New Blog to Read on the Tasering Craze

5 Comments

1. 

   Salunga on December 14, 2007 at 9:45 pm

     Its out of control Steve. The police are wrapped up in the whole worship a uniform crap. They feel like they are justified no matter how prejudiced and trigger happy. I thought we pay them to treat everyone fairly and show restraint. Not look for a reason to play violent tough guy to a pregnant woman. Its really getting scary.

2. 

   shergald on December 14, 2007 at 9:52 pm

   Cop: “Let me see your drivers license and proof of insurance.”
   Driver: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me get it.”
   Cop: “No. Not ‘whoa, whoa, whoa.’ Driver’s license and insurance or get out of the vehicle.”
   Mother: “Ok, give him the license.”
   Driver: “No, this guy’s sitting here yelling at me for whatever reason…”

   As the driver gets out of the car, the officer pulls out his taser.

   Cop: “Step out of the vehicle.”
   Driver: “I have no idea why you’re acting…”
   Cop: “Step out of the vehicle. Take your seat belt off, step out of the vehicle and give me your driver’s license and proof of insurance.”
   Driver: “I have no idea…”
   Cop: “Get to the back of the vehicle; put your hands on the vehicle. Get to the back of the vehicle. Stop.”

   It is then that the officer tasers Snelling. Lying on the ground and writhing in pain, the driver asks why he was tasered.

   Cop: “You’re under arrest and you’re going to jail.”
   Driver: “Going to jail, for what?”
   Cop: “For failing to give me your driver’s license.”
   Driver: “I’m not failing to give you anything.”

   All’s well that ends well.

   This is just the latest controversial use of a taser gun by police. In this latest tasering, Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo has apologized to the driver and is now using the video as a training tool for all his officers.

   Still, how many times each month do incidents like this one happen, and nobody can doubt that Black people are targeted for abuse more than white people.

3. 

   Indianadem on December 15, 2007 at 10:21 am

   A man died from a tasering by police in a community near us. It appeared that he may have been suffering from complications of diabetes.

   From the Indiana Daily Student:

   Borden, 47, died the evening of Nov. 6, 2003, while being booked into the Monroe County Jail after he was arrested for violating his probation by Lawrence County Police Department training officer John Potter.

   According to police and Emergency Medical Services reports, Borden was incoherent and disoriented when he was taken into custody at the Monroe County Jail after the arresting officers spoke with the Lawrence County Probation Department and ambulance personnel — against advice from EMS, who urged officers to seek medical attention for him.

   Borden was shocked multiple times with a taser by Monroe County Officer David Shaw for being uncooperative, according to police reports.

   After lying unresponsive on the floor, Borden received medical attention from a jail nurse. Ten minutes later a Bloomington Hospital team arrived, and shortly thereafter, Borden’s body was carried out of the jail on a stretcher.

   Monroe County Coroner David W. Toumey previously told the Indiana Daily Student in a Dec. 15, 2003, story that Borden died of a heart attack, drug intoxication and electrical shock.

   There was a lot of public comment at the time:

   What follows are excerpts from comments made to the council by retired IU professor and jail minister Jim Hart, citizen activist Marc Haggerty, and Val Beldavs from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI).

   Hart speaks about the militarization of police forces around the country and the role economic class plays in criminal justice, Haggerty about the government withholding information from the public, Beldavs about the treatment the mentally ill receive at the hands of the police.

   Their comments were made after the meeting adjourned. O’Connor is considering whether to include the citizens at the next meeting.

   *

   Jim Hart

   “There’s been a general problem with the ethos of the police. It’s been gradual. I don’t think there’s been any malevolence. It’s not exclusively tied to the 9/11 era. It happened much earlier with the war on drugs. And with the whole notion of the war on drugs the availability of huge federal money in terms of the militarization in terms of weaponry of the police departments.”

   “The kinds of training the police departments are getting makes a distinction between the policemen and officers of peace.”

   “There was a time when it was perfectly clear that the police are not soldiers in enemy territory. They were keepers of the peace. Increasingly, that distinction is vanishing. In part it’s because of the training they get. In part it’s because of the general atmosphere that is pervading the society. And the introduction of taser weaponry is just a very special indication of the problem.”

   Marc Haggerty

   “The reason I came tonight was talk about transparency, and I would like to be put on the agenda to talk about how hard it is to get information out of this county in regard to the jail death of Mr. James Borden.”

   “The jail has video cameras all over it, and that was made at public expense, and we’re now being told that it’s some sort of a product of a police investigation and so it can’t be seen by the general public. It can’t even be seen by the family of this man who died in police custody. And so we’re very concerned that the government is operating behind a veil of secrecy in terms of how they treat our citizens once they’ve been arrested and are in police custody and are no threat.”

   “This man had his hands handcuffed behind his back when he died. He was on his stomach when he died.”

   “In this particular case, the state information officer has decided this tape of what happens in our jail–and our citizens should know full well what happens in our jail–is not going to be available to the public that even paid for it.”

   “The family would like to see how their brother, how their brother-in-law, how their son died.”

   “Those of us who are common citizens want to know what happens in our jail. We want to know how our public officials and how our police are acting, how they are using these Tasers. What do they do with a sick individual, a man who is very, very ill that they bring into the salley port? We want to know what happens.”

   “Let me say that in Cincinnati where this black guy was beat to death, the first thing the city did was to release the videotape to the public, to the media, before they’d even seen it. And I’m asking why do we have to be so backwards. Is this some little hick town in Southern Indiana or is this the cultural Mecca of the Midwest?”

   Vid Beldavs

   “Mr. Borden clearly seemed to be at the moment, at the time, mentally ill. He was observed talking to inanimate objects as they were his relatives. So our concern is that this could have happened to anyone in a similar disoriented state who is unable to understand the commands and orders of police officers.”

   “Why he was in the jail is another question. It seems we have a breakdown in the system. Here you have a sick man who should have really been in the hospital, who winds up in the jail, winds up being tasered and so forth.”

   “In this county, our sheriff has said we will continue to use the Taser. In Lawrence County they have said we will now adopt a taser. This is after a man died in our jail.”

   “And this could happen at any time. It could happen to my son. It could happen to anybody’s friend or brother in our jail. Or it could happen in a squad car where a sheriff’s deputy takes a Taser to them, they have an enlarged heart, they have a diabetic condition, they don’t understand the police officer, and the result is death.”

   “Now, I have proposed three suggestions to this group.”

   “One is that the council consider a ban on the use of the Taser in Monroe County by any police, deputy or corrections officer until the investigation is concluded and appropriate measures are taken for public safety.”

   “Two, adoption of a crisis intervention team approach as implemented in Fort Wayne and other cities across the country. Now the crisis intervention team approach is basically the training of police officers so that they react in an appropriate manner with disoriented individuals, such as people who are mentally ill or are having a spasm resulting from a medical condition.”

   “In Fort Wayne, this training process was adopted on 790 incidents last year where an officer would have arrested the individual and they would have been placed in jail. The number of arrests was reduced to seven, and only in three cases was violence used by the officers. And 65 of the individuals had arms, they had guns.”

   “The other thing is we will need to involve the Indiana University Police as well. It needs to be communitywide. And we need the mental health folks to provide room to take people to when an officer asks for it.”

   “I have a good friend, her son would up in a prison. He was not understanding what the guards were telling him. He had ribs broken. I mean he literally was beaten.”

   “There is a third point is that right now this community seems to be really at a crossroads. If we continue in the way we are, then you build an $80 million jail, and you continue to make things worse. There may be an alternative, but for an alternative you need really broad public involvement. You need the public to be involved and outraged about conditions so that they improve them.”

   “And the way to do that would be to have some broad, public meetings. We have folks in this community that know how to organize such meetings. At the university you probably have a couple dozen people who are world-class experts on organizing public meetings at which you get broad input.”

   Jim Hart

   “Unless we face the issue of class, in Bloomington, and we make that part of our awareness of social justice, then we don’t have any hopes of changing anything.”

   “They (inmates) certainly did something, but if you talk to those folks you will see that many of them, I would say most of them, come from abused families, broken families, addicted families, families where many of the young people have been raped and violated, and their self esteem, their self consciousness, drags along the ground. And what our jail does is knock them a pike down further, and in many ways creates greater rage. So they’re there not simply because they did something, they’re there because of economic injustice, to a great extent.”

   Apparently, its now OK to torture at home as well as abroad. We are a sick society.

    

   • 

     Steven D on December 16, 2007 at 10:13 am

     And lookie here — TASR Intl, gets off scott free!

     LINK

     Because he was only tasered three times not six and the police mistreatment could have been the cause of death, and because the autopsy doctor was not an expert on tasers the wrongful death suit was dismissed.  Nice, huh?  Better go buy stock in TASR as I’m sure in the coming decade the use of their product will only increase astronomically.

     • 

       Steven D on December 16, 2007 at 10:14 am

       Sorry, make that Taser Intl.