Taser abuse getting out of hand

It's becoming more and more apparent that the use of tasers by law enforcement personnel is getting out of hand.

I should note that our friend Pierre Tristam has been writing about this for a while now. His first of many pieces on the subject involved a 16 year old boy who was "tased" (I guess that's a new verb that's entered our lexicon now) in his classroom when he refused to get up and leave.

The latest and equally outrageous example is highlighted by Digby, with a long and detailed comment thread. It needs to be read to be believed. Of course this follows another widely publicized taser incident in Canada.

Ironically what makes tasers attractive to law enforcement is their non-lethality, and it is precisely the non-lethality that makes them dangerous. It makes them a little too quickly deployed, perhaps. A police officer wrote in Digby's thread, responding to the video of a motorist who was tased for an apparent failure to comply:

I've had similar incidents in my career where the subject refused to cooperate and turned to leave before we were done. In each case, I explained quickly and briefly the options and consequences of their leaving without completing the detention - warrant for arrest, incarceration, huge fines, etc. At worst, I'd have to have a warrant issued for them to be stopped farther down the road, including escalation of force. But in no case was I warranted to use deadly force in preventing them from leaving.

In my opinion, law enforcement has been issued tazers and told by the tazer companies and department leaders they aren't "deadly force", and now their use has become a replacement for good police training.

I think we'll see tazers eventually taken out of general use, but I doubt we'll ever see wide-spread adequate police training.

What we're seeing with the increased use of tasers by police is a shifting attitude towards control and compliance. The strict obedience by the subject to the slightest command by the officer is the primary objective; anything less than full and complete compliance justifies, apparently, the use of force. You see this in the commentary that surrounds videos like that of the tasing of Andrew Mayer at the University of Florida (the famous, "don't tase me, bro")--well, he deserved it, he should have simply complied. The commentary suggests that ANY failure to comply with an officer's requests is worthy of the use of force.

This attitude is not only squarely at odds with our constitutional rights, but it also betrays a laziness. Instead of using patience, instead of talking and working with the subject, instead of viewing the subject as a rational being, the officer simply applies force. It's easier than thinking. We seem to have moved as a society from a value of individual rights and individual worth to a value of conformity and control. Technology in the form of tasers has given the state the ability to enforce an almost absolute level of compliance--total, abject, and unweilding compliance, in the face of even the most basic requests. This isn't just a police matter any longer. It's a question of what kind of society we want to have.

Sorry, Pierre. I was a little slow to come around. But you're absolutely right. Tasers are helping to pave the way to an increasingly authoritarian society.