Tasers and Disabled People

This from Local6 in Clay County Florida: http://www.local6.com/news/14147512/detail.html

CLAY COUNTY, Fla. -- A Clay County woman's family said it's seeking justice after their loved one died shortly after being shocked 10 times with Taser guns during a confrontation with police.

... (snip: WCD)

Officers said they arrived to find Delafield in a wheelchair, armed with two knives and a hammer. Police said the woman was swinging the weapons at family members and police. Within an hour of her call to 911, Delafield, a wheelchair-bound woman documented to have mental illness, was dead.

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield's death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case. "One, she's in a wheelchair. Two, she's schizophrenic. Three, they're using a Taser on a person that's in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes," Alexander said.

According to a police report, one of the officers used her Taser gun nine times for a total of 160 seconds and the other officer discharged his Taser gun once for a total of no more than five seconds. A medical examiner found Delafield died from hypertensive heart disease and cited the Taser gun shock as a contributing factor, the report said. On her death certificate, the medical examiner ruled Delafield's death a homicide.

Hmmm. Were the police feeling threatened? What was she going to do? Run over them?

OK. The story didn't say what kinds of knives those were, but really. She was waving them. She wasn't even aiming them. 2 knives and a hammer?!! Soooo, Messieurs et Mesdames, how does one account for the fact that the police tasered this African American woman with multiple disabilities?

I could take a mild position here and argue that, as many recent studies have shown, tasers are more risky than the majority of police departments seem to think they are. Tasers stun and that process of shock and stun interrupts the heart for far too many people. I could do that. But I don't want to make an argument about the precise nature of weaponry for the police force. I firmly believe that the police should be unarmed. I know that this is a hard line position to take, particularly since it's not me risking my ass out there in that hard world where the "criminals" are armed.

Those quotation marks are precisely my point. The police seem to do a sucky job at correctly measuring threat in part because they don't have to; they can simply outgun anyone. Waving weapons? No problem. The reliance on weaponry feeds the kind of exaggerated fear in any situation and, weirdly, the inaccurate sense of safety promoted by the weapon. In this situation, it looks like the skills that might have been used to defuse the situation in other ways were silenced by the skills needed to fire a taser. Short, sharp, sweet. Situation easily and quickly resolved.

I like the British rationale for not arming the police with firearms. It prevents the state from hiring and giving access to weapons to bullies; it prevents power-hungry, aggressive types from wielding the power of weaponry as well as the authority of their badge. This 2001 BBC report gives a nice statement of some of the issues -- including the 1995 statistic that 6% of the police force surveyed said they would resign if asked to carry arms routinely.

The UK and the US are worlds apart on guns and crime, but I'd like to see think about this in a different context. Just 48 hours ago, a student was tased at the University of Florida. He isn't the first to be hit by campus police. When I put the students' stories together with the disability stories, I see something different. Here, is another shocking tase-ing disability incident from last week from the Guardian:

TUSTIN, Calif. (AP) - Sheriff's officials defended their use of a Taser stun gun to subdue an autistic teenager who left a social services center where he was being treated.

``It was necessary,'' sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino said in defense of the use of a Taser stun gun to subdue 15-year-old Taylor Karras. He said the teen was running in and out of traffic and is lucky to be alive. ``If that were your son, would you want him Tased or hit by a car?'' Amormino asked.

What I learn from both these disability stories and from the stories of the student at the University of Florida and (last year) from UCLA is that police seem to see the taser as an easy out. A way of venting their frustration and annoyance at those who are different, provoking, subhuman. A taser, to them, isn't as dangerous as a gun (they'd be called into account for a shooting in a more public way than a "simple" tase-ing). You tase, the person recovers, seconds later, everyone feels much much better (except that sometimes they don't, but whatever).

The very feelings, perceptions, emotions that lead law enforcement officers to tase, shoot, whatever lead me to argue that officers should not be routinely armed.

On shootings: http://cripwheels.blogspot.com/2006/12/latest-nypd-shooting.html