There was a time when I would have been all over this story when it happened because I was documenting taser use around the country and the world. To me this use of electro-shock to put people into compliance is nothing short of torture and sometimes, summary execution. But I was told by some experts, and criticized by activists, who said that while the dangers of tasers are horrific they are nothing when compared to the horror of police shootings so I backed off my little crusade after the Michael Brown shooting.
But it’s still happening, particularly to people with mental health issues which is just heartbreaking. And there are times, like this, when it is deadly force:
Videos released this week of a teacher who died after Los Angeles police discharged a Taser on him at least six times on a Venice street raise serious concerns about the officers’ tactics, law enforcement experts who reviewed the tapes said.
The LAPD’s actions have sparked alarms from community activists as well as Mayor Karen Bass and are now the subject of an internal investigation.
Several policing experts who reviewed the videos for The Times said that the amount of force used by the officers seemed excessive given the man’s actions and that some of the tactics seemed haphazard.
“It is going to be hard to convince any judge that these officers were using reasonable force,” said Ed Obayashi, a Northern California deputy and a top state advisor on police tactics. “From the visual aspect, it looks like he is not fighting back; he is not threatening the officers. He is saying I am not resisting … and what could be considered resisting is an automatic reflex of the body to the pain application from the Taser.”
In the videos, Keenan Anderson, 31, becomes distraught and cries out for help as multiple officers hold him down.
“They’re trying to George Floyd me,” he screams, referencing the Minneapolis man killed by police as one officer briefly has his elbow on or around Anderson’s neck as he is held down on the blacktop.
Eventually, he is handcuffed and hobbled at his ankles before paramedics take him away. Four hours later, he died at the hospital. A cause of death has not been established.
The incident began Jan. 3 at 3:30 p.m. with a motorcycle officer arriving at what the LAPD characterized as a “felony hit-and-run” car crash at Venice and Lincoln boulevards. Police said Anderson was in the middle of the street, declaring, “Please help me.” LAPD Chief Michel Moore alleged this week that another driver reported that Anderson had attempted “to get into another car without his permission.”
Anderson then wanders in and out of cars, with the officer telling him to get on the sidewalk, according to the video. The officer yells, “Get up against the wall.”
Anderson then holds up his hands. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.” Anderson sits down on the sidewalk.
After a gap of several minutes, Anderson declares, “I want people to see me,” and “you’re putting a thing on me.”
That is when Anderson gets up and runs back into the roadway, according to the video. When Anderson stops, an officer says, “Turn over on your stomach.” As a swarm of officers moves in, Anderson cries out to onlookers, “Please help me,” and says the officers are “trying to kill me.”
Officers then attempt to pin him down. One can be seen on the video placing his elbow on Anderson’s neck while he lies on his back. The officer standing above him shouts, “Turn over, or I’m going to tase you.”
The officer then fires the darts of the stun gun into Anderson’s back and pulls the trigger, attempting to discharge the muscle-constricting electrical pulse. He discharges the Taser twice and then applies the Taser in stun mode directly to Anderson’s back at least four times.
Moore said data from the Taser weapon showed “there were six separate activations over 42 seconds. The first two [were] in the probe mode. We believe the darts weren’t effective. Then four activations over 33 seconds” in the stun mode in which the pulse was applied directly to the skin.
Walter Katz, a former independent police auditor in California and Chicago, said it’s up to the coroner to determine the role of the Taser in Anderson’s death, but either way that doesn’t mean the officer’s actions were appropriate.
Katz said the incident begins to go wrong when the officer with the Taser directs Anderson to turn over on his stomach and stop resisting.
“The first application of Taser is in such a way that if effective contracts the muscles so the person cannot move and makes them unable to comply with that order,” he said.
Then, Katz said, the officer used the Taser on Anderson’s body repeatedly without really giving the man the chance to reset. Katz said it should have been clear by that point that Anderson’s behavior suggested he was somehow impaired.
“To do more tasering to me was a poor decision,” he said. “This officer went down the path of this is the tool I am going to use.”
Under LAPD policy, “there is no preset limit on the number of times a Taser can be used in a particular situation; however, officers should generally avoid repeated or simultaneous activations to avoid potential injury,” Moore said.
The chief alleged that Anderson was in an altered state and resisted officers’ efforts to detain him. His bloodwork showed the presence of cocaine and cannabis in his system, Moore said.
Moore said one officer’s “elbow appears to be along the collar bone and may have touched the neck or not, but I hear, ‘Partner your elbow.’” The chief said there is no evidence of Anderson’s airways being compromised.
Timothy T. Williams, a use-of-force expert and former supervisor with the LAPD elite Robbery Homicide Division, said he was also concerned about the tactics.
“The tasing was, in my opinion, excessive force. You use the force which is necessary. You don’t hold a Taser on a person that length of time to control him or her,” he said.
Police had enough officers, Williams said, “to get him turned over and handcuffed and sat up.” He said the first motorcycle officer did the right thing by calling for backup. But in the slow-evolving incident, he never heard anyone call for the department‘s mental evaluation team, which specializes in handling people suffering a mental health crisis.
Carl Douglas, a well-known civil rights attorney representing some of Anderson‘s family members, said the officers failed to consider Anderson’s mental state and did not follow appropriate tactics and policies.
“Several officers are working independently here and not as a team,” Douglas said. “He repeatedly tased him in the back of his heart.”
Anderson was a 10th-grade English teacher at a public charter school in Washington, D.C., and had a 5-year-old son. He was in Los Angeles visiting family and moving his belongings back to the nation’s capital, Douglas said.
In the video you can see that the officer deployed the taser directly to Anderson’s upper back repeatedly. That should never be allowed. Think about it. We all just had a big tutorial on the how the heart can be disturbed by blunt force during a 30-millisecond window in the heart’s electrical cycle after the Damar Hamlin event on the football field. Does anyone think it’s safe to directly deploy electro-shock to someone’s back repeatedly while they are lying on the ground with an elbow on their neck? It’s not.
This man was not threatening anyone or doing anything but causing a disturbance, which happens approximately 50,000 a day in Los Angeles. These police officers were way out of line dealing with someone who was having some kind of mental health crisis. I suspect the problem was that he yelled “they’re trying to George Floyd me” which made them angry. So they tortured him a little — and it killed them.
This man happens to be the cousin of one of the founders of Black Lives Matter so it’s getting national attention. But it happens frequently. And nobody is counting the deaths by tasers nor has anyone taken up the cause of the junk science that is “excited delirium” a made-up cause of death to justify the tasering of people who are in police custody.
Tasers have killed hundreds of people over the last ten years and have been used to torture thousands. But the calculation is that if we didn’t use them, the police would have shot and killed many more. So that’s that. Other countries don’t do either. Why do we?