Corby Wrote:Not to be off-topic but another recent headline made me do a double take:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060420/od_nm/breasts_dc">http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060420/od_nm/breasts_dc</a><!-- m -->
To me, it just seems that those girls are just plain stupid.
im betting the family's gonna sue....i think i would....
I don't know what really went down and what was neccessary because I wasn't there but why was the old woman swinging knives and a hammer? I think, in general, there's too much sympathy for criminals. Not saying she deserved to die but she wasn't acting peacefully and I'm sure the cops didn't mean to kill her.
brown_eyed_girl Wrote:im betting the family's gonna sue....i think i would....
Of course they're going to sue. They would probably sue if the woman got only a scratch on her.
brown_eyed_girl Wrote:im betting the family's gonna sue....i think i would....
I would too....such a senseless loss
tigerthelion Wrote:brown_eyed_girl Wrote:im betting the family's gonna sue....i think i would....
Of course they're going to sue. They would probably sue if the woman got only a scratch on her.
That seems a little gratuitous...
if she(was) 56 and in a wheel chair, just let her keep swinging the knives until she gets tired...........then taser her :twisted:
couldn't they have just used tear gas? or shot the weapons out of her hands with rubber bullets?
My take on this is always the same, regardless of the circumstances:
If you physically threaten a police officer with a lethal weapon, you bring every conceivable consequence on yourself, up to and including death.
Cops have the risky (and often underpaid) job of rolling up their sleeves and doing societal dirty-work, and the day an officer neglects to protect him or herself could be the day he or she winds up dead.
I don't care if the subject is demented, crazy, or just plain dumb; threatening a police officer is unacceptable no matter where you live in this country, and doing so makes you a threat to society at-large. To go a step further and disregard warnings and commands leaves police with no other choice. Officers can't hold different standards for dealing with different types of volatile citizens when public (and his/her own) safety is at stake; that leads to complicated procedural policy, which is courting disaster...because you just never know.
Okay, Esthete, so now that we've established that threatening a cop is an offence, we're faced with the practical problem of actually making the arrest. And how we do that depends on the situation.
Clearly, a person in a wheelchair waving a knife poses a different threat than does an able-bodied person waving a knife.
Tasers represent a special problem, because they are "non-lethal," but can kill people. There is a lengthening list of people who have been killed by Tasers, and in most cases they were resisting arrest or otherwise bringing trouble on themselves.
The problem is not whether the police are justified in using force, but whether the level of force is appropriate. The question is whether the level of risk involved in Tasering someone is well understood by all police departments. There is plenty of cause to believe that it isn't.
There have been numerous examples of police using Tasers on people who were passively resisting arrest, where it is not justifiable -- i.e. a protester goes limp to force police to carry him into the paddywagon, so the cops Taser him until he starts walking under his own steam. That's no different from beating someone with a baton to make him walk -- in fact, it's worse, as the risk of death is higher.
Worse still, there have been numerous incidents of excessive use of Tasers, where the cops administer additional shocks as a way of taking out their frustrations. In some cases, cops have Tasered non-resisting suspects who were already handcuffed and in a cruiser. It's a way of administering a beating that, unlike beating with a baton, leaves no marks. In these cases, the Taser has acted to enable police brutality by providing a means of inflicting pain without leaving evidence.
This clearly suggests that lots of cops are not aware that Tasers can kill.
That brings us back to this incident. What exactly happened? We don't know, so we can't reach any conclusion. Should we be concerned? I'd say yes.
I hear you, Skippy. I guess my issue is that I always tend to give the police the benefit of the doubt (maybe I shouldn't, I don't know). It seems that in situations like this, the police really have to choose between two bad options. Using less force could increase the chance of an officer being injured or killed. Using the force they did could result in the injury or death of the perpetrator. Both options are not good ones. It seems whatever the police do, people will second-guess them.
I seem to work with the police on a daily basis...and id never second guess them, and im not saying there are no crooked cops, but still.. i have a beef with one cop..who just happens to have braces and is short so he has the big man syndrom...
i tink the bottom line is we cant say what is right or wrong because we werent there....
skippy the wonder dog Wrote:The problem is not whether the police are justified in using force, but whether the level of force is appropriate. The question is whether the level of risk involved in Tasering someone is well understood by all police departments. There is plenty of cause to believe that it isn't.
Of course the specific circumstances are key in justifying the use of this level of force. And you can't always trust media reports, I realize. That said, assuming that the woman in a wheelchair "swung knives and a hammer at relatives and police", and that she wouldn't follow the commands given to her by the authorities, then what
is the alternative? Swinging a knife at someone is felonius assult, whether you are standing, sitting, haging upside down or playing tiddlywinks.
According to the report, both police AND ordinary citizens being threatened here. You know damn well if authorities are on-scene and a civvy gets a femoral artery nicked by that knife because law enforcement didn't succeed in subduing the offender, there's gonna be hell to pay.
So its the lesser of two evils: either it's the inncocent civilians that authorities pledge to "serve and protect" who could potentially be victimized, or the offender herself.
Given that reality, what IS the appropriate level of force? If the offense is felonious assault, the taser is justified. End of story.
Kindly advise me as to how someone is going to get their femoral artery nicked by a person in a wheelchair. If the police are on the scene and bystanders are standing right beside the offender, are the police doing their job properly? Is this wheelchair powered by a Ford Cosworth engine off an old Williams F1 car? I fail to see how you jump to the conclusion that there was an immediate threat to life here.