The BART killing

I have been trying to keep the start of the new year on this blog light with video game reviews and silly articles. I have avoided discussing the conflict in the middle east even though that is the most significant international news right now.

But the riots of last night and the, execution style, police killing of Oscar Grant III are too much to ignore. These are very much subjects which we at The Fringe Element are concerned with. I'll start with the widely viewed video.




I don't know much of the story but people attribute Officer Johannes Mehserle's apparent shock to his mistakenly using his firearm when he intended to use his tazer. I am not sure how this is much better. As you can probably guess from previous articles, we here at The Fringe Element don't approve of liberal use of tazers by police, considering them to be a substitute for lethal force only. Whereas countless news stories indicate that police around the country treat this otherwise useful device as a shortcut to incapacitate any person the officer finds inconvenient to deal with.

In this case the use of a tazer would have been substantially less likely to cause death. I suppose that difference in outcome is supposed to mitigate the severity of the actions of the officer in this case in the minds of some people. But again, I don't consider a tazer to be non-lethal force. Neither do its proponents who call such devices "less lethal." In the same category as rubber bullets. The idea is to incapacitate with sufficient force to be sure to incapacitate with a single use. In many cases, the requisite amount of force to do so with such certainty is enough to kill. Again, I am not arguing against the use of tazers, I am arguing that people at large, and particularly the police, need to stop thinking of using a tazer as less serious than using a firearm.