The above film is from an unrelated police shocking incident
in Orange County, CA.
I live in Brazil and I just saw a scene on the nightly news here, from the US state of Texas (click here for video), that disgusted me, and will shock and astound Brazilians nationwide. A Texas police officer was arguing with a elderly white woman during a highway traffic stop, stemming from a speeding ticket. The police officer is easily a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than this slightly built white woman, and yet he ultimately fires an electrocution device at her and she can be seen falling to the ground. She is a wrinkle-faced white woman who is seventy-two years old.
Would the police officer have shot this woman with a handgun had he not had an electrocution device available? Of course not! Police officers don't shoot elderly white women at traffic stops. So, the electrocution device served as a new tool of curbside behavior management and pre-trial punishment that, unfortunately, often results in death or serious injury.
Should you really risk killing an elderly woman as part of issuing a traffic ticket?
There is no good reason for "Tasers" to exist in the USA today, any more than there was "an appropriate law enforcement role" for gas chambers in Auswhich, Germany. While it's true that people who died in the gas chambers escaped being burned at the stake, that is not a sufficient rationale for the existence of gas chambers. And the threat of being shot to death is not a sufficient rationale for being electrocuted instead.
Even as President Obama attempts to change the world's impressions about America's ruthlesseness and violence, local police officers are making television news around the world, electrically shocking little old white ladies into submission.
3 comments:
To an untrained civilian, I can see how this might seem outrageous to you. However, the woman's tasering is perfectly appropriate and justified police procedure, however. She was escalating the situation out of control and repeatedly failed to obey the officer's lawful orders.
Had she not been tasered, she likely could have tried to scuffle with the officer beside the dangerous interstate and tumbled into traffic. A police officer must make split second decisions how to both subdue an unruly suspect without harming the suspect, and that's exactly what he did here. The officer must decide what allowed method he feels would be best to effect the arrest, again exactly what he did. He did not have the luxury to review this tape slowly with "freeze frame" on a YouTube video.
The courtroom is the correct place to resolve matters like this. The woman should have accepted the citation then appeared to challenge it in traffic court with the appropriate evidence. Arguing with an officer after the citation has been issued was pointless. Once a citation is issued, it can only be resolved in court. She added insult to injury by violating the law again (as she did by refusing to sign the citation, as is required by Texas law) and further unnecessarily escalated this matter with her out-of-control tirade.
She is entirely at fault here, not the officer. He did his job right and well. There is no brutality here.
Jaguar, you're an ass. Tasering a 72 year old woman is "perfectly appropriate and justified"? You'd sing a different tune were she your grandmother or family friend.
The Gestapo cop escalated the situation well beyond where it needed to be.
If he seriously felt his life was threatened by a 72 year old woman, he needs turn in his badge and gun.
Just another cop on a power trip.
The police officer should have thrown a speeding ticket in the window of the woman's car and driven away, perhaps with a requirement that she appear in court.
Had she failed to appear of pay the ticket, THEN a judge could find her in contempt of court, limit her driving privileges, etc.
The insistence that a person who has committed a minor infraction must demonstrate polite submission to police officers, regardless of what officers say or do, is what often leads to situations escalating.
If police officers understood that they were not high priests of law enforcement, but mere ushers, then there would be far fewer confrontations between police and members of the public.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that this police behavior would NEVER, EVER be tolerated or perceived as necessary in Brazil, France, Italy or other countries where I have lived or visited.
Frail. unarmed, seventy-two year old women who weigh 90 pounds do not constitute a danger to any police officer. The officer should have respected his elders, issued a ticket, even if he dropped it in the window of the woman's car, and driven away.
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