I’m not claiming racism here, but I think the police can be a scary bunch of lunatics.
I’m talking about a video clip taken by a patrol car camera of the takedown of a nefarious criminal, found fleeing in her SUV.
Here’s the video, and a page with comments.
A woman is pulled over, and then apparently refuses to get out of her car when the police officer asks her to step out. He naturally uses his tazer weapon to extract the criminal from her vehicle. Twice.
There is also some commentary by another police officer there for your listening pleasure. I like the one where he agrees with the officer’s choice of tazer versus pepper spray. His reasoning is bullet-proof: the 22 year old woman, when asked to exit the vehicle, could have gone for a weapon. The pepper spray wouldn’t have stopped her cold like the tazer – the office was avoiding the greatest risk.
Oh, her crime? Driving with a suspended license.
Scary, agreed. And yet I can’t help but think they might have been a bit gentler if she hadn’t insisted on talking on her phone when he asked her to get out of the car, and if she hadn’t ignored him when he told her SIX times to get out of the car, three times with the threat of the taser. And I imagine that there are plenty of instances of someone in this situation trying to pull a gun, and at least a few involving 22-year-old women. If I were the policeman in this situation I’m not sure I would have acted much differently.
Put it this way: if I wanted to get tazed, hurt or shot by the police, I would behave EXACTLY how this woman behaved.
If anything, I suppose they upped the confrontation level very quickly from attempts at polite, gentle persuasion to grabbing, yelling and pointing a taser, and so the effect on the woman might have been a kind of deer-in-the-headlights effect where they couldn’t really expect her to cooperate — so they created the situation where they felt the need to use the taser. But it’s easy for me to say that they should have been more reasonable when I’m sitting comfortably in my office….