In 2004,
Malaika Brooks, seven months pregnant and accompanied by her 11-year-old son,
was pulled over by two Seattle cops for driving 32 mph in a 20 mph zone. She
was willing to accept a speeding ticket, but incorrectly thought signing it was
an admission of guilt. She refused.
In
response, one of the officers held up his Taser and asked if she knew what it
was. She said she didn't, but added: “I have to go to the bathroom... I am
pregnant. I’m less than 60 days from having my baby.”
According
to Adam Liptak, reporting for
the New York
Times, this is what followed when a patrol supervisor joined the
cops and decided to place Brooks under arrest, all in front of her young son:
The three
men assessed the situation and conferred. “Well, don’t do it in her stomach,”
one said. “Do it in her thigh.”
Officer
Ornelas twisted Ms. Brooks’s arm behind her back. A colleague, Officer Donald
M. Jones, applied the Taser to Ms. Brooks’s left thigh, causing her to cry out
and honk the car’s horn. A half-minute later, Officer Jones applied the Taser
again, now to Ms. Brooks’s left arm. He waited six seconds before pressing it
into her neck.
Ms.
Brooks fell over, and the officers dragged her into the street, laying her face
down and cuffing her hands behind her back.
In the
months that followed, Ms. Brooks gave birth to a healthy baby girl; was
convicted of refusing to sign the ticket, a misdemeanor, but not of resisting
arrest; and sued the officers who three times caused her intense pain and left
her with permanent scars.
The 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals let the officers off the hook for the incident,
finding that while the force they used was excessive, they couldn't be held
accountable “because the law on the question was not clear in 2004.” And then a
strange thing happened: the cops, after winning, appealed the ruling to the
Supreme Court, which will decide shortly whether to hear the case.
Why
appeal a case the cops had basically won? According to the Times, it was
because the decision “put them and their colleagues on notice that some future
uses of Tasers would cross a constitutional line and amount to excessive
force.” Tasers have become such an integral tool in forcing citizens to comply
that police agencies consider constraints on their use to be a bridge too far –
a fight worth taking to the highest court in the land.
The city
of Seattle filed a brief with the court asking that it not hear the case. City
attorneys criticized what they called the cops' “sky is falling” take on the
decision, adding that “three applications of a Taser in drive-stun mode in less
than a minute on a pregnant woman who does not pose a safety threat” is the
kind of excessive force that is likely to lead to liability for the city.
The most
telling part of the story may be the unexamined assumption that police, faced
with a very pregnant, nonviolent, non-threatening woman, had to resort to some
sort of force to deal with the situation. In an ostensibly neutral news
story, Adam Liptak wrote, “The situation plainly called for bold action.” One
judge, dissenting from the ruling, said that Brooks had invited the assault by
being “defiant” and “deaf to reason.” He added that the cops “deserve our
praise, not the opprobrium of being declared constitutional violators. The City
of Seattle should award them commendations for grace under fire.”
But the
cops weren't “under fire” – they were simply dealing with a confused citizen
and they were unable or unwilling to resolve the situation without violence.
(Another dissenting justice claimed that “tasing was a humane way to force
Brooks out of her car.”)
The use
of Tasers to compel obedience – and, all too often to punish people police
don't like – has become all too common in law enforcement circles. We see
Tasers used on unruly
schoolchildren, rowdy sports
fans, a person “acting strangely” at a theme park (that one died),
suspects in
handcuffs at police stations, tourists who
don't speak English and can't understand what police are telling them
and college
students who don't produce identification on command. Hardly a day
goes by without such a report popping up somewhere in the United States.
The
standard justification for arming police with Tasers is that they save lives –
if police officers weren't equipped with the devices, they'd have to use more
brutal, if not deadly force to achieve the same ends. There's certainly some
truth to that claim. Tasers have been used to subdue violent suspects who might
otherwise have been shot or beaten. But police wouldn't have thought to use a
gun or a nightstick on, say, a 9-year-old
truant (he was laying on the ground with his hands beneath his body
at the time), or a pregnant woman who refused to sign a traffic ticket.
Amnesty International
“acknowledges the importance of developing non-lethal or 'less than lethal'
force options to decrease the risk of death or injury” from conventional
weapons, but warns that Tasers – easily portable means of inflicting intense
pain without leaving evidence on the body -- are “particularly open to abuse by
unscrupulous officials, as the organization has documented in numerous cases
around the world.” After a week in which three seemingly healthy men in their
20s died after being shocked by police in the U.S., the UN Committee Against
Torture declared
that “the use of these weapons causes acute pain” and “can have a grave
physical and mental impact on those targeted, which violates the UN's
Convention against Torture.”
Taser
International – the company that makes the devices – and police agencies scoff
at the notion, saying that with proper training, Tasers are in no way torture
devices. But a 2005 ACLU
study of guidelines in 50 American police departments found that
“few if any controls are imposed on police using Taser stun guns to subdue
suspects.” Whereas pepper-spray and other “less lethal” weapons like “bean-bag”
shotgun rounds are highly regulated, Tasers are not.
Perhaps
the biggest problem with Tasers is the widespread belief among police agencies
and the public that they are “non-lethal” weapons that can't cause serious and
permanent harm. But several police cadets have sued Taser International for
serious injuries suffered during their training (most police departments
require officers in training to experience what it's like to be shocked).
According to the Las Vegas Sun, the cops claim that “Taser failed to
adequately warn the police department of the potential for injury and minimized
the risks of being shocked, which officers had been assured was not only safe
but advisable.”
And they
are most certainly lethal. Amnesty International reports
that there have been 500 Taser-related deaths in the United States in the last
10 years. Taser International claims that its product is safe, and the deaths
should all be attributed to underlying medical conditions, but a study
published this year in the medical journal Circulation found that
“electrical shocks from Tasers, which shoot barbs into the clothes and skin,
can in some cases set off irregular heart rhythms, leading to cardiac arrest.”
“This is
no longer arguable,” Dr. Byron Lee, director of the electrophysiology
laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco told the New York
Times. “This is a scientific fact. The national debate should
now center on whether the risk of sudden death with Tasers is low enough to
warrant widespread use by law enforcement.”
It is
obvious that “less lethal weapons,” including Tasers, can save lives. But it is
equally apparent that they aren't just being used as a last-resort alternative
to lethal force. And it is also apparent that they often turn out to be deadly
weapons. Ideally, we would have a grownup discussion of their widespread use according
to a rational risk-benefit ratio, but with law enforcement and Taser
International denying that they pose a danger – and with the unexamined
assumption that some sort of force is justified when citizens don't obey police
orders quickly enough – we're not having that discussion, and people continue
to be abused and, sometimes, tortured to death with Tasers.