It’s simply dreadful how these communist propaganda mouthpieces, like the Salt Lake City Tribune continue to attack our law enforcement officials from using tasers to protect themselves from unarmed naked people. So what if a bipolar guy who could have been taken into custody without the use of deadly force died after being shocked twice by the police because he was “walking toward them?” Mentally disturbed people should know better than to fail to obey a lawful police order immediately. Guy had it coming to him, is what I say.
In June, [Brian Cardall] 32, was returning to Arizona after visiting Utah when he experienced a manic episode brought on by his bipolar disorder. He pulled his car to the side of the road, got out, removed his clothes, and began flagging down vehicles on State Road 59 outside Hurricane.
Cardall’s wife gave him medication, called the police, informed the dispatcher of her husband’s psychotic condition and the fact that it would take a while for the medicine to take effect. But Cardall ran out of time.
Just 42 seconds after Hurricane Chief of Police Lynn Excell and officer Ken Thompson arrived at the scene, Thompson claims, a confused Cardall, who refused to get on the ground as ordered, stepped toward the officers. Thompson fired his Taser, striking a naked and unarmed Cardall in the chest over the heart. When the Flagstaff resident attempted to rise, Thompson gave him a second jolt. Within minutes, Cardall was dead, one of about 350 Americans to die after a Taser deployment since 2001.
Had the incident occurred 20 years ago, before Tasers came on the market, Cardall, who weighed just 156 pounds, would have been physically taken to the ground and handcuffed. He may have suffered bumps and bruises, cuts and scrapes. The police officers would have risked same. But nobody would have died.
Don’t you hate it when certain “socialistic” newspaper editors carp about the “good old days” before tasers were invented and police were given the right to literally shock people into submission for any reason whatsoever?
Why should our law enforcement officials have to risk dirtying up their spiffy and no doubt freshly washed uniforms by wrestling unarmed naked people to the ground merely to put handcuffs on them? As another example, why should our police have to risk scrapes and bruises to subdue some ten year old kid who throws a hissy fit? Or have to listen to some mouthy 72 year old woman talk smack at them?
Hey, a few unnecessary deaths is a small price to pay for keeping our police officers looking neat and tidy, stress free, and not having to suffer the indignity of wrestling unarmed 156 pound naked guys.
I can see his wife now. “You know, I didn’t call you so you could kill him like a rabid dog.”
Protect and serve has a new meaning these days.
Do any of the teabaggers ranting about the police state ever bitch about tasers? Not that I recall.
Ah, but for the TB’s (I think of them that way), the “police” in police state isn’t “the boys in blue”, who are still more likely to share their politics than not and far more likely to shoot or taser people with distinctly darker skins than the tannin-heavy but melanin-deprived TB set.
The “police” in their “police state” are comprised of secretive p.c. black-ops tax-and-spend ugg-booted thugs cabal who lurk in the librul devil-worshiping shadows just looking or any excuse to STEAL THEIR FREEDOMS<sup>TM</sup>.
Police murder by Tasers will continue unabated UNTIL a some group takes Taser Corp. to court and wins a huge settlement in the Millions of dollars. The legal dodge here goes like this. Taser voluntarily gives police departments specified INSTRUCTIONS on the proper use of their weapon. Based on this they have claimed in court that they are not liable for improper use of their “restraint weapons”by police. From their side, the police claim they always use the Taser in strict accordance with direction provided by the manufacturer, so they are no liable for any injuries sustained by people being restrained by the police.
So we have the police and the Taser manufacturer both claiming no fault liability in the use of the Taser weapon during any police action, which is an obscene use of the American justice system. Attempts have been made in Congress to pass legislation to stop this form of police murder. Each attempt has failed due to the lobbying effort and congressional payoffs funded by Taser Corp. And now Taser views itself to be “too big to challenge” in court. When the day arrives that a coalition of Lawyers decide to bring a serious strong Taser case into court naming both a big city police department and the Taser manufacturer co-defendents in a liability complaint involving police murder by Taser we might see an end to these outrageous murders by police with no justice given to the victims of these sanctioned crimes.
Or, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Conflict causes stress, no argument there. But if you can’t ‘force’ an immediate solution then you have to think and negotiate your way through to some sort of resolution. Things like, that guys not really a threat, have time to come into the picture.
The other massive problem with easy access to the means of forcing someone to submit is that it becomes a big part of your identity. The US can’t “negotiate with terrorists”, or anyone else for that matter, because might=right and any other approach might cause us to have to question the legitimacy of our policies and actions. Which is why the Right has such a field day with “surrender monkeys” and other such epitaphs. And why the Left lets itself get cowered into “supporting the troops”. Backing down is not an option, even if only to regroup and come up with a better solution.
It’s why I call the center of power the “dead center”. There’s no freedom to choose “not” to do what promotes power. All real freedom of choice exists at the boundaries and the further away from the center you stray the more freedom you have. Which is yet one more reason those in power hate us “radicals”.