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We’ve already seen what police do with these “electronic control devices” (right). It’s only a matter of time before we have a boatload of fatalities and lawsuits after the school guards cut loose with Tasers.
While heightened security might be a necessity in an age where kids smuggle deadly weapons to school, this fact alone should give parents and school officials pause. Even as school administrators and local law enforcement accept and incorporate Tasers as disciplinary measures, deploying them on school grounds is putting students at risk.Last September, police officers in Hawthorne, Calif., tased an autistic 12-year-old boy at his middle school after he became "violent," launching a misconduct investigation by the police department.
In June, at Penn Hills High School in Pennsylvania, a student was tased in the hallway after ignoring a police officer’s orders to put away his cell phone. ("The kid refused to listen," Penn Hills Police Chief Howard Burton explained, saying the student then "pushed the officer.")
In 2006, an 11th-grader named Angel Debnam was tased at her high school in Bunn, N.C., just outside Raleigh. “Something sticks in you, and it’s like a wire,” Debnam described to local ABC affiliate WTVD. “When I was on the ground crying and shaking, he asked me, ‘Was that enough? Are you calmed down now?’ and he did it again.”
In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that “the number of law enforcement agencies that have given Tasers to officers who work on school campuses has grown to well over 4,000,” according to Steve Tuttle, vice president of communications at Taser International. That’s up from 1,700 in 2005.
This is a lengthy article with many more incidents of childrent being brought into submission by a 50,000-volt shock. Are these truly situations where a gun was necessary (the designed purpose for the substitution with a Taser)? In case you were wondering, the state with the most recorded Taser deaths was California, with 55. Florida ranked second, with 52.
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Tasers for TotsHelp a child in need. Drop off your new, unwrapped Taser at any public school….
(Insert puking smiley here)
Combine with this news, and I can’t help but weep for the state of public education today.
they’re there to break up fights and stop school shootingsDear Lord, guys. This is not the same as putting hardened criminals in the school. This is not a case of wolves among sheep. These people are here to protect your children against school violence. In two of the three incidents reported, the kid started something and the guard retaliated. Whether he used too much force is debatable, but he was completely in the right for using force at all.
Some of my friends went to a high school with armed guards, and just watching how people moved around the guards, it was pretty clear, YOU DO NOT FUCK WITH THE GUARDS. Only people with something to prove or people too stupid to know otherwise do that. They have near-absolute right to protect their own physical security, which, yes, gets abused sometimes, but mostly means you have to treat them with respect. It’s not unreasonable, and on their part, they are generally aware that they’re on a very short leash while they’re in a school because everything they do has dozens of witnesses with powerful parents.
MisinformationTasers are NOT designed to be substitutes for guns. That’s just pure misinformation. They are designed to be substitutes for batons and chemical sprays, and sometimes punching or wrestling.
I 100% agree that people have been hit with Tasers when they should not have been. They aren’t toys, and they aren’t harmless. Tasers are dangerous but they do have a useful purpose, and some of the stuff here is very misleading. For example, the 12-year-old autistic boy in California WAS violent, not “violent.” Here is what he did (from the linked LA Times article):
So, even with the benefit of unlimited time and a safe, comfortable environment in which to contemplate — not to mention that you would be able to consider things while not suffering the pain of a kick to the groin — could you devise a safer and more effective tactic to immediately stop the violence and protect the counselor, the security guard and the 200 other students?
I don’t know if Officer Arias had called for back-up, but regardless none had arrived. Realistically, what were his choices? Spray a burning compound into the kid’s face (that could get all over both the fighting kid and the guard he was attacking and often does not work)? Hit the kid with a night stick (that is much more likely to cause injury than a Taser)? Tackling the kid onto the floor (also more likely to cause injury)? Talking did not work. Response = groin kick.
The police department is “launching a misconduct investigation” because the boy’s parents complained. Every complaint has to be investigated, and the fact that there is an investigation does not necessarily mean there was misconduct. If the police officer had let the violent kid keep running toward the other students, and the kid had attacked one of the other children, then the parents of those children would be the ones filing complaints.
The fact is that the boy was controlled and taken into custody without being injured in any way.
Publicizing the misuse of Tasers is a good thing; it encourages better training and better policies and maybe even better design of Tasers. Yet, it’s just not true that every use is a misuse.
We regularly see where people with Tasers use them sadisticallyWhich, all too often, results in death.
Will you be so sanguine when a kid who refuses to put away his cell phone is murdered by a “security” guard who gets off on shooting children and watching them writhe in pain?
Why not just take the kids down to the basement and attach them to a waterboard?
So the justification moves.When electroshock weapons were being put into use by police, we were assured that they were a substitute only for deadly force — so while there might be an occasional unexpected death, it would only be in a case where the alternative would have been a more likely death by gunshot.
Of course, even when officially electroshock weapons were to be used only in cases warranting deadly force, they were being regularly used in place of verbal confrontation. If we’re lowering the official bar that much (electrotorture as a substitute for restraining someone?), where will the de facto use end up? As a substitute for officer boredom?
Are you seriously trying to convince usthat a school shooter could be stopped by a rent-a-cop with a taser? Thanks for the laugh.
Do not criminalize schoolsI can’t believe there are people on PHB defending the use of potentially deadly force against children.
By criminalizing the school environment, we criminalize our students. They are no longer students, but potential criminals to be pre-emptorily guarded “for their own safety” just like prisoners in prison. As they wrack up “interactions” with law enforcement without even leaving the school grounds, they are being prepared for adult life complete with a pre-packaged criminal record.
If you ask students what they are more afraid of: violence from fellow students or violence from these security officers, maybe you would learn something.
There’s a reason we have the term “School to prison pipeline.”
Learn more about why law enforcement in schools is a bad idea.
who is “we” and who is “they”?Who assured you that Tasers were only a substitute for deadly force? I have never read that from any law enforcement source.
Many in law enforcement believe that Tasers reduce injuries to the public and to people in law enforcement, not because they are substitutes for firearms but because they are substitutes for billy clubs (batons) and chemical sprays and that sort of thing. I’m sure there are times when a Taser has been used in place of deadly force, but that was never the stated purpose.
To break up fights?Why don’t we just let kids slug it out and be done? When I was in school (graduated in 2000), if you were pissed at someone, you threw down in the hallway or outside after school. One of you went home with a bloody nose and that was it. The teachers intervened if it was necessary (as in cases of bullying as opposed to cases of consentual fighting). We didn’t need to bring guns to school because we had healthier outlets for our emotions.
And yes, I firmly believe that an after-school fist-fight is a healthier option to the alternative, which is coddling kids and having them bottle everything up until they snap and bring a gun and shoot up the place. Having seen both pre-Columbine school and post-Columbine school, I can honestly say things got a lot worse once they brought the cop into my school and started treating us like prisoners.
I haveWith respect to law enforcement…
See Phoenix:
http://phoenix.bizjournals.com…
or Chicago:
http://nateo.blogspot.com/2008…
the Tricities:
http://nateo.blogspot.com/2009…
This one’s right from the horse’s mouth:
http://www.cachevalleydaily.co…
and another from VT:
http://www.wcax.com/Global/sto…
PDs make that argument all the time…
And to think, I was scared of ping pong paddles!Yes, some kids are a bit big for thier britches. Security personnel should be trained to restrain someone with minimal truama to the individual.
Yes, physically restraining someone can lead to injury and even death. But how often does that happen vs someone being tasered?
Everyplace you look, there is evidence piling up that its being abused. That officers go for it first, some times not even saying anything to the victim.
The use of tasers should be out-lawed an an instrument of torture.
I looked at your linksThe Phoenix link doesn’t indicate any law enforcement source said Tasers were to be used only as substitutes for deadly force. The source says that police shootings had declined since Tasers were issued to police, but that’s not the same thing at all.
The Chicago link goes to your own anti-Taser blog and contains a quote with no attribution. Did the police “spokeswoman” say this directly to you?
“Less-than-lethal” not only does not mean that a weapon is to be used as an equivalent or substitute for deadly force, it means exactly the opposite. Lethal (deadly) force is likely to cause death or serious injury. A Taser is not lethal force. A firearm is. No matter how much you do not like them, Tasers are not likely to cause death.
The Tri-Cities link does indeed quote a law enforcement source talking about using a Taser in place of deadly force in one particular situation. That still does not mean that Tasers were ever intended to be substitutes for guns (deadly force), only that in that particular sheriff’s opinion, a Taser was used when the deputy was justified in using deadly force.
The “horse’s mouth” link also quotes a law enforcement source talking about a specific incident where he says police could have used deadly force and used a Taser instead (that time using only the effect of the red laser-sight dot on the offender’s chest), avoiding injury to all parties involved. Again, nowhere does a law enforcement source state that Tasers are intended to replace the use of deadly force.
The Vermont link does not at all indicate that Tasers are intended to be substitutes for deadly force. Again, they are described as “less deadly” and that description is provided not by a law enforcement source but rather by the reporter writing the news item.
I do see what you mean in that it takes very careful reading to discern that the sources aren’t actually saying Tasers are meant to be substitutes for deadly force. If you want to know how law enforcement officers actually are trained to use Tasers, then you should request a copy of the applicable department regulations and/or training guidelines. I am confident in saying that I do not believe you would ever find one wherein Tasers are defined as deadly force. Ever.
Most police departments require that the people who carry Tasers learn first-hand what it’s like to be hit with one. Would they really do that if they believed Tasers were deadly force?
Tasers, like pitbulls, aren’t inherently bad. It all depends on the handlers.
What. Utter. Crap.There are a great many creative solutions between your black & white scenarios of “healthy after-school fist fights” and “coddling.”
Battery is battery, regardless of the age of the “willing” participants. Allowing violence perpetuates a culture of violence and fear. It becomes a norm. Permitting fighting tells kids that they have the sophistication and life experience and judgment to determine when words should come to blows. And it tells them that whoever wins the fight was right. And that when they “grow up,” this is acceptable behavior as well.
There is no way to monitor who is a consenting participant and who is not, since fights happen so spontaneously. And usually one person’s size and/or skill makes a “match” absolutely unfair. The culture evolves to a point where those who refuse challenges to fight get the crap beat out of them when no one is there to protect them. To kids who are abused at home, school is the one area where there is an opportunity to experience a somewhat sane world, where reasonable people abide by rules of conduct and there are consequences when those rules are broken.
Developmentally, youths’ moral sensibilities don’t solidify until late teens/ early twenties. It is the job of adults to set standards and teach the wild and self-centered young how to be civilized adults. Strong conflict management programs have taught kids critical adult lessons and reduced violence in many, many school districts. Where violence reaches a certain threshold, police and other monitors may be necessary. Tasers, of course, are beyond the pale.
The kid is 5 foot 7. 130 to 150 poundsIf you cannot subdue him without resorting to tasering him, or injuring him fairly seriously, then you need to find a new line of work.
This isn’t a muscular 6 foot 5 250 pounder.
Let me guess, you are going to claim that tasering does not cause injury.
Yes, it isn’t a case of putting hardened criminals in schoolSo tell me, why is it necessary that there be guards whereby
If you need guards such as this, it sounds very much to me as if you are behaving as if the people at school ARE hardened criminals.
It is unreasonable. Completely utterly unreasonable. No one has a right to be treated with respect. More importantly, no one has a right to resort to physical violence, just because someone else does not treat them with respect.
And when doPDs ever pin themselves down with a policy on a potentially lethal force that would limit their options. You’re very much trying to paint a fine line where one does not exist. Law enforcement does indeed try to get tasers into their hands by implying that they’ll keep departments from shooting people. Why would “less-than-lethal” ever have been coined in the first place?
(and yes, the Chicago link is dead sadly, doesn’t mean is wasn’t said.)
When law enforcement talks about using something in place of deadly force, or a less-than-lethal option, what do you think they’re selling? I’m not buying your argument/gymnastics. Of course they are talking about gun alternatives. Who said anything about PDs claiming exclusive gun replacement? Not me, but PDs make the tasers-gun replacement all the time, as those links show via quotes (whether it’s in post shooting statements or selling the tasers at town hall meetings).
Also, you might want to consult the Braidwood findings from Canada as well, the US’s own interim report on conducted energy weapons from our National Institutes of Justice regarding multiple tasings, or now multiple findings from coroners. If tasers kill someone, anyone, they can’t be called “less-than-lethal”. That would make them “less-than-or-equal-to-lethal.”
And I would LOVE to get my hands on taser training materials and regulations from PDs, as well as usage statistics. Good luck getting that information. Many PDs have been holding use policies very close to the chest.
Good luck defending a device, sold as less than lethal, that randomly kills.