Another lethal shot from a non-lethal device

A man who died after he was stunned with a Taser by a Houston police officer this weekend had a drug addiction and lengthy criminal history, according to relatives.

And there you have it. Straight out of the police playbook after a suspect somehow ends up dead.

Another man tased. Another man dead without explanation.

The taser was promoted as nonlethal option for the police to use to control an unruly person. Of course the original idea was for the police to start off using the least amount of force and only escalate if necessary.

But, being that the first rule of policing is to make it home safely after the shift is over, it's more common for the police to start at the top of the force ladder and work their way down. That means instead of the taser being used as a last resort before the service revolver comes out, it becomes the default first mode of control.

Unfortunately not everyone is suited to be shot with a jolt of electricity. And the person on the firing end of the taser has no idea whether the person he's aiming it is a heart failure waiting to happen. But we certainly can't let folks go around questioning whether the police overreacted by firing a taser when a lesser alternative was available.

Nope. It can't be the fault of the guy with the badge. It must be the dead guy's fault. So out comes the dirt after the fact. Nevermind that none of the officers on the scene had any idea that Denis Chabot was an addict or that he had a criminal background.

The purpose of the statement at the beginning of this post is to trash Mr. Chabot so that the public doesn't start questioning the use of the taser. You don't want someone poking their nose around asking why the police were firing a taser running along the freeway. You don't want someone wondering why no one called medical personnel if Mr. Chabot seemed to be under the influence of something.

Why an officer decided to fire his taser at Mr. Chabot we will never know. All we know is that Mr. Chabot is dead. Needlessly.

We're the police and we're here to help

He was acting strangely. His hair was wet. His eyes were "big." He told the clerk at the hotel he needed help.  He wouldn't come in and he wouldn't leave.

The clerk was worried. She called 911.

Paramedics from the Houston Fire Department arrived shortly thereafter. He refused their help. Then the police officers arrived. We're told he began to fight.

So one officer decided it was a good idea to pull out his Taser to subdue the man. Nevermind that he wasn't accused of any crime. He clearly needed help. But one man in blue thought the best way to help him was to shoot him with a Taser and send a jolt of electricity through his body.

Nobody refuses an offer of help from a paramedic - and lives to tell the tale.

By now you should have guessed what happened to our protagonist. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he died.

The Taser has been promoted as a way of avoiding the use of deadly force. Instead of pulling out a gun and shooting a person with a live bullet, the officer can incapacitate that person with a strong jolt of electricity. There is, admittedly, the one little complication that strong jolts of electricity and heart conditions don't usually end well. And the corollary that at the time the officer pulls the trigger on the Taser he doesn't know whether the target of his less-than-lethal show of force has a heart condition.

We don't know if the victim had a heart condition before he was tased. What we do know is that he needed some type of help - either medical or psychological. He didn't need to be involved in a confrontation with the police.

The police are taught to fight crime and, if necessary, to subdue suspects. They aren't trained mental health professionals. Their's is a very different tool kit. You see, police officers don't like it when someone tells them no. An officer is used to having people answer "how high?" when asked to jump. Any other response is considered a provocation.

Is it an ego thing? A macho thing? Or is it what happens when you give a man a gun and a badge and turn him loose?

Now a man is dead for no reason.

Did an 82-year-old man really need to be tasered?

Tasermania is the new fad sweeping the English countryside these days.

According to the BBC, on June 28, 2011, police were called out to a disturbance. An 82-year-old man (whom the English press refers to as an "OAP" - old age pensioner) was arrested for possession of an offensive weapon and for criminal mischief. Now I have no idea what pissed off an 82-year-old man enough for him to vandalize someone's car - but I'm guessing it was pretty bad.

But then the story gets more bizarre as an officer pulled out his taser and "discharged" it. The 82-year-old man was taken to the hospital (or, as they say across the pond, "to hospital"), where he stayed for several days, complaining of pain.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is looking into whether the use of the taser was either appropriate or proportionate given the circumstances.

What would possess a police officer to unleash 50,000 volts of electricity into the body of an 82-year-old man? What "offensive weapon" could this man have been carrying to justify shooting him with a taser?

Scott Greenfield regularly points out that the first objective for any police officer is to make it home safely at the end of his shift. That objective sometimes causes officers to overreact to a situation and see it as more dangerous that it really is.

We can assume that the old man was not packing heat because he wasn't shot. I think it's also safe to assume that the old man wasn't threatening an officer with his "offensive weapon" because, once again, he wasn't shot. This would seem most likely to be a situation in which an officer tells someone to drop whatever's in his hands and drop to the ground; but the object of the officer's attention doesn't heed the command or doesn't move fast enough to satisfy the officer.

If an officer has to choose between using his gun or a billy club, chances are he will use his gun because it enables him to take command of the situation from a safer position. If a suspect has a knife or a pipe, moving in with the club exposes an officer to the risk of injury - but using a gun allows the officer to stay out of the line of fire. The taser gives the officer a third option - now he can stay at a distance and still bring a suspect to his knees without killing him.

Thus, an officer becomes more likely to rely on his taser as a first resort rather than as a last resort.