IT TAKES A TASER TO RAISE A CHILD

By Doug Newman

November 27, 2007

Posted at Freedom4um.

As if we had not heard enough recently about Taser-happy cops, this evening brought me three new stories. I got in from work this evening and logged on to my new favorite internet forum and read the following:

• In early 2005, 13-year-old Llahsmin Lynn Kallead of Jacksonville was tasered twice by police in the back seat of a police car after she refused to cooperate with them. Miss Kallead weighed all of 65 pounds. Evidently, her upper body strength was just too much for Jacksonville's finest.

• The Jacksonville Times-Union reported the following:

  "One officer used a hold on her jaw and twisted her arm in a move designed to subdue a person but wrote in the report, "I feared further force on the suspect's arm would cause her harm, [due to her small size] so I disengaged the suspect."

  "That's when Officer G.A. Nelson used the Taser, according to the report."

• This story came just a few days after Miami-Dade police tasered a 6-year-old boy who was waving around a piece of glass in the school principal's office. Police said they tasered the boy to keep him from harming himself with the glass.

• Also, near Miami, Sylvana Gomez, 12, was caught skipping school, drinking Olde Demon Rum and smoking hippy lettuce. While she is probably not a candidate for early admission to Yale, she did not deserve what happened to her.

• When a Miami-Dade police officer tried to take Sylvan back to school, she ran into traffic. At that point, the officer tasered her. Later, he said that this was for both his and her safety.

  Sylvana Gomez must have been one awfully big and ornery 12-year-old.

Is it the Florida water, or the legacy of Janet Reno, the former state attorney general? (More on her in just a minute.)

Tasering is harsh and extremely painful. In each of the above cases, tasering constituted "cruel and unusual punishment." tasering is a form of "pain compliance", which is just a euphemism for torture. Tasering has killed people.

In each case, police claimed they tasered these kids for their own good. This is all too reminiscent of the army officer during Vietnam who claimed that it was necessary to destroy a village in order to save it.

The word "village" got me thinking. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (1) wrote a bestselling book titled "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child." Hillary and her husband, Kim Jong-Bill, had very interesting ideas about how children - not Chelsea, but less privileged children -- ought to be raised. (2) Consider the 20-plus innocent children who were incinerated at Waco. Consider the machine gun pointed at little Elian Gonzalez.

Last year, I stated that, "The same folks who laughed convulsively when Hillary Clinton stated that 'It Takes a Village to Raise a Child' evidently have no problem with the idea that it takes a police state to raise a child."

I don't want to give Hillary any ideas, but just imagine her coauthoring a book with her husband's - Waco Willie's - attorney general, Jackboot Janet Reno. The book would be called "It Takes a Taser to Raise a Child."

(1) There is only one presidential contender who is unequivocally opposed to such police state measures. His name is RON PAUL . If we don't elect him, this whole election will be absolutely meaningless.

(2) Just so you know I don't favor either the Clintons or the Bushes, Jeb Bush's kids don't get tasered when they say "I don't think so" to the authorities. His son wasn't tasered when he resisted arrest in Austin in 2005. His daughter wasn't tasered when she was caught with crack cocaine in violation of her probation in 2002.

If you would like to post this, please e-mail me and include this URL.

Freely Speaking: Essays by Doug Newman

Don't be too swift to judge

[davidwr]

Any time you use force to subdue someone, you risk harming them. If the force is great enough, the risk of causing serious or permanent harm is non-negligible.

In these cases, you need to weigh the various outcomes to your various actions.
You could:
* do nothing/back off
* use an amount or type of force with only a negligible chance of causing serious or permanent harm, such as tackling a healthy adult and pinning them to the ground, or grabbing a child's arms and restraining them, or using pepper spray
* use

Re:

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Tase a 68 lb child? Jesus, you are an apologist.

I say TASE JENNA!

Better tasered than shot

[davidwr]

Granted, this particular case is probably out of line, but put yourself in this hypothetical position:

68 pound 10 year old kid with known anger and violence issues and suicidal tendencies gets ahold of a gun.

He's holding his little brother hostage and the kid's teachers and school counselors have already been called in and they tell you he's fully capable of killing the little kid.

You have a choice:

Do nothing.
Try to talk him out of it/negotiate.
Try to take him down by tackling him.
Tase him.
Pump lead into hi

Re:

[spun]

What a great debating technique: if the actual situation is too antithetical to your desired conclusions, simply make up a hypothetical case. Bravo.

Cops do not just use tasers in situations where the only previously available option would have been deadly force. They use them on children, invalids, and people already under restraint. Your example proves nothing except the lengths you will go to as an apologist for the misuse of power. "Probably out of line," indeed.

The idea of admitting that police misuse t

let's look at these cases then

[davidwr]

OK, let's go down the stories one by one:

*13 year old girl in the back seat of the car:
Very likely overkill, unless "following instructions" was something like "please put the gun down" or something equally unlikely. I mean, how much danger to herself or others can a girl in the back of a police car be, really? Even if she is, is she so fast that she can do someone serious harm before a cop gets in there with her and pins her to the seat until she calms down? Unless she has a weapon, I doubt it.

*6 year o

Let's ask the real questions, then

[spun]

Do you know what "drive-stun" is? Are you willing to admit to the possibility that American police have in the past, and continue to torture innocents using tasers? Do you think police always do the right thing? Do you think that investigations into police misuse of force usually ferret out and punish misconduct? Do you think there is enough oversight of our police force?

You may want to educate yourself as to the depths of controversy around electroshock weapons [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[davidwr]

We are veering away from the original 3 claims and are now entering into a meta-discussion of police misconduct.

Do you know what "drive-stun" is?

I do now.

Are you willing to admit to the possibility that American police have in the past, and continue to torture innocents using tasers?

I'm sure such things happen from time to time. I'm also sure that some people who are stunned by justifiable use of tasers will claim they were innocents or that the tazing went beyond what was reasonable for the circumstances.

Do you think police always do the right thing?

I think that far more often than not, professional police do what they believe is the right thing. Yes, there are some crooked or outright evil people in Ameri

Re:

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

They're not "time-to-time". They are "all the time" - and now getting some attention.

Re:

[spun]

Let me tell you of my experience with the police in San Francisco. Most has been perfectly friendly and respectful. However, I volunteered for quite some time with Food not Bombs. It is our policy to give out free food, in public, to draw attention to the truth about hunger in America. City officials do not like that, it hurts tourism. Note that, even though it is our stated opinion that there should never be a permit required to give out free food, we did seek one. Turns out, although you still need one, t

Judge Dredd

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Your Plea?

Re:

[spun]

Guilty of the one true crime: disrespecting imposed authority.

San Francisco

[davidwr]

City officials do not like that, it hurts tourism.

You would think it would help tourism, but that's beside the point.

Turns out, although you still need one, the process for getting one has been overturned

Hmm, whatever judge overturned the policy for getting a permit without simultaneously imposing his own policy OR waiving the permit requirement entirely didn't do his job.

The police pour the soup into the street in front of hundreds of hungry people. They dump out the bagels and pour bleach on them so that

Re:

[spun]

Heh, you should have seen the Arcata case. They tried to charge everyone involved with distributing food in a public place without a permit, so the FnB lawyer entered pictures of the judge distributing free food in the courthouse (a public place) from the Christmas before. Guess who ended up going to jail?

The thing is, you seem to regard all these incidents as aberrations. What if, just what if they are not? What if my experiences represent the norm, and yours are the unusual ones? Obviously, my anecdotal e

Re:

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

You work downtown?

Re:

[spun]

Used to serve in front of City Hall, then at U.N. Plaza. Never served in Arcata, I was just friends with all those guys. I don't live in S.F. anymore, sadly. Albuquerque isn't nearly as fun.

Re:

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

SF isn't as fun either... :-)

Re:

[tsalaroth]

Having worked in IA for a police department as a civilian, I can say that in most cases, no, there is NOT enough oversight. However, when there's an investigation they usually DO ferret out and punish misconduct. Sometimes, the punishment is too much. Sometimes, it's too little. There is rarely a happy medium, unfortunately.

Re:

[spun]

Despite harboring a fair amount of resentment towards police, I also have respect for them and the difficult job they do. If I were in charge of setting up a police force, first thing I'd do is give each and every officer training in psychology. Then I'd get them a permanent shrink for as long as they were on the force. Seeing the worst of society, day in, day out, tends to make a person crazy.

I used to date a lady cop....

[zogger]

...she was a recent divorcee', with one kid, and found herself in need of a fast job with decent enough pay and benefits. Applied at the local cop shop, got hired. So I am dating this woman, and within a few months she went from civvie with new job as copette to when referring to civvies, prefaced it all the time with "effin" (fill it in) civvie. I stopped dating her at that point. And I have heard this numerous times from young guys who join the service as well, just something I have noticed, pretty soon,

There are three types of people...

[hummassa]

to a cop:
1. cops;
2. cops' relatives;
3. suspects.

But there was no gun

[benhocking]

Sure, you could come up with a hypothetical situation where tasering a 68-pound kid is the right thing to do. However, we're talking about an actual situation here and the kid was in the back seat of a cruiser sans gun. Tasering was not only the wrong thing to do, it was very obviously the wrong thing to do. No Monday-morning quarterbacking required. If you couldn't have figured out instantaneously that tasering was the wrong thing to do in this situation, then you don't deserve to have a taser (or a gun).

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[tsalaroth]

The one positive side this story has is that the whole taser thing is getting a lot of press at the moment, pretty much all negative, which means it stands a fraction of a chance of being dealt with politically. Assuming it doesn't all blow over as people get taser abuse fatigue.

I've noticed lately, that I've been hearing a lot of ads for Tasers during conservative talk radio shows - including ads to "protect your kids when they go to college! buy them a Taser!".

W...T...F...?!?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Rationality? In a Jeremiah Cornelius Journal Entry?

You must be new here. Jeremiah's as lunatic left wing fringe as they come.

Re:

[tsalaroth]

I can't believe someone wasted a mod point on that. Bravo.

I agree

[ak3ldama]

with what you said. There is also no, NO, reason to setup apologies. Police states don't need apologies, they can only follow rules. There is no reasoning, just rules that they follow - this is not a personal situation but an automated set of responses. If possible I will vote Ron Paul, however I am registered libertarian and therefore won't have a chance at any primaries (not that South Dakota matters hehe.) From the sound of the debate tonight he won't run independent.

As the saying goes...

[Farmer Tim]

Spare the (cattle p)rod, spoil the child.

Broken Arrow

[HTH NE1]

Would you mind not tasering the man wearing the plastic explosives?