On the mean streets of crime-ridden Creston, Iowa, another citizen lies dead with Taser dimples in his corpse.
Now, if you're salivating over the prospect of another long diatribe against Tasers per se, you'll probably be happier clicking over to someplace else.
If, on the other hand, you wonder at the monumental stupidity of some Taserings, you may have come to the right place.
You can call Creston crime-ridden with only a trace of irony despite the general civility and good nature of 99-point-something per cent of it 7,579 souls. The fractional per cent of crime seems to be adequately represented among its police leaders.
Thus our thesis: It isnt the Taser, stupid. It's the cop.
A little background if you please:
Even in bucolic western Iowa, Creston never got much notice. It's an old railroad town, one of the few places in the state where you can hop the Amtrak for a bit of tax-subsidized touring, where there's still a community pride in having spawned astronaut Wally Cunningham, where the old boys in the coffee shop speak wisely of crops and weather and the general FUBAR state of the world.
It's a place of Boy Scouts and 4-H and lime Jello with shredded carrots in the church basement. Pretty tame. A nice place to raise kids, just like hundreds of other Crestons in rural America. Not much happening to interest anyone from the big sin centers like Council Bluffs.
That changed at closing time on April 18 at the Crestmoor Golf Club.
When the night's drinking was done, only the police chief, his assistant, and a comely-enough bartender remained. Some discussion occurred, and the lady refused a certain request.
The criminal charges remain to be proven in court. They allege the assistant chief raped the woman while his boss held her hand and whispered a gentle "hush hush" in her ear, reflecting something that sounds a lot like one of those quickie courses in effective interpersonal relations.
When the lass reported the shenanigans, there was the usual berrying* around, a Barney Fife local investigation, denials, "administrative leave" for the two head cops. Then state investigators got involved, formal charges were filed, and the city fired the two leaders of its finest.
The mayor said everything would be nice now.
---
Monday afternoon something else happened.
Donald Atkinson, 59, created a so-far publlically unspecifed disturbance at the Creston Fareway grocery story. Cops were called.
One of them Tasered Atkinson, who was taken to the court house, cited for disorderly conduct, and released. A few minutes later he was found dead on a sidewalk just outside court house.
It's a spot news story, still developing, and no one is saying much authoritatively about the details of what happened, but by all accounts Atkinson was a sick man, subject to heart problems and seizures.
He had one of the latter Monday in the store, leading to the 911 call. He came out of the seizure, did something to either scare or irritate the responding officers and wound up dead.
Maybe -- but only maybe because the autopsy report is still to come -- the Taser killed him, or contributed to his death.
Maybe, though I doubt it, he needed Tasering.
If you believe one eyewitness account, he took down six cops as his seizure ended, and the big shock was needed to save the bottoms of their backs..
If you believe a different tale, he was on the ground and out of fight when the electrodes hit.
I don't yet know what's true, of course, but if six healthy young law officers couldn't control a sick man on the cusp of old age with something less than 50,000 or so volts, things still aren't nice in the Union County seat. Nor are they likely to get pleasant anytime soon, at least until the politicians learn how to recruit fitter cops who got better grades at the academy.
(Dammit. The Contessa is in my ear again. "Randeeeee! Randeee you fuuuhl!! Noooolin Shart is for the whole world, big cities and so forth. Why you think they care about Iowa with only corn and pigs?")
Because, My Dear, morals are morals, a concept of which you are unaware, although delightfully so I must add. Just don't try to write my damned column for me. There's a point to be made here.
---
I'm glad many cops are Taser-armed.
The ordinary officer on the beat gets paid to stop bad guys. Not kill them, just stop them. We want it that way, and always will. Even in an Ayn Rand utopia, slimy creatures will roam, and we will still hire mercenaries to help protect ourselves from them.
To that end we buy our officers some tools, usually, in ascending order of lethality, pepper spray, clubs, Tasers, and big, efficient, handguns.
Any officer who would misuse any of them is likely to misuse all of them.
In any large sample of lawmen -- just as in the general population -- you'll find a few who are dumb, some in love with a macho self-image, the occasional coward, or just the professionally inept. All are dangerous to an indescribable degree, but that's a recruiting problem for the politicians, not a tool-selection problem.
it can often make things clearer to personalize. Somewhere out there in libertarian land one of our gentle, responsible, liberty-loving comrades has temporarily lost it.
Pretend it's you. A little too much booze, a fight with wifey, a day you couldn't stand to relive. Something goes haywire in your feedback circuits and you start swinging. It's an alternate you, a personna you've always kept in check and probably always will in your future, if you have one..
But at this moment you're a real threat to your fellow humans, including the man in blue the dispatcher sent. His peacemaking efforts are for naught. He wants to de-escalate. You don't. Or can't. Suddenly it's time for quick action, and the question of your future, if any, is on the line.
He carries a Taser which will stop you and may, against hugely long odds, kill you. He also carries a nicely tuned Colt 1911 stuffed with 200-grain hollow points coming out of the barrel around a thousand feet per second.
Take your pick.
---
Aside from being far more selective about the men and women to whom we hand a badge, a Taser, and a gun (which is admittedly difficult), we can at least stop lying to them about the Taser.
Any of you who are interested have read the interminable protestations that Tasers are "non-lethal." The truth is somewhat less -- that they are hardly ever lethal to a big healthy adult in his hearty years.
Beyond that we should not go, and if we quit teaching our officers that the Taser won't kill, period, fewer of the bad ones will start thinking of it as a fun little thing to use when situations get extra frisky. We will have gone far to advance the cause of responsible law enforcement.
---
*berrying--from "berry" the new official term for "bureaucrat" cf:
http://www.nolanchart.com/article4217.html
(Ron Paul, The Berries, and the Value of a Human Life)
###
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Published: Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Last modified: Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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Reader Comments:
Posted By: a Theologian
Date: 2008-08-28 10:17:49
The issue of Tazers is one that honestly perplexes me. I am torn because there are two conflicting views going on in my head as to cops and the use of force.
For one, I think that criminals aught not be killed outright (if it can be avoided). Less than leathal weapons (like tazers) seem to be a great alternative to shooting people.
The other side is the "when is a weapon necessary" argument. Less than leathal weapons encourage their use for situations that haven't escalated (and probably won't) to need the use of leathal weapons. The use of a weapon against another human becomes a much more trivial event. Combine that with "control the situation" training, and it is no wonder we have cops on power trips.
For instance, a beligerant protester might be a pain in the neck to a cop and not worthy of killing, but a quick taze gets the message across that we don't like your kind. It is just too easy and causes the cops to become complacent in their ability to fight crime. Instead of using creative wit to defuse a situation, using these less than leathal alternatives and hauling them off to jail for a night becomes a popular choice. With a flick of a finger, the suspect (innocent or guilty) is writhing in non-leathal agony - incapacitated and unable to stand up for their own rights.
Given the choice of being shot or tazed, I'll take tazed. Given the choice of being treated like a human or like cattle... I'll take human.
Posted By: Roy Wright
Date: 2008-08-29 00:13:16
The issue should be about when should someone use a tazer. IMO, a tazer should only be used to stop an act of violence when the only other alternative is to use lethal force. If a person is being violent, using force to stop the violence is acceptable.
The problem is some law enforcement's policies allow using a tazer at a much lower threshold. The lowest level appears to be to allow police to use a tazer if a person does not immediately comply with the officier's orders. The classic example is the tazering a man for refusing to pee into a cup. That is using a tazer as an instrument of torture and should be unacceptable.
Multiple applications of a tazer should be prohibited. If one application is not enough, who in their right mind would expect a dozen applications would improve the situation?