Roid Rage
by digby
Here’s a great post on Daily Kos by Steven D about the increased use of tasers in Chicago. Within the article however, is a report which I’ve not seen before about the use of steroids among police officers, which has been tied in some cases to excessive taser use(Roid Rage being the ostensible cause.)
Apparently, this has been known for a long time:
A segment of the CBS-TV program “60 Minutes” had already made that point on November 5, 1989. “Beefing Up the Force” presented interviews with three officers whose use of steroids had apparently caused the hyper-aggressiveness that had gotten them into serious trouble. The worst case involved what one psychiatrist called “a real Jekyll and Hyde change” in the personality of a prison security guard in Oregon who had kidnapped and shot a woman who made a casual remark he didn’t like. He got 20 years in prison, and she was paralyzed for life. The personality he presented during his prison interview made it seem utterly improbable that he would have been capable of such an act. But his testosterone level when he committed the crime was 50 times the normal level. This broadcast conveyed the message that steroid problems were lurking in many police departments across the country, and that police officials were turning a blind eye to a significant threat to public safety.
It was no accident that the “60 Minutes” segment paid special attention to a “hard core group” of steroid users on the Miami police force. Two years earlier the Miami Herald had run a long article on steroid-using police officers. The seven notorious Miami “River Cops”, who in 1987 were on trial for alleged crimes including cocaine trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder, included Armando “Scarface” Garcia, a weightlifter who had publicly admitted to taking steroids. “There’s a great potential for an officer abusing steroids to physically mistreat people,” said the police chief of nearby Hollywood, Florida, who had told his investigators to be on the lookout for officers who looked like “small mountains.” (3) The Miami Herald article may have been the first of the tiny number of analytical treatments of this subject that have appeared in American newspapers since the 1980s.
Here’s another report from 2007:
I have often lamented the loss of common sense among some officers in the use of tasers.The documented abuses seem so irrational and so disproportionate that I’ve wondered what’s going on in the minds of these guys. Maybe this explains some of those cases.
I can’t think of a worse drug for police officers to use than steroids. I know they need to be physically strong, but the side effects of these particular drugs are the worst of all possible worlds. They create paranoia, anxiety, aggression and violence which are the last characteristics you want in police officers. If this is a wide spread phenomenon then it explains a lot about why tasers are used so injudiciously and often with such inappropriate emotion.
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