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HICI Special Report: Tasers center of public safety debate

Sunday, October 14, 2007

TASER-HAPPY?
The problem is a mind-set that excuses stun-gun abuse

Daytona Beach News-Journal Editorial

Police Tasers, or stun guns, are the common denominator in a growing list of questionable, sometimes outrageous, incidents of police violence on individuals who appear to pose little danger, and on whom, in the same situations, the police would never take out a gun.

News-Jounal graphic/OCTAVIO DIAZ
FEB. 1, 2006: A 16-year-old special education student at Flagler Palm Coast High School was having difficulties doing his work. After his teacher corrected him, the student began to act out. Efforts to get the student to leave the room failed, and other students were evacuated. Later, the assistant principal, a counselor and a school resource officer (deputy sheriff) entered the room. As the student became more defiant, the deputy threatened to use his Taser. After the student refused to sprawl on the floor, as ordered, the deputy fired the Taser. The student was arrested for battery on an officer. Objections by the Flagler County School Board resulted in the sheriff deciding to no longer arm his school deputies with Tasers. AUG. 31: Jeffrey Shields, mistaken by Ocala police officers for a man who reportedly had a gun, was ordered to take his hand off the bulky object tucked into his waistband. Shields refused, telling the four officers it was his Quran. He also refused, as ordered, to throw it on the ground, saying he didn’t want to desecrate it. Then one officer Tasered him twice. Police found the Quran, wrapped in a blue cloth, tucked in his pants. Shields was arrested on a charge of resisting arrest without violence. The Ocala Police Department has launched an Internal Affairs investigation. SEPT. 16: Andrew Meyer, approached an open microphone after U.S. Sen. John Kerry’s speech at the University of Florida and demanded the senator answer a few questions. Meyer’s microphone was turned off and officers began to remove him physically from the UF auditorium. He was then pushed to the ground by six officers. Police threatened to use a Taser on Meyer if he did not “comply,” but he continued to resist, yelling, “Don’t Tase me bro.” Meyer was charged with disrupting a public event. An investigation is under way by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. SOURCES: News-Journal and other newspaper reports

The case of David Shea (see box at right), whom Volusia County Sheriff’s deputies Tased repeatedly, in his home, is just one such incident. The case of the University of Florida student who was Tased during a town-hall meeting last month is another. The case of a Flagler County special education student Tased for refusing to leave a classroom last year is another. The list quickly grows long. So does the list of names of victims, now longer than 200, who died when electrocuted by Tasers. The company that makes the guns, and the police agencies that use them, insist the weapons are nonlethal, that the deaths are the result of other causes — drugs in the victims’ systems, for example.

The fact remains that the combination of factors makes Tasers the trigger of unnecessary deaths, just as it makes Tasers’ selling point as “nonlethal” the excuse for unnecessary violence. A study of the Houston Police Department’s use of the weapon over two years found that in 92 percent of the cases, the victim posed no danger to himself, to officers or to others, even though that’s the only time the stun gun is supposed to be used. The victims aren’t the problem. The stun gun and the police culture that justifies its use are.

In a remarkably candid paper, “Police Brutality: A Lifelong Learning Process,” written for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Earl C. Johns lays out a grim picture of police brutality that goes beyond the proverbial few “bad apples,” and analyzes what makes officers overreact. Johns, a graduate of the FBI National Academy who served in every division of the Kissimmee Police Department, reports that an us-vs.-them mentality teaches officers to see their role in the community as in a war zone, which Johns says is wrong and must be eliminated. And not enough emphasis is placed on police techniques as “strictly defensive in characteristic and not offensive,” he wrote.

Tasers in police hands have exacerbated offensive techniques instead of tempering them.

The problem is in the mindset behind Taser use — the mindset that excuses brutality as public protection. Johns recommends more police training, more community-oriented policing, more inclusiveness of community concerns in police work and transparency of police techniques. He also recommends civilian complaint review boards, which allow a community’s residents to feel like they are “involved ‘with’ their department and not ‘against’ the department.”

Above all, the us-versus-them mentality should be eliminated. Too often, the “them” are people like David Shea. If they need policing, they certainly don’t need punishment, let alone Taser brutality.

Tased at home

David and Irma Shea were having a rough patch in August 2006, and Irma was not living at their Deltona home. One evening Irma delivered David’s laundry, but he didn’t answer the door. The landlady told Irma that David was probably asleep. Irma called the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office to request a well-being check anyway.

When the sheriff’s deputies got to the Sheas’ home at 9:30 p.m., David, groggy from sleep and medicine, asked the deputies to leave him alone. The deputies pushed their way in, “fearing for his safety,” according to the sheriff’s report. David got “agitated” and refused to comply with the deputies’ orders to submit to a pat-down. He also resisted handcuffs. Then they Tased Shea until he lost consciousness. “I resisted,” David told The News-Journal, “because I didn’t do anything wrong. . . . There was two minutes of talking, three minutes of Tasing. . . . I mean, I’m sitting in my house.”

Shea was charged with resisting an officer with violence. He wanted a trial but a judge told him if he lost he’d face five years in jail. “I gave up,” he said. A plea agreement resulted in six months’ probation. David and Irma (now reunited) are seeking redress but his plea means little can be done.

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