where it actually is completely unnecessary. That's pretty understandable. You take a person who is in constant danger of a person trying to hurt them, tell them they can not hurt that person back in any way, and then give them something saying "Here this will stop them immediately and is mostly safe," and yeah they're going to want to fire that thing off as soon as they can. They shouldn't, though, especially when the suspect isn't even going to do anything. There are tons of valid cases of this.
In this case the officer in question was not only being actively attacked, he had already been injured. In the fucking nuts. At this point the tazer was the least violent solution, really honestly.
It might be that the cop had no business trying to restrain her in the first place, okay fine. There's no context supplied there, and I respect the police enough - even in Arkansas - to assume that they're not going to start grabbing children until that child is a clear and present danger to somebody. And really, I have a hard time believing she wasn't.
Thread split. Could have sworn we had this one already, but maybe that was on Pyoko.
