mvpel said:
JuanCarlos - police are tasked and empowered to use force to gain compliance from uncooperative people. A police officer inflicting some temporary pain on a subject in order to compel his submission and cooperation is not corporal punishment, it's just a fact of life. The subject here made choices which dictated the police response. He was not being "punished," he was suffering the consequences for his poor choice not to act like a civilized human being.
Whether it's done with a wrist lock, bent fingers, a snatched earlobe or lip, pepper spray, a baton, a knee to the groin, or a taser, it's all part of the same thing - inflicting pain to force compliance with the will of the police officers.
That said, I do agree that the police made a poor choice to keep zapping him instead of just hauling him out. They're supposed to work out and be physically fit for just this reason.
Once the police showed up, he was going to be out of that library, the only question was whether it was going to be the easy way or the hard way.
How does the bolded part
not constitute punishement? Anyway, you've basically hit the nail on the head: the police made an extremely poor choice in continuing to zap him rather than just haul him out. This is actually why I call it "punishment," rather than lumping it in with standard use of force/compliance techniques...as soon as it became obvious that tasing him was
not going to get him to move on his own, they should have moved on to a tactic that
would, such as simply picking him up and dragging him. Any additional uses of the Taser after this point were basically nothing more than punishment, as far as I'm concerned.
Now, it's arguable as to when this point was; personally, I think after the first or second use of the Taser it was pretty obvious to anybody with half a brain that this technique was not going to get the job done.
209 said:
JuanCarlos- what are you trying to say?
That the officer was involved in a shooting, so he must be wrong in this case?
The shooting you are referring to was jusitifiable. So, what does it have to do with this case.
The officer also has other civilian compliants, so that means he must be wrong in this case?
I'll explain a bit about citizen complaints:
Stop a car for a traffic violation. The person stopped is upset about the ticket. They complain. The complaint is investigated. It's a "throw-away" complaint. That is one that has no substance. Many PDs keep track of all complaints- even the unsubstaniated ones. You ask, and the PD will acknowledge there are complaints against an officer.
The better way to reference his past may be to say: "There have been some complaints lodged against the officer. I'm not sure how many of them were substaniated."
But, I guess that doesn't make the same statement you were trying to make.... does it?
You know, I'm not an idiot...I do understand a little bit about things like this. For instance, I would actually be surprised if, after 18 years as an officer, somebody
hadn't racked up a few citizen complaints...as you said, you pull enough people over, somebody's bound to get angry and want to get back at you.
But I think the
nature of the complaints is what is more important here. One for choking a student with a nightstick. Yes, I can imagine plenty of scenarios where this is warranted...but from the LA Times story, it sounds as if he came about a hair away from being dismissed, and was suspended for 90 days over the incident. This suggests that it was not necessarily some baseless accusation.
As for the shooting, again I can imagine plenty of scenarios in which it might be justified. This may well have been one; he may be telling the God's honest about what happened. At the same time, I also know that when a police officer says a bum tried to grab his gun, and the bum says he didn't, and no cameras caught the action (this happened in a restroom), the cop's word will stand no matter what actually happened.
Perhaps some of you live in a dream world where cops don't lie. I live in the real world where cops will actually coerce a 14-year-old girl into
not getting a rape kit done, in order to prevent any "hard" evidence from being gathered against their fellow cop who raped (statutory) her. Yes, I am talking about somebody close to me. No, the case never went to court; lack of evidence, dontcha know. So excuse me if I don't take the word of a police officer as gospel simply because he is a police officer.
So now we have this last incident. It shows what appears, at least to most non-LEOs, to be an inappropriate use of a taser on a passively resisting student. Funny thing: most people don't judge somebody's actions individually, but rather tend to judge them taking into consideration past actions as well. So not only do I take into account his past actions when forming an opinion about this current incident, I also form opinions about how justified his past actions might have been based on this incident. It goes both ways. Add it all up (including his being dismissed initially from the Long Beach PD...though not for anything UoF related), and it smells like a bad cop. How bad, I don't know. Probably not quite as bad as I'm making it sound...but bad enough that I'd feel better if he wasn't a cop anymore.
So yeah,
that is pretty much what I was trying to say by linking to the article. As for the bolded part of your response, that's pretty much what the linked article said. I simply went on to say that was interesting. No, I don't expect everybody else to form the same opinions I did regarding it. I would expect any LEO to draw pretty much the opposite conclusions, much like you did...cops tend do defend their own.
