The police shot someone with a taser for doing graffiti on an abandoned building? That is completely insane.
You can literally rub graffiti off a wall, why would you risk killing someone for that.
You can literally rub graffiti off a wall, why would you risk killing someone for that.
I think that's the main point of the article. Taser markets these weapons as non-lethal, going to great lengths to make sure investigations point the blame somewhere else when a death occurs.
Police don't treat these weapons as lethal, which is clearly not true.
They should do the testing a 30 minute drive from the hospital without medical personnel on hand at the top of a flight of cement stairs with no one around to catch their fall.
I'm sure the police would not volunteer for that test.
I don't believe the trigger is depressed during this, so it's just the contact shock, not a prolonged/repeated one.
I also have no idea what medical personnel are on hand, but all police officers are trained in CPR and I'd imagine they have an AED on premises, even if there are no EMTs right there.
It says use of ECD (Taser), as non-lethal force, is warranted to prevent inter alia damage to property, section 4.b.1.b.
It also says verbal warnings should be given when they don't betray a tactical advantage.
Once a warning is given, if you run you're resisting arrest, which is for good reasons a serious crime.
Whatever the law says, the use of potentially deadly-force to prevent the application of graffiti is unconscionable. Graffiti may be aesthetically undesirable and property owners are within their rights to obstruct or remove it from their property, but adding a layer of paint to a wall does not damage the wall.
Should we let people graffiti other's property without any hindrance?
If you make something illegal, you have to allow police to intervene. If you allow police to intervene some people will run. Police are worthless, as are the laws they seek to enforce, if they don't have legal powers to physically stop people who flee from them, using appropriate force. Thus situations where people come to physical harm that outweighs the gravity of their (known) suspected crimes are inevitable so long as people choose to flee when confronted by police.
Point out the holes there for me?
I'd contend that an electric shock across the heart is too much force for stopping someone accused of spraying graffiti.
It seems to me that this is the grey area where the officer's humane discretion should come into play: "is it worth risking another human-being's life in order to prevent their evading capture for a crime of this level?"
It seems like this grey area often gets flattened into "is this human being complying? If no, pull trigger."
The situation would change a lot if, e.g., they were tasering someone already restrained as a punishment, or conversely if they were tasering someone who ran into a dead end, then turned to attack them. Given that the details in the article were quite thin, I'd want to see more evidence before rendering judgement.
There is inherent risk when you escalate an issue with the police. I'm not excusing the police for using deadly force, but he made a bad choice.