State of the Taser Nation

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The Agitator links to more taser atrocities


Police taser man in his bottom after arresting him

Warning: The following story contains graphic details:

BOISE - Two Boise Police officers have been disciplined by the Boise Police Department for "serious" policy violations after a complaint was filed that officers used excessive force during an arrest.

According to the Boise Community Ombudsman's report, in early 2009 police were dispatched to a house on a report of a fight between a man and a woman.

Police say they struggled to get inside the home to speak with the man. When police managed to get inside the home, the suspect was placed in handcuffs. The complainant alleged that he was Tased three times by police - once to his wrist, the second to the small of his back and the third to his buttocks.

Click the following link to listen to a police audio recording from the arrest.

The ombudsman's report states that the suspect was tased only two times after an investigation. One of those tases, however, was in the buttocks.

The use of force "was after he was handcuffed," said Ombudsman Pierce Murphy. "And it was in the most senstive, private areas, and accompanied by threatMORE

Gates Is Lucky Cambridge Doesn’t Tase

Henry Louis Gates is lucky Cambridge Police don’t use tasers. Anywhere else, it might have been different. Seriously, a quick Google News search of the last month alone reveals a barrage of police tasing incidents across the country one more barbaric than the other: grandmas, grandpas, the mentally ill, teens and even children. Some of these taser victims died. One (ok, in Australia) burst into flames, another was left with burns in his anus, and yet another, a 14-year-old girl, got it in the head — running away after a dispute with her mother over a cell phone (caution, graphic).
All — in varying degrees — needed to be “subdued” by police, and were. It is, after all, a most effective tool in that regard, especially when dealing with pregnant women, 16-year-olds with broken backs and 6-year-old boys. After reading news reports dating back to 2004 about the hyper-use of these 50,000-volt zap guns, it’s not difficult to imagine what might have happened if Gates were say, in Boise, and had hurled one more insult, used a few expletives, raised a hand or moved toward Officer James Crowley in a “threatening manner,” much like this guy, who was irate and scary, but nonetheless handcuffed and shackled, when he was Tasered in a Kentucky court on July 22.

When Reason wrote about Tasers in 2005, there were 6,000 law enforcement agencies employing Taser guns. The high-voltage weapons, according to the Amnesty International statistics in the report, “are used on unarmed suspects in 80 percent of the cases, for verbal non-compliance in 36 percent, and for cases involving ‘deadly assault’ only 3 percent of the time.” Today some 14,200 police departments use Tasers, along with countless school districts across the country. In Pennsylvania alone for example, Tasers were employed by police in 122 schools as of June.MORE