When is it safe to taser a kid? I suspect the answer is never.
Imagine this scenario. A mother calls the cops because her ten year old daughter won’t take a shower…. yep, that’s it. The kid won’t take a shower. We don’t know the details but for the sake of argument let’s assume the ten year old girl was screaming and kicking and crying.
The cop arrives and sees the kid who appears to be having a temper tantrum and is definitely acting in an unruly manner. The cop asks the mother if he has her permission to taser the kid. The mom gives the go-ahead. The cop tasers the kid. The cop is suspended.
So far the story seems right, especially the part about the cop being suspended. Here’s the catch. The cop was not suspended for tasering a 10 year old girl. He was suspended for not having his camera on while he did it. True story from Arkansas.
This year in Michigan alone there have been reports of teens dying after being tasered by cops. Another Michigan incident involved a 17 year old girl who was a passenger in a car stopped by the cops. When the driver was asked to take a sobriety test the girl (the passenger) started to run and the cop tasered her in the back. There is no report of this teen dying but it does cause us to question the need to taser a 17 year old passenger in a car who panicked, probably worrying that her parents were going to punish her for being in the car with someone who may have been drinking or for some other related reason.
Realizing that cops face danger everyday they are on the job, there is obviously a need to subdue some perpetrators. The question that persists is one of the need to use a taser. There are reports of adults dying across the country following a tasering act. The problem seems to be that certain medical conditions can be triggered by the taser.
With the knowledge that adults are dying from beding tasered, why would anyone suggest that tasering a kid is appropriate but failing to catch it on camera is not? What ever happened to calling for back-up? Are we to believe that the only appropriate action is to shoot a kid with a taser? Or, should we consider that some cops are like kids with new toys ready to try them out as soon a possible? What possible danger could a 10 year old present that a few adults could not control? What possible danger to law enforcement arises from a teenager running from cops when she was only the passenger in a car?
Excessive force, via the taser gun, has become a problem in our nation… a deadly problem, especially for some of our children.
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