Take Tasers From The Police

When University of Florida journalism student Andrew Meyer was tasered at a John Kerry event, the incident showed the brutality of tasers. It also demonstrated how members of the law enforcement community increasingly turn to the use of tasers when normal physical restraint would work just as well. At the time I considered the event an anomaly, and merely an isolated example of shoddy police work. I no longer have the luxury of believing that.

In March of 2008, Walter E. Haake Jr. died from being tasered. He had suffered a head injury prior to the incident. He was tasered for not exiting his vehicle, although the police had his keys and he was not acting in an aggressive fashion. The justification for police actions amounted to, "He didn't obey us."

Earlier this year, on January 17, Baron Pikes was murdered by taser in Winnfield, Louisiana. Pikes fought with Scott Nugent, who was a police officer at the time. Nugent continued tasering Pikes long after the man sawmill worker was handcuffed and under control. Justice for the family of the murdered man has yet to come, and probably never will.

In Ozark, Missouri, Mace Hutchinson fell off a 30 foot overpass and broke his back. When police officers arrived on the scene the badly injured sixteen year old could not stand up. Police claimed he said something about killing cops, and that's why they tasered him 19 times. Evidently a sixteen year old boy with a broken back was too much of a man for Ozark police to handle. The only mystery of the story is how the young man survived. It's no mystery why the police really did this thing: they are sadistic cowards.

The list of fatalities goes on and on. The last story mentioned 300 reported taser deaths in one year, but they probably meant the 337 confirmed taser deaths since 1999. The author inaccurately states that the list of people tasered to death does not exist anywhere else. The Department of Justice has the list, they just don't publicize it. Amnesty International has discussed the increasing number of fatalities, and the exact number of deaths, on a number of occasions. The number of deaths is common knowledge to people who care, but the general public is kept in the dark about it. After all, the mainstream media barely even covers Iraq now.

According to one Amnesty International report, the data and conclusions of which are echoed in nearly every study on tasers, the weapon is far from the non-lethal solution it was intended to be. Not only does it present far greater health risks than stated in the lead-up to law enforcement use, but the use of the weapon is often completely unwarranted. Women and children have been electrocuted with the devices, but we all know how dangerous women and children are.

This needs to stop. Our nation's not so subtle slide toward a police state needs to be reversed. Any form of oppression, especially American proto-fascism, has no place in our democracy. The right-wing's love of violence need not become our rule for the future. Everyone should know just how much danger they are in when dealing with the police. Police need only to dislike a person to put them on a stretcher. I say take the tasers away from the police. Please make it a personal issue to enact legislation banning the weapons. I know that I will.