To protect and to serve: tasered while hogtied
by digby
This is among the worst taser incidents I’ve ever chronicled:
They keep saying this woman is “mentally disturbed” but she sounds perfectly sane to me, both in the video of the incident and this interview. Obviously, I don’t have a full picture of her mental status, but from what I saw the diagnosis seems to be based upon the idea that she kept replying to the police tasering her and demanding that she “stop”, by screaming “you stop” and then accusing them of meting out punishment and enjoying hurting women. Under the circumstances, that hardly seems delusional.
But then police states often develop this definition of mental illness, don’t they? Anyone who questions the authorities is automatically suspect and must be insane. After all, in America, anyone who doesn’t automatically accede to a policeman’s orders or questions the officer’s right to do anything he chooses immediately subjects themselves to electro shock and possible electrocution. What sane person would assert their rights under those circumstances? Unfortunately many Americans don’t understand this because they’ve been taught all that silly stuff about freedom and the constitution in school.
Unsurprisingly, the officer who held her down by putting his hand over her face as she was on her back hogtied in the back of a squad car while they tasered her turned out to be a violent wife abuser. Two weeks later the police were called to his residence, but they didn’t taser him or even arrest him for some reason. I guess he was polite about it.
The Supreme Court turned down the police officer’s appeal in the 9th circuit decision, which makes me feel a tiny bit more confident that the Court will end up either banning or severely proscribing the use of tasers at some point. It’s hard for me to imagine any American constitutional scholar of any school ruling that it’s ok for police to repeatedly electro-shock people who are in restraints. But I’ve been wrong before.
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