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UN Says Tasers Are a Form of Torture
The use of Tasers "causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture," the UN's Committee Against Torture said. "In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events." Three men — all in their early 20s — died from after tasering in the United States this week, days after a Polish man died at Vancouver airport after being tasered by Canadian police. There have been 17 deaths in Canada following the use of Tasers since they were approved for use, and 275 deaths in the US. "According to Amnesty International, coroners have listed the Taser jolt as a contributing factor in more than 30 of those deaths."
Wtf is Excited Delirium? The Taser company and police department seem to be always quick to blame any deaths associated with tasers on this supposed condition, while APA nor any other medical body recognizes this as any type of medical condition.
Weapon involved? Tasers are good in this case. Unfortunately, tasers are not used in that manner exclusively. They are also used to "calm people down", saving the cop from having to communicate with the individual. This is unacceptable. Pulling your arm away from a cop who is trying to grab you is not immediate justification to tase (see "don't tase me, bro!") since it might very well be considered a natural reaction. And "don't let a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch" has been considered. When 80 year old, wheelchair-bound schizophrenic women are being tased (and subsequently, end up dead) because the cops are too scared to handle the situation as they were trained, then tasers are obviously too much responsibility for them to handle.
>There is some truth to this sentiment, which is why police officers in most districts are required to be both
>tasered and pepper-sprayed during training - so that they realise just how effective a tool they are.
The trouble is - the officer gets a single jolt from the taser. When they actually *use* the damn thing the administer continuous or repeated shocks. I've been watching this situation develop for quite some time and wondered when it was going to come to a head. Maybe the time is now.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
Yes but a person who is tasered is often a lot more likely to come to harm than a person who would never have been shot. The cops who tasered Mr. Gaubert while he was incapacitated by a diabetic coma, would be in jail if they had just shot him. Ditto for the officer who tasered the 87 year old woman in a wheelchair who yelled at her.
Abuse would likely also happen if officers just had firearms as well. I don't personally think that that would be a better situation. At least with tazers, mace and pepper spray the likelihood of having somebody to apologize to is far higher than with a firearm.Sometimes that is true and sometimes it isn't. You assume the alternative to tasering someone is to pull a gun on them. In truth, the alternative is often just to stand back and talk to them, or simply walk away from them.
It is quite another to actually have to deal with both sides of the story and try to reconcile them in a way that suits the public interest rather than inflaming tensions between different groups of people.I know quite a few cops. My brother used to be one and a friend of mine sells tasers as part of his law enforcement equipment business. I have heard the stories of punishing some "punk kid" or "nigger" or "hippy" and shutting their smart mouth up with a taser. Those same cops would never have fired their weapon in the same situation because they'd be held accountable, probably for murder.
I'm not arguing tasers don't have their uses and should not be used, but hopefully this classification by the UN will get police departments to look seriously at their rules for using them and start to help curb their overuse and use in inappropriate situations, as well as provide support for private lawsuits that will help do the same thing.
To clarify: the glass wall that did not directly separate him from his mother at any time, and which, at the time of his frustrated outburst, did not separate him from her at all, since she had gone home several hours earlier after being told repeatedly by airport staff that her son was not in the airport.
Also, the man had already passed through customs; in fact, he was waiting on the far side of the door between the arrival area (where his mother had told him to wait) and the main part of the airport (where his mother waited for him).
I'm not trying to say that his tasering was a good (or even reasonable) course of action, but people seem to be screaming bloody murder because the police just waltzed on into the airport, looked for the first foreigner they could find, and tased him at the first excuse; in reality, he had been waiting there for eight hours because his mother told him to wait in the wrong place and airport staff were too lazy/incompetent to find him. By the time the police arrived and enacted their screwup, everyone else had done theirs already; if they hadn't, he'd still be alive.
You're overstating the "benefits" of being native, being a Status Indian myself, I should know.
Natives certainly do pay taxes. You can avoid paying income tax provided your job is on a reserve. Unfortunately, most reserves have been placed in far-flung areas where the land had low productivity, any windfalls were mere oversight. On my own reservation, there's two gas stations and the Band Office for work, almost all the people work in the nearest town and pay taxes just like everyone else.
I hear about us not paying taxes all too often, so it's not common knowledge, but should be. I'd probably deal with a little less racism if it were so.
To offer another, similar example: police in England tasered a man in a diabetic coma because they thought he was a security threat and he wasn't responding to them. They shocked him because he wasn't responding - he was unconscious - how could that possibly be use of the taser in order protect the officers?