Police Taser blind man mistaking his white stick for a samurai sword
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If you are blind it may be difficult to distinguish between a sword and a stick.
A foil maybe, but a samurai sword.
The blind shooting the blind. Or more accurately, someone who refuses to see shooting someone who cannot see.
Even if he had been carrying a katana, what does it say about our modern police that their first reaction is to taser him? Are 60 year olds that much of a threat to modern rozzers?
“He said that he initially thought he was being attacked by hooligans”. Initially?
“We’ll let you off lightly this time, but don’t do it again.”
Well at least the police did not kill him, unlike the poor Pole, two years ago, who died at Vancouver Airport after being tazered several times by the RCMP.
“He said he initially thought he was being attacked by hooligans when he was struck by the Taser.” He was right. Shot in the back? Yes, the blind old man certainly presented a clear and present danger to those brave policemen.
Tasers are a serious menace in the hands of police. They should not be permitted to carry them. They seem to think that because tasers are “non-lethal” that gives them license to use them indiscriminately. We see far too much of that in the US.
Who hung the monkey.
Police should have no more weapons than are available to law-abiding citizens to choose from.
It should be within the law for me to carry: taser, pepper spray, firearms if I want to.
All concealed so that nobody knows what or when I am carrying.
There would be a reduction in death toll of innocent civilains in mass shootings because a law-abiding citizen would be able to shoot the aggressor.
Police would be kept more honest if they thought that, while tasering a blind man, their violence could be stopped by a law-abiding citizen tasering them at the time.
The police in this case should be prosecuted.
My solution is simple. Any policeman found to have incorrectly tasered a member of the public gets to be tasered him(or her)self.
I think you might find that a lot of the police refuse to carry them, and those that did would be considerably more careful in when the used them.
Rob: the man is blind, mind you:-)
Police should have no more weapons than are available to law-abiding citizens to choose from.
And, more generally, police should have to obey the same laws that everyone else does.
This is what happens when you arm the police and I thought our police were not supposed to be routinely armed in this country? Taser = hand gun as far as I am concerned (and also under the Firearms Act for that matter).
I saw a documentary on police training somewhere in the American south that required police to be tasered before they were allowed to use them. The rationale was that if the police knew what a taser felt like, they’d take more care to use it appropriately.
Not sure if that’s general practice in the US or elsewhere.
Absolutely, this is general practice. When I took Taser training as a copper in a large metropolitan department in Michigan, umpety-hoop years ago, the curriculum required each student to be Tasered twice, and several participants ‘volunteered’ for more hits than the course called for.
It’s quite nasty while it’s happening, but the effects are gone in minutes or less. I’ve had dental work that was more unpleasant. Mind you, this was in a gym setting, with padded floor mats and spotters standing by to catch you if you fell.
Sunfish, how many times did they make you ride the lightning?
llater,
llamas
So did the police bother to get a description of this sword-carrying mystery man? And did they pass this description along to Barney Fife? The guy’s 61 years old, twice the age of the actual Ginsu Guy, and blind, so how exactly do you mistake the one for the other if you’re acting on a description? Police radio calls are recorded, yes? Let’s have the tape, I want to hear the part where the dispatcher asks for and passes along a description, and the officer acknowledges receipt of this information.
Maybe they thought the criminal was also a master of disguise?
when taser first came out, I thought that they were a good idea, but a recent case here in Australia has me convinced they’re bad.
As far as I can recall there has not been an incident in Britain of armed police saving anyone’s life. The armed response units go around posing as if they are in a LAPD SWAT training film. I would disband all armed police, and go back to the situation where police were only issued with firearms in exceptional circumstances.
The problem is not with Taser per se – in fact, the provblem may well be that the Taser is too good, for its own good.
Back in the day, old wise coppers carried a ‘sap’ – a flat, leather-covered device containing either lead shot or lead discs. A blow from such a device, properly placed, could knock a man silly, but would not permanently hurt him. Oftentimes, it wouldn’t even leave a bruise. It was the perfect device for subduing the unruly, but of course, it also became the perfect device for the administering of some extra-legal justice, or just plain old revenge.
The Taser has become the sap of our generation. Because it hurts like hell but usually does no permanent damage, it is being deployed far too often, not as a means to subdue a violent suspect, but as a means of punishment or revenge, according to the lights of the officer deploying it. It is the perfect tool for the bully or the sadist.
As a means of enforcing compliance, it works stunningly well when deployed as intended. The problem is, at also works far too well for purposes for which it was not intended or issued.
Civilian Tasers include an evidence-distributing system, that ejects tags carrying the serial number of the device along with the probe package. I don’t think that it would be too much to ask that police-issue Tasers include an evidence-gathering system, that records their use.
llater,
llamas