The police have ways of safely restraining adults, sure, but kids are a whole lot more brittle.
As the grandson of two special educators, I'm going to call bullshit on this one right now. There fucking-well ARE ways of restraining out-of-control children without breaking their bones, and "they had to choose between breaking her arm and pumping her full of enough voltage to stop an adult" is precisely the kind of false choice that leads to police brutality in the first place.
Now, I appreciate it on a "Well of COURSE if you attack a cop you're going to get tazed" level. Whether or not the officer's behavior was acceptable, it was certainly predictable. But an officer of the law should use physical violence as a last resort -- that's true when dealing with adults, and ESPECIALLY true when dealing with children.
Not to excuse poor police behavior, but the techniques they teach you aren't applicable to children that small.
An interesting choice of words. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that this is a training issue and that the officer was not instructed in how to properly deal with a situation like this.
That's still a pretty far cry from the claim that such techniques don't actually EXIST.
Also using force against preteens is always a sticky subject. If the officer hadn't used a taser, we may very well be discussing a non-taser related incident of excessive force.
In which case the cop would STILL be a prick for attacking a child.
Top on the list: Bleach your skin.
obvious sammy sosa joke
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.
No, Tasers are supposed to be AN alternative to pure brute force.
And that's not just semantic nitpicking, I think it's precisely the root of the problem. As I said above, you're not the only one drawing a false choice, the police officers who overreact to minor threats are doing exactly that.
Or, if I'm to be less charitable still, just lashing out at somebody who pissed them off.
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.
Anecdotal, I realize, but I've been badly shocked, and I've been pinned helplessly to the ground. The fear of being shocked still evokes a visceral reaction in me ten years later.
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.
Which brings us back to my "he wasn't thinking, he was lashing out" suggestion.
At this point the tazer was the least violent solution, really honestly.
In what conceivable universe is the Taser the least violent solution? How does that even make sense?
