The latest case involves a Syracuse mother who was pulled out her car during a routine traffic stop. She was summarily tasered, cuffed and arrested in front of her kids by an officer who left them behind, alone in their car, while he took her to the station and charged her for resisting arrest, driving five miles over the speeding limit, and disorderly conduct — the diaphanous charge controversially leveled on Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. earlier this year.There’s plenty more where that came from. Did you hear the one about the pregnant woman who was tasered because she wouldn’t sign her speeding ticket, or the pregnant woman who was tasered at a baptism party thrown by her father, a bible-study teacher who was charged with public intoxication in his own backyard and whose wife and son were also tasered? How about the officer who tasered a pregnant woman while inside the police department?Or the cop who tasered a girl, no lie, in the brain, because he couldn’t chase her down on foot? Or the one that shoved a taser up a man’s ass in Idaho? Or those who tasered and pepper-sprayed an umbrella-wielding man in a Dollar Store bathroom, and after finding out that he was both mentally disabled and deaf still decided to charge him with resisting arrest, failure to obey a police officer and (of course) disorderly conduct, charges which the on-duty magistrate refused to accept? And don’t forget the belligerent baseball fan, the 72-year old grandmother, the bride and groom tasered at their wedding, the bicyclists who were tased after cops tried to run them off the road. And what about that guy who burst into flames? What about the six-year-old who was tasered after threatening to cut his own leg with a glass? (That’ll teach him!)It is pretty clear that by far the majority of taser use has had nothing to do with being a substitute for using a firearm to subdue a ‘dangerous’ person. Clearly the taser is being used as the whip has been used for centuries, to inflict pain and suffering as well as humiliating the victim and establishing the power of the person that wields the whip. Don’t move fast enough, don’t show the ‘proper deference’ or, show any form of resistance to an overseer, a master of slaves and, you shall receive the punishment of slaves, the whip. In this case the electric whip that forces you to writhe on the ground in agony at the mercy of your overseer, an appropriate form of submission for a disrespectful slave
Source:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/142006/why_are_cops_tasering_grandmothers%2C_pregnant_women_and_kids/
Related articles by Zemanta
- Obama Tries To Defuse Black Scholar Race Row (news.sky.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=578974fc-812b-474a-af6c-4c3d367fc59a)
