The lowdown: Cops came upon a man having a diabetic seisure in his car on the side of the road. When he didnt respond to their verbal commands, and kept having his seisure like some hooligan, they tazed him. Three times. Eventually they figured out that he was under medical distress and instead of taking him to the nearest hospital for medical attention, they hauled his seizure having ass to jail and chucked him into a cell. The arresting officer claimed to have smelled alcohol. They administered a BAC test and found not only was he well under the legal limit, he had absolutely no alcohol in his system.
So again I pose to you the question that is the point behind all these tazer stories we keep posting here. Are tazers a device that spare criminals lives by providing peace officres with a less-lethal method of dealing with and ending the danger the criminal presents, or are tazers a device that since it so rarely results in death, and does not leave externaly visible wounds, police feel cart blanche to fall back tazers as a way to "induce compliance." These are alternatives we often label as "Tazers: Tool or Crutch?"
You may feel that both of those alternatives as I have described them are valid and fall under the "tool" catagory. However the second catagory as I have described it is rather broad. What about the situation at hand where a man was in medical distress and the officer chose to zap him. There could be any number of reasons that the officer decided to pull the triger in this situation but I dont think it would have turned out so bad as to have made the news if this officer did not have a tazer. I think the second catagory I described, if you believe that compliance inducement on a criminal who poses no risk to life is a legitimate reason for the use of force/tazers, can be divided into the larger catagories of Tool v. Crutch by drawing the line at media coverage. If the cop didnt have a tazer, would this case have wound up in the news?
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