Taserrific Friday
by digby
This was sent in by several people. It seems to have really hit a nerve:
A 30-year-old pregnant Chicago woman is claiming she was tased Tuesday night by police in a south side parking lot.
She says she pulled over in a handicap spot to let her husband out of the car. When police tried to give her a ticket, she says she got out of her car to approach them then she ripped it up. Police reports indicate she swore repeatedly at one white and one black officer then then threw the ripped up ticket in one of the officers’ faces and tried to take off in her SUV.
Her fiancé came running out and then he, too, found himself handcuffed.
Rent, who is 8-months-pregnant, said if things weren’t bad enough, officers surrounded her while she was on the ground and joked and made fun of her after she had been tasered.
Well, she should consider herself lucky. According to police authorities and taser international, tasering is all about saving lives. If they didn’t have their tasers they would have had to shoot a fetus and nobody wants that.
I understand that the women behaved disrespectfully toward the police. But this was a parking ticket we’re talking about. I find it very hard to believe that this was the only way to deal with the problem. Is it not possible for the cops to simply issue another ticket and let the legal system deal with it after the fact. Is it really necessary to get full compliance on the spot?
The ironic thing is that this seems to be a replay of the case the Supreme Court declined to hear last week in which the 9th circuit held that officers who tasered a pregnant woman for refusing to sign a traffic ticket used excessive force. Unfortunately, this woman is not in that district and so that ruling won’t apply to her.
Personally, I think the use of “pain compliance” for traffic violations on anyone is barbaric and disgusting. Unless the person is a danger to others, there is no reason not to treat this as a bureaucratic matter for the person to deal with in front of a judge or pay a fine. Escalating it into violence and feeling the need to electro-shock a citizen for parking in a handicapped zone and then acting like a drama queen when she gets ticketed defies common sense. The woman wasn’t a criminal, she was an overwrought citizen. Cops used to know the difference.
(If I were her attorney, I’d file suit for assaulting a fetus. That’s far more likely in this day and age to get a sympathetic reaction. A pregnant woman just doesn’t have much standing in our legal system.)
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