mistermack wrote:Cops are not know for their intelligence.
Well, you're cops aren't...
It's a fact that if you give a stupid person a weapon, they will be itching to use it. You see it all the time. So they don't wait for the right moment when it's needed, they wait for the lowest threshold when they can justify using it. It's not all cops, it's the stupid ones.
This case is obviously justifiable, but that's not the point.
The point from this is that the taser is NOT SAFE, it's lethal far too often.
And it's a shock tactic, that will get misused at times of high tension.
Surprisingly we largely agree. My take on excessive Taser use is that it's not stupidity as much as it is cowardice. Cops use Tasers these days rather than exercising one of the other forms of physical force in the continuum of force they have at their disposal because it's easy, safe (for them) and decisive. They care less about the risks to the suspect than they do about not hurting themselves, messing up their uniforms or having to sweat a little while taking a suspect into custody. All they have to do is stand back and zap someone who shows even the slightest bit of reluctance to cooperate. In my day, we had to either talk the person down and get them to cooperate, which I was very good at, or we had to use escalating levels of force beginning with voice, hands, baton, Mace and, as a last resort, firearm.
Lazy cops who fail to recognize that all suspects are innocent until proven guilty prefer to treat everyone as if they are guilty and administer "street justice" if the suspect says so much as a harsh word to them, so they just tase them.
The use of a Taser should be the LAST RESORT before the use of a firearm because, as you quite rightly note, it is a DEADLY WEAPON.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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