Originally published at: Police officer who tased a man in a wheelchair 4 times was fired | Boing Boing
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Although the officer was fired, he likely won’t be charged (but of course), according to Insider, since “there was no clear evidence of ‘intent.’”
Assholes.
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Where the fuck did these two learn how to put handcuffs on. Neither of them have the cuffs ready. They could have easily gotten them on multiple times. What’s worse, as they have his hands behind his back they are yelling ‘put your hands behind your back’
He couldn’t wait for any excuse to use that taser.
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Yeah, sure seemed like he intended to taze a helpless old man.
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This was more of a punishment for disobeying than anything else. Cops should face charges as well as civil rights investigations.
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Of course there will no consequences beyond firing the guy
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The instruction was confusing as hell. Why would they ask someone in wheelchair to stand up?
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Because they want an excuse to hurt the man, because they are sadists…
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This. Absolutely this.
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I am curious whether they checked the box “Eligible for rehire.”
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There is no other reason for doing that, other than making an excuse for brutality.
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Sure as hell wasn’t an accident.
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Oh, oh, wait - I know this one. He was fired for refusing a direct order from a superior officer to tase the civilian a fifth time.
Right?
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That’s the thing. Tasers should only be used for stopping people from being violent, but they jump straight to the gun for that. Tasers shouldn’t be used as pain compliance devices but that’s the large amount of uses we see and police training we see espoused.
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It certainly looks like the guy was “resisting” to whatever pitiful extent he was able by failing to make his arms completely pliant, but I mean wtf? Clearly he was both impaired in a way that was making it difficult for him to completely understand what was going on and no threat whatsoever.
Totally inexcusable and entirely predictable.
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The most surprising thing about this story is he was fired not because of a complaint or public outcry, but because of a supervisor. A step in the right direction for accountability.
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“I think I looked at that video over 20 times,” Chief Holloway said.
The Quiet Part: “…and believe me, there was no way I could make that sound like we could spin it our way, so…”
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“He wrote a report, and he said that Mr. Grant was resisting with violence,” Holloway said. “You all saw that tape. Mr. Grant was not resisting with violence.”
It’s sadly surprising that a) the cops would admit this and b) would see it as cause for firing. It usually isn’t.
That’s also really surprising.
Yeah, the way tasers originally got sold to the public was as a substitute for shooting people with a gun. Instead, cops still shoot people with guns in situations that don’t warrant it, and use tasers to torture people, often in situations where cops previously wouldn’t have done anything. Rather than the de-escalation of violence we were promised, it turned into a significant escalation instead.
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If you happened to miss the last couple episodes of This American Life it has some fascinating insights on so-called “bad apple” cops.
While the story itself is pretty compelling the part that caught my attention was towards the end when they are discussing how different departments identify cops that show a pattern of bad behavior. It was noted that using simple data analysis shows that cops that exhibit aggressive and racist policing also exhibit other troubling behavior such as rudeness, general escalation instead of de-escalation and other code of conduct violations. They are also much more likely to be involved with incidents of discharging their firearms compared to the average.
Pretty much a “no duh” to everyone else but they are starting to gather actual data on these incidents. Of course it’s the police unions that prevent this type of data collection from being gathered and used to weed out the bad cops.
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Well OBVIOUSLY the cop was fired. He should have known the lower limit for tasering helpless victims in Florida is SIX times.
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