Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/12/teen-gets-zapped-with-stun-gun-after-doing-backflip-during-cincinnati-reds-game-video.html
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Why are you calling them the Reds? Its the Guardians now.
Uh - I don’t know a lot about baseball, but I know there are the Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Guardians (formerly Indians).
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I’m so old I remember when tasers first came along they were touted as something that could be used instead of deadly force. So, unless the kid was doing something where killing him was a reasonable course of action, I hope everyone involved gets sued for everything they’ve got.
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I don’t have much sympathy for the guy. His desire for an attention-getting prank does not give him the right to interrupt a game that thousands of other people paid money to see.
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Correct. yancy has the Ohio baseball teams mixed up.
Which doesn’t make tazing him an appropriate use of force to detain him. He wasn’t presenting a physical threat. They’re allowed to use “reasonable force” to detain him. In my opinion, a tazer wasn’t necessary. Plenty of drunk idiots charging sports fields have been arrested over the years without resorting to a weapon.
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If he’d shouted “Don’t taze me bro!”, he would have been fine. /s
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Yep. The Cincinnati Reds name comes from the color as their name used to be the Cincinnati “Red Stockings.”
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Yeah, they’re “less lethal weapons,” with the emphasis on lethal weapons, but somehow they almost instantly became, for the cops, “this thing we can legally use with impunity to torture people.” It sure seems like at least 90% of its use is in situations where it’s not appropriate.
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Interrupting a game doesn’t strip him of his civil rights or make it in any way acceptable for a security guard to use a “less deadly” weapon in an act of excessive force on a non-violent person.
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WTF is with American security guards having deadly weapons, period. In my country (Canada) the only security guards with firearms or the like are armored car cash teams. Cops are the only other folks allowed to carry sidearms and tasers.
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Excellent question.
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This. Looks like several people here need a reminder of just how lethal Tazers and other electrical stunning devices can be:
A 2012 study published in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation found that Tasers can cause “ventricular arrhythmias, sudden cardiac arrest and even death.” At least 49 people died in 2018 in the US after being shocked by police with a Taser.[3][4][5]
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Unless you are trying to say that tazering the fan was appropriate (which I don’t think you are), this really qualifies as victim blaming. As others have pointed out, Tazers are “less-lethal”, not “non-lethal” weapons, and I doubt that the fan intended or expected to put his life at risk in this escapade.
The “The fan could have been hurt or could have hurt someone” is a refrain commonly heard to defend police use-of-force, that is, blaming the victim for excessive use of force overall.
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Cops had to come up with a whole fake medical condition to explain why so many Black men were dying by taser - when the simple answer is that it’s a numbers game. If you shock a particular group that much, you’ll have more people in that group dying…
Every time tasers come up, I also remember a news story I read when tasers were first being sold in real numbers to police departments. The sales staff would go to police events and demo the weapon - by shocking volunteer cops. Except that, for safety reasons, the power was turned way down on the demo model. So all these cops thought they had been shocked by the real thing, but had this completely false notion of what it was actually like. I’ve always suspected that, from day one, it made cops more likely to use the devices, setting the precedents. (Though I also wonder if the practice continued with subsequent generations of cops…)
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"… a fan got a little carried away last night, running across the outfield during a game against the Cleveland Guardians and doing an excited backflip. The crowd cheered.
The crowd cheered that fan, and for any number of reasons, one, for instance, witnessing an event that cut into the generally glacial flow of the game. Have you ever attended an MLB ballgame? A nine-inning game runs about 3 hours and you’re sitting there hoping for something to happen. I love baseball (mostly anything to do with the pitching battery) but, for the most part, game excitement comes in isolated spurts… if one is lucky.
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It’s traditional, I think.
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