Collateral Damage
by digby
A New York City police lieutenant who gave the order to fire a Taser stun gun at a man who then fell to his death in Brooklyn committed suicide at Floyd Bennett Field early on Thursday, law enforcement officials said. The lieutenant, Michael W. Pigott, a 21-year veteran of the force, had been placed on modified assignment without his gun and badge after he gave the order to a sergeant to fire the Taser at a Bedford-Stuyvesant man, Iman Morales.
I wrote about that horrible event the other day, here.
I have no idea why this police officer killed himself. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he just temporarily lost his perspective about the lethality of the taser because it’s so commonly used in those situations. Obviously, it was ridiculous to taser someone teetering on a ledge, but you could imagine that if you think of tasers as being cojpoletely benign that you might just automatically issue a stupid order before you thought through the ramifications.
Tasers are horrible, pain inducing weapons which police now use as casually as handcuffs. The result has been a complete loss of common sense policing — as if the taser is a magic tool that solve all sticky problems by making people drop to the ground, screaming in agony without having to personally lay a finger on them. It promotes, shall we say, a certain abstraction. That leads to double tragedies like this. There’s nothing abstract about shooting a mentally ill man full of electricity so he falls to his death.
H/t to Elliot, David and Jane, among others.