TPM Reader CR with an important addition about the rise of tasers as a substitute for “self-defense training and lessons in conflict resolution” …
Thank you for printing CL’s commentary on the power of the local constabulary. I wholeheartedly agree. Unlike CL, very few of my clients have been people of color. I don’t practice in downtown NYC, I don’t have a storefront office right next to the local bail bondsman, and most of my practice is civil. Nevertheless, the generally petty ante stuff that I handle at the Municipal level often reeks with officers throwing the kitchen
sink at my clients for nothing more than giving the ticketing, and subsequently arresting officer a sideways look.One thing that CL neglected to mention, probably because he did not run into it much as it is a recent phenomenon…Tasers. Tasers are the newest “non-lethal” toy employed by police officers that has taken the place of self-defense training and lessons in conflict resolution. Tasers are unbelievably painful, sometimes crippling, and sometimes lethal. Police officers now use them with such regularity that we get to see an endless supply of Taser videos on youtube. Many of the victims of this allegedly
non-lethal form of coercion seem to be guilty of nothing more than talking back or being generally recalcitrant. If an officer physically put you into as much pain as a Taser does, he would be up on charges of police brutality. But because the pain comes in the form of a nifty handheld gadget and the officer can do it from ten feet away our society seems alarmingly complacent about it. So you are not allowed to beat them up in the interrogation room but you are allowed to electrocute them before they get there? How F****d up is that? Throw in the fact that the company that makes the gadgets actually sues doctors for defamation when they have the temerity to say under oath that the machines are in fact lethal.I tell my children that when they are older and can get into trouble, or be in the wrong place at the wrong time when trouble is around, don’t argue, don’t run, just lie down and comply and let me deal with it later. I have read about too many incidents of teenagers involved in trivial things like being disagreeable in school (because they forgot their anti-depression medicine) or tagging a local building and running from the police and ending
up dead after being Tased. There was the pushy college student that wanted to ask a question of Al Gore and got tased for it. Our society is becoming remarkably violent in slow motion and we seem to be sitting by and accepting it. No wonder so many people don’t seem to be upset that America now tortures prisoners, they torture American citizens before they are even taken into custody. What if that professor was tased and had a heart attack?
