Ex-State Trooper Convicted Of Involuntary Manslaughter For Tasing A Teen Riding An ATV At 35 MPH

from the less-lethal? dept

Former Michigan State Trooper Mark Bessner is going to jail. Bessner originally faced a second-degree murder charge for tasing a teen riding an ATV, but was ultimately convicted of a lesser charge. The details here are provided by the New York Times, which seems to be trying to further exonerate the former law enforcement officer with its reporting.

A former Michigan state trooper was convicted of involuntary manslaughter on Wednesday, nearly two years after he fired a Taser at a teenager on an all-terrain vehicle who then crashed and died.

The teenager, Damon Grimes, 15, was illegally riding the A.T.V. in a residential area of Detroit in August 2017. State police officers followed in a patrol car to get him to pull over. When he did not immediately do so, the officer in the passenger seat of the patrol car pulled out his Taser and stunned Damon.

Video footage of the episode showed the A.T.V. veering toward the side of the road. The teenager crashed into the back of a parked truck and died shortly thereafter.

If this is the only writeup someone sees regarding this incident, they're going to come away with a lot of wrong impressions.

First, Bessner fired his Taser from his moving patrol car at Damon Grimes. Both vehicles were traveling at 35 mph when this happened. Earbuds were recovered from the scene, bringing into the question the assumed fact that Grimes knew he was being pursued by the troopers.

At the point the pursuit was initiated, Grimes had only committed a traffic infraction. Trooper Bessner decided to punish this with an inadvertent -- but foreseeable -- death sentence. The pursuit was unnecessary. Bessner's decision to tase a person riding an ATV at 35 mph by firing out the passenger window of his moving vehicle was beyond idiotic. It was psychopathic.

Bessner retired while under investigation. His former employer has attempted to exonerate itself by stating Bessner's Taser deployment fell outside of department guidelines. Inarguably, this is true. But what the agency won't own up to is its continued employment of a trooper who should have been fired long before he took someone's life. According to public records obtained by the Detroit Free Press, Bessner was a liability to the force for years.

Bessner has a history of using excessive force and has been reprimanded before for using his Taser inappropriately, including using the device on handcuffed suspects. The investigation into Bessner's conduct shows that over a four-year span ending in 2017, he had 40 use of force incidents, 17 pursuits and five car accidents.

The last stat possibly explains why Bessner was in the passenger seat. The rest of it explains why Bessner felt justified firing his taser at a teen riding an ATV -- a teen whose unprotected body was hurled headfirst into the rear end of a pickup truck, resulting in multiple deadly injuries, including a dislocated skull.

The Times article also skims right past Bessner's attempt to change his story during the trial. None of the records obtained by the Detroit Free Press contain anything indicating Bessner believed Grimes was carrying a gun. Multiple body camera and dashcam recordings contained zero statements about this CYA theory, as did the paperwork related to the incident and its subsequent investigation.

Nevertheless, Bessner tried to save himself by claiming -- months after being charged -- he thought the teen on the ATV was trying to pull out a gun.

“He had slowed down and he had looked back several times,” Bessner testified. “There was one very, very crystallizing moment where his left hand reached down towards his waist.”

He later said he “absolutely” believed Grimes had a gun and that his life was in jeopardy.

“It was a deadly force situation, is what I thought, and I used the tool I had available to me,” Bessner said.

After Grimes crashed the ATV, Bessner said he and his partner tried to help the teen. He also searched the victim for a gun.

“I was shocked that he didn’t have a weapon. I was shocked at the magnitude of what had happened,” Bessner testified.

Every cop who kills an unarmed person is "shocked" when they don't have a weapon. Some shock is legitimate. Some of it isn't really shock, but rather dismay that the "feared for my safety" defense may only be as bulletproof as the dead body at their feet.

State Trooper Bessner screwed up and it's going to cost him a few years of his freedom. But he didn't screw up by making a bad judgment call on force deployment. He screwed up by assuming he could act like a vigilante rather than a law enforcement officer and get away with it. His history with the state troopers shows it was a safe bet to make. But sometimes the bet doesn't pay off and the constant underdog -- police accountability -- scores a rare win.

Filed Under: atv, damon grimes, detroit, involuntary manslaughter, mark bessner, taser

Oversight Board Spares NYPD's Feelings By Softening Language In Taser Complaint Report

from the say-a-prayer-for-the-people-in-power dept

The NYPD's estranged relationship with its oversight continues. The Civilian Complaint Review Board -- put into place after it became apparent the NYPD wasn't interested in policing itself -- has noticed the department is vocally supportive of better policing, but has no interest in actually making any changes to the way it disciplines its officers.

The NYPD has yet to see a civilian complaint it can't make disappear and has almost always recommended a lesser punishment for misconduct than the Board has recommended. In controversial "chokehold" cases, the Board found the NYPD was completely uninterested in doing anything about officers' use of a tactic it has outlawed.

In those cases where CCRB substantiated chokeholds, recommended Administrative Charges, and DAO became involved, none of the substantiated cases ever went to trial before a NYPD Trial Commissioner. Instead, DAO departed from CCRB’s recommendation every time. Rather than pursue the more serious Administrative Charges, DAO recommended lesser penalties or no discipline whatsoever.

Despite being shown no respect by the NYPD, the CCRB has decided to protect the badged-and-armed delicate flower of the department by softening the language in its Taser use report before publication.

In the spring, an oversight agency for the New York Police Department circulated a draft report on the use of Taser stun guns. The report highlighted “troubling” findings and issued stern recommendations: The police should create an annual report on the use of Tasers and prohibit their use on handcuffed suspects.

But the latter recommendation was removed from the final version of the report, quietly released in October by the agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, with no formal announcement. The other was removed from the executive summary and relegated to the report’s final page.

The agency also removed language highlighting what police reform advocates and civil liberties groups later said was the board’s central finding: In most Taser encounters reviewed, officers used the stun guns on people who were unarmed.

What the CCRB found wasn't encouraging. The NYPD already has a troubled history of Taser misuse. Not much is made of it because Taser deployment in the force is severely limited. But the NYPD's ability to make even a small number of civilian complaints vanish into the ether remains unchanged. The New York Times highlights the report's findings, which are disturbing and have remained unaltered.

Over the period studied in the report, from 2014 through 2015, the board’s investigators conducted full investigations of 51 of the 153 complaints filed and substantiated only three of them.

The other 102 fell by the wayside because the complainants failed to cooperate with the investigation. Perhaps some of them felt the outcome would be no different than the 94% that did make it all the way through the process. Perhaps some had outstanding warrants, unpaid tickets, a general disinterest in interacting with law enforcement, or whatever. But with only six percent of complaints being substantiated, the outcome of the NYPD's internal efforts are par for the course: lots of complaints, almost zero repercussions.

But just as disheartening is the fact that the CCRB edited its report to ensure the NYPD wouldn't even feel the weight of PRINTED WORDS.

The alterations to the report run throughout and appear to play down the findings — which remain unchanged — and remove language that could be considered charged or critical of the Police Department.

This is an organization with an inordinate amount of power -- both over the people it serves as well as the politicians that ostensibly control its budget and activities. Specific edits were made to turn the report into something as proactively exonerative as statements made by the NYPD itself in the wake of excessive force allegations. Police brass say things like "the officer's gun discharged." The CCRB -- post-editing -- says things like this:

[T]he draft report found that “there is also evidence” that Tasers were being used in response to unruly or obstinate behavior by suspects. That phrase was changed in the final version to say that “there is concern.”

Also excised was the Board's "troubling" finding that Taser deployment often occurred when suspects were already in custody. The stat -- 30% of the time -- remains. The word "troubling" is nowhere to be found. Another sentence was removed completely, apparently out of concern the NYPD might react badly to it.

"[A] review of several of the police custody complaints supports the perception that the Tasing may have occurred unnecessarily."

The NYPD needs to be subjected to strong language that draws attention unavoidably to its use of excessive force. This is the sort of thing the NYPD finds to be "appropriate" Taser use.

Mr. Sells said in an interview that during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, he learned that two separate officers used Tasers on Mr. Paul, striking him a total of 13 times — six by one officer; seven by the other — over the course of 41 seconds.

Anthony Paul is dead. He was 29 years old when he died in NYPD custody. The NYPD brushed off accusations of excessive force with the above "appropriate" statement, as well as the excuse that the Tasers failed to deliver even more electricity to the eventual corpse of Mr. Paul.

"...not all of the “activations” resulted “in actual electrical circuit charge transmissions.”

A government entity that has the power to kill civilians who do not immediately subject themselves to an arrest is apparently too weak to handle direct criticism of its actions. The Board has wiped any implications from its findings, leaving the stats to speak for themselves. The facts aren't pretty, but the NYPD has no problem ignoring hard numbers and incontrovertible facts. But it must be protected from any insinuations that its use of force is sometimes too much… or occasionally unjustifiable.

Filed Under: abuse, ccrb, nypd, oversight, police, taser

Border Patrol Agents Tase Woman For Refusing To Cooperate With Their Bogus Search

from the the-question-that-has-no-real-answer dept

Jessica Cooke, a New York native who had recently applied for a position with Customs and Border Protection, asked the only question that needed to be asked after being tased by CBP agents for asserting her rights: "What the fuck is wrong with you?!?"

Cooke was driving from Norfolk to her boyfriend's house in Ogdensburg, the northern border of which is the St. Lawrence River. If you cross the river, you are in Canada, but Cooke was not crossing the river. She nevertheless became subject to the arbitrary orders of CBP agents by driving through one of the country's many internal immigration checkpoints, which can be located anywhere within 100 miles of the border (a zone that includes two-thirds of the U.S. population). For some mysterious reason, she was instructed to pull into a secondary inspection area, where she used her cellphone to record a five-minute video of the stop (below). [Language possibly NSFW]

These CBP agents -- like too many other law enforcement officers -- had no idea how to react when their authority was challenged. They only saw one route to take: escalation.

Cooke knew the CBP agents needed something in the way of reasonable suspicion to continue to detain her. But they had nothing. The only thing offered in the way of explanation as they ordered her to return to her detained vehicle was that she appeared "nervous" during her prior interaction with the female CBP agent. This threadbare assertion of "reasonable suspicion" is law enforcement's blank check -- one it writes itself and cashes with impunity.

The CBP supervisor then stated he'd be bringing in a drug dog to search her vehicle -- another violation of Cooke's rights. The Supreme Court very recently ruled that law enforcement cannot unnecessarily prolong routine stops in order to perform additional searches unrelated to the stop's objective.

If the purpose of CBP is to secure borders and regulate immigration, then this stop had very little to do with the agency's objectives. Cooke is an American citizen and had not crossed a border. If the CBP's objective is to do whatever it wants within x number of miles of the border, then it's apparently free to perform suspicionless searches. In this case, the CBP was operating in drug enforcement mode, but even so, it still hadn't offered anything more than Cooke's alleged "nervousness" to justify the search and detainment. Additionally, the CBP's decision to bring in a drug dog raised the bar for justification.

While nervousness alone might be deemed enough for reasonable suspicion, SUNY Buffalo immigration law professor Rick Su told the local NPR station, "it is not sufficient" to justify a vehicle search, which requires probable cause to believe the vehicle contains evidence of a crime.

Things escalated when Cooke refused to return to her vehicle and wait passively for the CBP to perform its questionable search. Cooke told the officers she would leave if the search wasn't performed within 20 minutes. The supervisor told her she could leave, but her car couldn't and if she tried, spike strips would be deployed.

Shortly thereafter, this exchange occurred:

CBP agent: I'm going to tell you one more time, and then I'm going to move you.
Cooke: If you touch me, I will sue your ass. Do you understand me?
CBP agent: Go for it.
Cooke: Touch me then.
CBP agent: Move over there.
Cooke: Go ahead. Touch me.
CBP agent: I'm telling you to move over there.

Cue said "touching," followed almost immediately by screams of pain and swearing as Cooke is tased. Before the recording end, you can hear the CBP agent claiming Cooke "assaulted a federal officer." (As one does…)

And for all the hassle, the CBP came up with nothing.

During an exterior inspection of her vehicle by the unit, nothing was found, Ms. Cooke said. She said agents then opened the car doors, got her keys and opened the trunk.

Again, nothing was found, Ms. Cooke said, adding that agents did a second search of the vehicle with the K-9 unit, but found nothing.

There will always be those who feel citizens who refuse to meet law enforcement instructions with anything but meek obedience deserve whatever happens to them. "It's tough being in law enforcement," they claim. And it is. But considering the job contains the constant threat of injury or death, a little mouthiness or stubbornness shouldn't be met with this level of force.

Things are slowly changing, though. Law enforcement officers can no longer rely on the belief that citizens know less about their rights than they do. They will need to do more to justify searches and seizures in the future, instead of just making vague claims about perceived nervousness. Otherwise, their unconstitutional search attempts are either going to rely heavily on ensuring compliance through inapproriate use of force, or head to the other end of the spectrum, where they won't even get a chance to take a look. [Language possibly NSFW]

Filed Under: 4th amendment, border patrol, search, taser

LAPD's Body Cams To Be Synced To Taser Deployment

from the recorded-into-compliance dept

The Los Angeles Police Department is going to be compiling some pretty graphic footage in the near future, thanks to Taser International.

Los Angeles police on Tuesday ordered Tasers that, when used, automatically activate cameras on officers' uniforms, which will create visual records of incidents at a time of mounting concern about excessive force by U.S. law enforcement officers.

The 3,000 new digital Taser X26P weapons record the date, time and duration of firing, and whether Taser wires actually strike suspects and how long the thousands of volts of electricity pulse through them.

This is the functional synergy of buying your "less lethal" weapons and body cameras from the same company. A Bluetooth connection between the two engages the camera once the Taser's safety is disengaged. This should provide a fairly decent record of incidents involving this particular form of force, while simultaneously addressing fears that officers might forget to engage the camera during heated situations or lose valuable seconds turning them on manually.

That the device will also record key data about the Taser itself is also encouraging. Even if the camera angle is less than helpful, the captured metrics should give overseers a pretty good idea whether the use of force traveled into "excessive" territory.

On the downside, this is the LAPD, which has already stated that body camera footage will be available only via court proceedings. By cutting out the general public, the LAPD has removed a very important layer of accountability. And the incidents mentioned in the Reuters article as examples of public concern over police use of force (Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford) all notably did not involve the use of a Taser (Garner was choked to death, Brown and Ford were both shot). The new Taser/camera system closes the accountability gap for one particular area, but use of other types of force are still subject to officers' control of their body cameras.

The LAPD has proven in the past that its officers don't care much for being recorded, so the rollout of 7,000 body cameras needs to be treated with more skepticism than optimism. Widespread abuse of DOJ-mandated audio recording devices (missing/disabled antennas, deliberate disengagement) has been greeted by LAPD supervisors with timid hand slapping and "accountability is hard" complaints. There's no reason to believe certain officers won't be able to find a way around this new, automatic recording technology as well.

But, on a theoretical level, it's a better system than relying on officers themselves to engage recording devices before deploying Tasers. Its application in the real world will probably not be quite as foolproof as Taser's spokesman portrays it. And, even if it does roll out smoothly and work as advertised, we're still left with the unfortunate fact that the general public will have very limited access to either the Taser data or the automated recordings.

Filed Under: body cameras, body cams, lapd, police, taser

Cops And Schools Collide Again: School Fight Ends With Tased Teen In Medically-Induced Coma

from the routine-altercations-meet-routine-responses dept

Another incident that highlights the troubling aspects of placing cops in schools has surfaced. The sheriff's office's (which supplies the deputies to the school) story has changed several times in the space of few days, but the end result is inarguable: a 17-year-old student is in a medically-induced coma as the result of its officer's actions.

At one Texas high school, the use of a Taser by Randy McMillan, a sheriff’s deputy/school resource officer, on 17-year-old Noe Niño de Rivera has resulted in the student being put in a medically induced coma. The family has filed a lawsuit against McMillan, the school district, and the county, and alleges Rivera was tased after trying to break up a fight.

According to the court documents, the teen was walking backwards from school officers who were trying to break up a fight when he was tased, falling backwards and suffering a brain hemorrhage. The sheriff's office maintains that the student acted aggressively and refused to back off when ordered to by officer Randy McMillan.

The narrative is cloudy, even when restricted to just the sheriff's office's statements. The original report of the incident on Nov. 20th said this:

A Bastrop County sheriff deputy assigned to Cedar Creek High School as a resource officer used a Taser on a 17-year-old student during a fight on Wednesday, according to officials.

The student and two other boys were involved in a fight in the hallway when the deputy used the stun gun on him, according to the Bastrop school district and Sissy Jones, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office.

The next day, the office's statement added this:

A 17-year-old Cedar Creek High School student was acting aggressively before a Bastrop County sheriff’s deputy Tased the teen Wednesday, officials said Thursday.

Thus making the deployment of the Taser more justifiable. But it also added this:

Sissy Jones, a spokeswoman for the Bastrop County sheriff’s office, said that two deputies who work at the Bastrop school district as resource officers were trying to stop a fight Wednesday between two female students in the high school’s hallway when the 17-year-old male student approached.

The original report stated the tased student was involved in a fight with two other boys and the deputy. This new statement shows the student wasn't even involved in the fight and had only "approached" the scene.

The student tried to interfere with the deputies and didn’t listen to their commands, Jones said. “He looked as though he was ready to fight.”

"Looked." This still doesn't explain the office's statement that the student was "aggressive" or the implication that he posed a threat to the officers.

The family's lawyer claims to have cell phone footage of the incident that contradicts the statements made by the officers.

"They're completely lying, they're completely lying because they're very worried about this officer being indicted for a criminal charge, which he should be," said attorney Adam Loewy, who is representing the family…

"Noe was being a good Samaritan, a good citizen, he broke up the fight. Then there was some stoppage to everything, and he was standing there. You see these police officers go up to him and tase him," Loewy said.

Whatever this footage shows likely won't make an appearance until the case goes to trial, but it would seem the school itself should have footage of the incident. According to its parent's handbook, the school has cameras in use (p. 70).

For safety purposes, video and audio recording equipment is used to monitor student behavior, including on buses and in common areas on campus. Students will not be told when the equipment is being used.

A "high school hallway" would presumably be a "common area." If there is footage, no one has made any mention of it. Even stranger, no one has even offered to review the recordings or even deny such footage exists.

The lawsuit would obviously limit the school from talking about the incident (as would the student's age), but the school issued nearly no statements in the days preceding the filing, other than its original joint statement with the sheriff's office (above) and this boilerplate isued on the day of the incident.

“The safety and security of all students is the number one priority at Cedar Creek High School and Bastrop ISD,” the district said in a statement. “When law enforcement officers intervene and take action, they do so based on their training and protocol, as they deem warranted.”

The sheriff's office has gone on record as stating the student wasn't involved in the fight, but yet somehow, the uninvolved student is the one who was tased and hospitalized for nothing more than appearing "aggressive." Fights have occurred in schools as long as there have been schools, but only in recent years has it been assumed that only law enforcement officers are capable of handling combative students. When you use law enforcement officers to handle routine disciplinary problems, you greatly increase the odds of severe injuries. Officers have certain training and tools and applying them to situations that don't require severe responses puts LEOs in the awkward place of either doing nothing or approaching students as though they were dangerous, hardened criminals.

If this school had no "resource officers," it's nearly guaranteed that this situation would have ended with nothing more than routine disciplinary action, rather than with a 17-year-old in a coma and the filing of a federal lawsuit.

Filed Under: police, schools, security, studnets, taser

Cop Shoots Cuffed Teen In The Face With A Taser, Claims He 'Feared For His Safety' [UPDATED]

from the the-first-rule-of-policing-rears-its-abusive-head dept

[UPDATE: Several commenters have pointed out that the "his" in the quote "feared for his safety" may refer to the safety of the suspect (who may have been running into traffic), rather than the safety of the officer. I will try to find another quote that clarifies this matter and will add it to the top of this post when I do. Tasing someone while they're cuffed seems like a strange way to make someone "safer," but it's a better rationale than arguing a cuffed suspect represents a "threat" to an officer's safety. This incident does seem to have a bit more vagueness than other "feared for his safety" cases. In most others, the suspect has ended up beaten or shot, which pretty much eliminates the suspect's "safety" from the equation.

Why an officer couldn't simply run down a cuffed suspect on foot is beyond me, considering they have to pass certain physical tests before exiting the police academy. But if the physical shape of police officers tracks with the general physical condition of much of the population, it's easy to see why firing a Taser would be preferable (and quicker) than attempting a rundown. (I'm reminded of Christian Slater's character's quote in the seminal 90s comedy "Kuffs," delivered while undergoing physical training at the police academy: "Why are we doing all this running? Aren't we going to be driving around in cars?")

The "pulling his legs out from under him" quote is probably just an example DA Heckler used to illustrate how this teen's face ended up in the condition it did.]

Let's get everything else out of the way. Everything that might indicate this teen/perp got what he "deserved."

1. He was caught shoplifting at a Wal-Mart along with his 19-year-old cousin. He was positively identified by Wal-Mart Asset Protection.
2. He was arrested and cuffed.
3. He ran from the cops before they could place him in the squad car.

This kid isn't exactly a sympathetic character. He was caught red-handed breaking the law. He was on his way to being processed. But then he ran. And for that, he was shot in the face with a Taser.

This isn't according to the kid or his mother. This is according to the County District Attorney himself.

Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler tells NBC10 that police officers yelled warnings at the teen and fearing for his safety, they fired a stun gun to subdue him. The D.A. says the Taser struck the boy in the face and with his hands cuffed, the boy had no way to brace himself against falling face-first.

None of this adds up.

How does a cop "fear for his safety" when a handcuffed suspect is fleeing police custody? It's highly unlikely he was running towards police officers in order to escape them, but the DA himself claims the teen was "struck in the face" by the Taser.

Marissa Sargeant, the teen's mother, claims he was beaten.

“The picture speaks 1,000 words. They brutally beat him,” Sargeant said in her Levittown apartment. “If he did fall on his face, why does he have scrapes and bruises all over his whole face, everywhere. Why is his nose broken? Why is his nostril lifted off his face? Why is both of his eyes black and swollen?”

Maybe the cops just roughed him up a bit and somehow thought the ridiculous Taser story would cover it all up? Even the DA can't seem to get his narrative right.

“You take off running at a full clip and someone pulls your legs out from under you, and you’re cuffed from behind, you’re going to break your fall with your face,” Heckler said last night. “I could well believe that you’d have fairly substantial bruising, cuts and scrapes.”

So, which is it? Was he struck in the face by a Taser or were his "legs pulled out" from under him? Either way, it's conceivable he'd take a faceful of pavement. But neither response sounds appropriate.

It's tough to make a complete assessment about this teen's physical size from a headshot, but to me, he looks pretty slight -- not like some overgrown boy/man who's jumped the development curve on his way to 6'6" by age 16 and who purchased his first razor at age 11. Even if he was running directly at the cop, his hands were cuffed behind his back. Anyone in law enforcement who "fears for their safety" when a cuffed perp starts running either towards or (especially) away from them should probably hand in all assigned weapons, whether lethal or not.

His mother is certainly being overly dramatic when she compares it to the Rodney King beating. This isn't an extreme case of excessive force. Nope, this is just the run-of-the-mill deployment of excessive force to subdue a perp who made the responding cops' job slightly harder. For the DA to not only swallow, but parrot, the "fear for my safety" line is sadly unsurprising as well.

This isn't a poster child for police abuse. This is just another in a long line of incidents showing just how frequently law enforcement members will claim to "fear for their lives" in order to justify handing a perp a little extra "attention"... or a full-on beating... or an instant death sentence.

Filed Under: police, police brutality, taser, violence

Park Ranger Tases Guy Walking Dogs Without A Leash

from the watch-your-back dept

In the latest example of questionable taser use, a man walking his two dogs off-leash at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area was tased in the back by a park ranger, who was apparently trying to make an example of him. The problem was that the guy, Gary Hesterberg, was walking the dogs at Rancho Corral de Tierra, which used to be an off-leash walking area until it was just recently incorporated into the National Park. When the park ranger confronted Hesterberg and asked for his identification, for reasons unknown, Hesterberg gave her a fake name, and then tried repeatedly to leave. Finally, when he started to walk away, the ranger shot him in the back... because she was trying to "educate residents of the rule." Then, he was arrested "on suspicion of failing to obey a lawful order, having dogs off-leash and knowingly providing false information."

It seems that the use of a taser in this situation was excessive and unwarranted. The guy wasn't threatening the ranger in any way, and even if he had lied about his name (not that lying should be a reason to tase someone), the ranger wouldn't have known that at the time, since Hesterberg only gave his real name to the authorities after he got tased. Did the ranger accomplish her goal of "educating" visitors of the park rules? Yes, if educating means "scaring into submission." As Eric Cartman would say, "Respect my authoritah!"

Filed Under: dogs, san francisco, taser

Police Caught Tasing Teen Without Warning

from the is-that-really-the-best-use? dept

quack points us to a story in which police in London Ontario came to break up a fight among some teens. Rather than say anything, asking the participants to stop, or even holding any of the participants, a cameraphone video from someone across the street shows the cop just walk into the area and immediately shoot his taser into one kid's face. A report on the incident has the police saying that the officer acted appropriately. The mother of the kid who was tased argues otherwise. She says her son was the victim, was attacked by two other boys and was trying to defend himself when he got tased. Furthermore, the taser got stuck in his face and had to be removed by medical professionals.

Of course, if the whole thing weren't on videotape, most people would probably have taken the police officers' word on the story. But the video shows that he made no other effort to stop the fight, when it seems clear that he easily could have used less dangerous methods. Hell, by the time he gets to the area and shoots the kid with the taser, the two boys have already separated. He easily could have stopped the fight by stepping into the space between the two of them.

Filed Under: canada, police, taser, warnings

Taser Drops Misguided Lawsuit Against Second Life

from the focus-on-your-first-life,-please dept

Back in April, we had a story about how Taser was suing Second Life's parent company Linden Lab because some users in the game had created fake Taser-like virtual stun guns. Yes, seriously. It was hard to see how Linden Lab would be responsible for the actions of its users, but Taser has a long history of being ridiculously overaggressive in trying to protect its brand. However, perhaps someone explained how unlikely its chances were in court, because the company has dropped the lawsuit. Anyone know if Taser-like devices are still around in Second Life?

Filed Under: second life, taser, trademark
Companies: linden labs, taser

Don't Blame The Taser, Doctor Bro... Or Else We Sue

from the cause-of-death dept

There have been a number of reported deaths of people soon after those individuals were subdued by law enforcement using a Taser stun gun. More and more medical examiners have included the Taser shocks as part of the "cause of death." However, Taser, the company, is not at all pleased. As an anonymous reader sends in, it's even gone so far as to get judges to change the "cause of death," overruling the local medical examiners. It appears that the company has taken the exceptionally aggressive step of suing some of the doctors who list a Taser shock as one of the causes of death. It then uses research and "experts" paid for by Taser to make the claim that a Taser cannot lead to death -- preferring the basically made up diagnosis of "excited delirium." Somehow, it seems that Taser attacks seem to cause a disproportionate amount of "excited delirium." Either way, in suing to have the final diagnosis overturned, the company is clearly intimidating doctors, who may now be afraid that listing a Taser as a cause of death (no matter what the evidence) will lead to a courtroom battle.

Filed Under: autopsy, cause of death, intimidation, taser
Companies: taser