Tasing ‘O the Day

by digby

If you watch this you will note that he officers didn’t even give this fellow 10 seconds to comply with their orders. When he falls out of the car (in which his wife and three year old child were also sitting) and runs, screaming in pain as any human would instinctively do, they arrested him for resisting arrest. The charges were dropped but the officers were also exonerated by the police department. Their behavior is considered perfectly ok.

Unfortunately for the citizens, aside from being subject to similar violence, the city ended up having to pay tax dollars to the victim in this case:

A 24-year-old Columbia man has received $50,000 to settle a lawsuit against the city police department and two officers over their stun gun use.
The Columbia Daily Tribune reported that Cadilac Derrick settled his federal civil suit earlier this month. The case was then dismissed from Missouri’s Western District U.S. Court after it went to mediation.

Maybe if a few more towns and cities had to pay out money for this authoritarian brutality, police departments might find it in their best interest to curb this behavior. There’s no excuse for it, but until someone, somewhere, is held responsible any one of us could be electrocuted in the front seat of our car for failing to properly respond to a police officer in less than half a minute.

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