I don’t know how to start or even title this damn thing — United States of Authoritah? UN Says Taser is Torture? Man Tasered for Not Signing Traffic Ticket?
(video below the fold)
. . . too often, giving a police officer a Taser is like giving a kid a new squirt gun. Doesn’t matter that you tell him not to use it, he just has to go out and try it. And that’s when it can become a tool of torture.
For those of you who don’t want to watch the ten-minute video, the Deseret News provides an accurate summary, of a Utah police officer tasering a guy for not signing a traffic ticket. But the account doesn’t include Officer Gardner’s blatant lying at the end of the video (starts about 30 seconds from the end). However, the report does note Gardner’s ‘confession’ to the victim’s wife, “I tasered him because he did not follow my instructions.” That will be important in Massey’s civil suit, when Gardner tries to say he tasered him for other reasons. Official authoritah punditry of course has ignored Gardner’s self-condemning statement.
Trooper’s Taser use pops up on YouTube
By Geoff Liesik
for the Deseret Morning News
Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2007A Utah Highway Patrol trooper’s conduct during a Sept. 14 traffic stop in Uintah County is being called into question after a video of the stop was posted on the Internet.
The video … shows the trooper pulling over 28-year-old Jared Massey on U.S. 40 west of Vernal for allegedly speeding in a construction zone. …
The nearly 10-minute video clip … shows Gardner approaching Massey’s SUV and asking for his driver’s license and registration. Massey asks how fast he was going, which prompts Gardner to repeat his request.
“I need your driver’s license and registration — right now,” the trooper says.
Massey continues to question Gardner about the posted speed limit and how fast he was going but hands over his papers. The trooper walks back to his car.
Gardner returns to the SUV and tells Massey he’s being cited for speeding. On the video, Massey can be heard refusing to sign the ticket and demanding that the trooper take him back and show him the 40 mph speed limit sign.
“What you’re going to do — if you’re giving me a ticket — in the first place, you’re going to tell me why … ” Massey says.
“For speeding,” the trooper interjects.
” … and second of all we’re going to go look for that 40 mph sign,” Massey says.
“Well you’re going to sign this first,” Gardner says.
“No I am not. I’m not signing anything.” Massey says.
Gardner tells Massey to “hop out of the car,” then walks back to the hood of his patrol car, setting down his ticket book. Massey is close behind the trooper pointing toward the 40 mph speed limit sign he’d passed just before being pulled over.
“Turn around. Put your hands behind your back,” Gardner says. He repeats the command a second time as he draws his Taser and takes a step back.
The trooper points the Taser at Massey who stares incredulously at him.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Massey asks.
Gardner repeats the command to “turn around” two more times as Massey, with part of his right hand in his pants pocket, starts to walk back toward his SUV.
“What the heck’s wrong with you?” Massey can be heard asking as Gardner fires his Taser into Massey’s back. Immobilized by the weapon’s 50,000 volts, Massey falls backward, striking his head on the highway. The impact caused a cut on Massey’s scalp.
Massey’s wife Lauren, who was seven months pregnant at the time, gets out of the SUV screaming and is ordered to get back in the vehicle or risk being arrested. Gardner handcuffs Massey and leaves him on the side of the highway while he goes to talk to Massey’s wife.
“He’s fine. I Tasered him because he did not follow my instructions,” Gardner explains to the audibly upset woman.
“You had no right to do that!” she responds. “You had no right to do that!” …
When a backup officer arrives on the scene and asks Gardner what happened he tells them Massey “took a ride with the Taser.” …
[Utah Highway Patrol spokesperson] Roden said an investigation into the trooper’s conduct was being expedited. Officials hope to have it completed by early next week, he said.
Gardner had not been suspended Tuesday and was working his usual shifts.
UHP policy says one of three situations can warrant Taser deployment, according to Roden. First, a person could be threatening himself, others or an officer; second, the use of more force would endanger people; or third, other means of control have proved insufficient.
The Deseret News report immediately inspired this good American comment:
Erik | 12:44 a.m. Nov. 21, 2007
This reminds me of what is wrong with America, and what, if not rectified will be the recipe for our demise. Respect. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say, I was taught to respect authority. That meant my elders, law-enforcement, teachers, whatever. Kids now have this sense of entitlement that is unmatched anywhere else on this Earth. They think that if they make a mistake they can just hit the ‘reset’ button like on their video game and start over. Well, life is not like that. There was once what is called the Greatest Generation. This is not it. What we have is the Worst Generation. No wonder other countries hate us. We are gluttons in every thing we do. This sniveling little brat needs the full measure of the law brought against him and that trooper needs a pat on the back for doing his job. I’m still dumbstruck by this. To have it called into question like the officer was in the wrong. WAKE UP MORONS! It’s not the teacher, the officer, the bus driver, or etc. IT’S YOUR KID. Wake up! By the way, I’m 30 years old.
More Respect & Obey Authoritah comments were at the youtube sites:
He was speeding, sure not a bank robbery, but the cop didn’t just pull him over to pass his day. The so called “victim” broke—–the—-law. c’mon, this country isn’t an Anarchy.
an individual walking back to a car is threat to an officer
The guy was a jackass. Confrontational and disobeying. . . . Just another punk with an attitude that got what he deserved.
Sign the ticket you speeding, law breaking, piece of trash and you don’t get tasered.
the man did not cooperate, when u dont cooperate you get your ass tasered.. i got arrested 2 weeks ago and i didnt get tasered.. why? oh shit..because i cooperated!
he didnt cooperate and a cop shouldnt have to tell you to do something more than once. the ways things are these days.. if i was a cop i wouldnt take any chances either.
You only need passive resistance to use the Taser and walking away after being placed under arrest IS passive resistance.
And there’s more Amerikrap here:
Looks like a douche and his wife thought they were above the law and amateur lawyers. . . . If the cop was excessive he would have hit wifey with a blast too when she kept getting out of the car.
The driver is in the wrong. you have to sign the paper and if you dont you go to jail. better to pull a tazer then a gun. He did not have to shoot but the cop was with in the law. Dum ass should have signed the paper and got a lawer to fight the ticket.
The officer did not taze him because he refused to sign the ticket. Its because the man was walking back into his car. What in his car was unknown, and there may have been something in the car to injure the officer. Understandibly the officer was not going to find out.
plain and simple, he did not follow the officers instructions, acted like he was in charge with no respect for authority. THE ASSHOLE DESERVED IT!!!!
the cops do have a right to taser him because he was not following directions and very uncooperative.
And the good Amerikans above are backed up by official authority, a Salt Lake Tribune editorial:
There’s no doubt that the use of the Taser was justified …
The ‘amateur lawyer’ victim, Jerold Massey, says he thought the taser was a real gun:
“I was scared for my life. i had my 6 1/2 month pregnant wife in the car, 15-month-old baby,” said Massey. “You know, those panic thoughts start going through my mind of what’s going to happen to me, what’s going to happen to them. I really felt that this cop would shoot to harm me.”
In Europe, meanwhile, use of tasers is rightly defined as torture. Here is an editorial in the leading Scottish newspaper by a member of Amnesty International [bold added]:
The Scottish Government launched proposals in September to ban electronic training devices on cats and dogs because there are concerns that their use could conflict with the ban on inflicting unnecessary suffering or causing injury to an animal under the Animal Health and Welfare (Scotland) Act 2006.
Unfortunately there has never been an equivalent consultation on the use of electro-shock weapons, called Taser guns, that are used by police forces throughout Scotland. I for one find it alarming that we consult and investigate the use of electronic devices on animals but not those used by the police on human beings.
A Taser is a pistol-shaped device which fires two metal probes at 123 miles an hour that can penetrate up to two inches of clothing and become lodged in the skin. Then, for five seconds, a 50,000-volt shock overrides a person’s neurological system, contracting all the muscles in the body, causing enormous pain and sometimes leaving burn marks.
Currently here in Scotland, Tasers are only used by specially trained firearms officers and deployed only as an alternative to a gun. Most people would accept that the police should use a less than lethal alternative to guns and, indeed, Tasers have been deployed in a very small number of incidents in Scotland. According to our research, Tasers have only been discharged operationally by the police in Scotland on six occasions and just once by Lothian and Borders Police.
However, Tasers are legally defined in the UK as weapons of torture. With pilots for extended use in England and Wales and policing organisations repeatedly calling for Tasers to be issued to all officers, Amnesty International is concerned that we are seeing the arming of our police by stealth.
This concern comes from our experience of the misuse of electro-shock weaponry around the world. From June 2001 to September 30 this year, Amnesty International recorded 291 deaths of individuals in the USA and Canada who had been struck by police Tasers. In many of these cases, the coroner listed the use of the Taser as a contributory factor or indeed a direct link to the death. Only 25 individuals appear to have been armed with any sort of weapon when they were electro-shocked; and such weapons did not include guns.
Even in the Scotsman, of course there were idiots like the following in the comments section:
1. Alternative (High Octane) Fuel Head, Edinburgh / 12:31pm 13 Nov 2007
Can’t see what all the fuss is about. If you hear the shout “Armed Police! Stand Still!” you will find that if you stand still and obey their orders, no-one will shoot anything at you.
If they are going to shoot anything at all, a taser is almost certainly better than a bullet.
And before anyone mentions de Menezes, that was a special forces hit, not police.
Here’s the beginning of an article with the right title — US: Torture by Taser — well worth reading in full (and, of course, from the alternative rather than the mainstream ‘respect my authoritah’ media):
US: Torture by Taser
by Peter Gorman, Fort Worth Weekly
June 24th, 2005Robert Guerrero may have died because he wouldn’t come out of a closet.
The small-time crook had been looking to steal some electricity. When he tried to illegally reconnect a neighbor’s electrical meter at the North View apartment complex near the Fort Worth Stockyards last November, someone called the cops. And when the officers arrived, someone else pointed them to the closet in Apartment M where he was hiding.
Guerrero, 21, wasn’t a violent criminal. His rap sheet was littered with convictions for things like misdemeanor theft and burglary of a coin-operated machine. Normally, theft of electricity won’t even get you arrested — just reported to the electric company. But when Fort Worth police arrived at the apartment on Clinton Street that afternoon, they treated Guerrero like a dangerous character.
Two officers entered the apartment and pulled open the door to the closet, where Guerrero was hiding under a black plastic trash bag. Officer P.R. Genualdo, a six-year veteran, told him to step out of the closet. When the 143-pound Guerrero refused, Genualdo unholstered his Taser and shot him in the chest, sending electricity through Guerrero’s body. A police report of the incident indicated that Genualdo held the Taser’s trigger down for 10 seconds — double the normal length of time. Worse, in the next minute he jolted Guerrero three more times with five-second blasts before pulling him from the closet floor.
A few minutes after the officers pulled him from the closet, Guerrero stopped breathing. Neither the officers nor paramedics could get his heart started again, and Guerrero was declared dead when an ambulance got him to John Peter Smith Hospital a short while later. …
But for a weapon whose makers crow about its “stopping power,” Tasers occupy a strange place in the police rulebook. Law enforcement officers learn what is called a “use of force continuum” to determine what means or weapons they may use in different situations. The “continuum” begins with simple police presence, then moves up to issuing commands, then the use of open hands, and after that, pepper or other chemical sprays, closed hands (including elbows and knees and other takedown moves), the use of a hard baton, and finally, the use of lethal force.
You might think Tasers would fit somewhere near the “lethal force” end of that list, right before a gun. Instead, however, many police agencies place Tasers immediately after the “issuing commands” force level — which suggests to officers that using a Taser is less serious even than a push or pepper spray. Which also means that if an officer asks you to produce your driver’s license and you ask “Why?” rather than immediately complying with the order, there’s a chance, in some jurisdictions, that you could, within their rules, be hit with a Taser for refusing the command. That’s in part how Tasers have begun to be used, not as serious, life-threatening weapons, but as a bully’s tool of compliance, something to get people in line — with sometimes egregious consequences.
The article goes on to describe another case, and smack on is the defense attorney David Henderson comment (bold added) near the end:
David Henderson, an attorney in Bethel, Alaska, won a $1.08 million judgment for a client last October for torture in connection with Taser use. “My client was drunk, and he took his aunt’s snowmobile without permission,” Henderson said. “She sees it gone and calls the police, and they pick my guy up and put him in the local one-cell jail — which just happens to be guarded by his cousin. So in the morning, his cousin lets him grab a smoke outside, and he decides to wander off to go visit his girlfriend. A trooper goes to apprehend him, and my client resists. The trooper tasers him, my client falls down in the snow, and the trooper gets on top of him and handcuffs him. All legal so far. My client, by the way, weighs 140 and is hung over; the trooper is six-four and weighs 220.
“But then,” continued Henderson, “the trooper tasers him seven additional times — while he’s on the ground, face in the snow, and handcuffed. That’s not police work, that’s torture.”
At the trial, Henderson said, a representative of TASER International “testified that the Taser couldn’t leave scars. Well, my client was covered in them. And the fellow says, `Those are not scars, those are just skin discolorations.'”
[The above is an example of the marks that the company says the taser does not leave]The Bethel Police Department, which is appealing the judgment, claimed that Henderson’s client refused to cooperate, which is why he had to be hit with the Taser so many times.
Nonsense, Henderson said. “If that trooper didn’t have the Taser, he’d have had to do real police work — just wait my client out ’til he settled down. Now the police are all in a hurry to go get that next café latte, and the Taser makes things quick.
“To be honest, there are situations where they’re useful, but too often, giving a police officer a Taser is like giving a kid a new squirt gun,” he said. “Doesn’t matter that you tell him not to use it, he just has to go out and try it. And that’s when it can become a tool of torture. In my opinion it’s like giving police a portable electric chair.”
Amnesty International has documented the sheer volume of both deaths and of the use of tasers to torture. And a UN committee has made the following common sense official declaration:
Tasers a form of torture, says UN
TASER electronic stun guns are a form of torture that can kill, a UN committee has declared after several recent deaths in North America.
“The use of these weapons causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture,” the UN’s Committee against Torture said.
“In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events,” the committee of 10 experts said.
Three men, all in their early 20s, were reported to have died in the United States this week, days after a Polish man died at Vancouver airport after being Tasered by Canadian police.
The man, Robert Dziekanski, 40, fell to the ground and died after the police officers piled on top of him.
There have been three deaths in Canada after the use of Tasers over the past five weeks. …
The UN committee made its comments in recommendations to Portugal, which has bought the newest Taser X26 stun gun for use by police.
Portugal “should consider giving up the use of the Taser X26,” as its use can have a grave physical and mental impact on those targeted, which violates the UN’s Convention against Torture, the experts said.
My opinion? Friendly fascism came to Amerika wearing a badge and saying “just doin’ my job, ma’am.” But 9/11, Dirty Harry, Rambo, Iraq, Law & Order or wtf changed everything, so now we have assholes like Cartman– I mean Gardner. And Amerika is luvvving up its judge/jury/executioners in heavily starched or gleeming metallic uniforms.
Cartman the Cop
Eric Cartman [of the South Park TV show] is spoiled, foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, insensitive, sociopathic, greedy, racist, hypercritical, wildly insecure, sadistic, bigoted, corrupt and manipulative. The very dark, disturbing undertones to his personality seems to hint at extreme mental imbalance. Apart from being portrayed as having a general lack of moral responsibility or social conscience, he also seems to take pleasure from others’ misfortune, and is generally unable to show empathy. …
Cartman, however, does not consider himself to be a bad person, in fact he seems to disregard good or bad altogether and does whatever he feels is necessary for him to get ahead.
By the way, the Dems chose Abu Ghraib torturer Ricardo Sanchez to give their weekly radio address last Saturday. Turkana doesn’t tell you all about it at Dailykos. Just luvvv an asshole in a uniform, don’t we now, Turkana, Markos, Amerika? More at Democrats Choose Prisoner Abuse-Linked General for Radio Address, Author Tara McKelvey on Sanchez and Her Book “Monstering.”
Also at http://www.politicalfleshfeast.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1224
