Cop Tasers Fleeing Handcuffed Girl, Head injuries put her in vegetative state

[WithmirTeigh]

Can I guess the rest of this story? It is either "and the cop received no punishment" or "cop was celebrated as hero for not killing her".

Too much stupid in the world, a lot seems to come from America but every country has it ... America just puts out more content so they get a lot of stick for it. Get a lot less if they realized guns = bad.

Should have chased her, not been a lazy fuck. If you agree with his decision don't be a cop, if you believe she should have been shot leave America, please.

You're more then welcome to follow her into a busy 6 lane highway with cars traveling in excess of 60 mph which is acctually 20 feet to the left of the dash screen (the direction she was running).

Because you know, a Highway Patrol Substation would kinda be... next to the Highway.

But by all means... Chase her.
because clearly endangering the lives of that individual, yourself, and countless innocents that are mearly driving by is the better option then using a TASER...

I know this doesn't apply to everything but "if she can do it, he can".

Ever watched a movie? The good guy never gets hit by a car! (unless it's to make the film reach 90 minutes).

I have to ask "clearly endangering the lives of that individual, yourself, and countless innocents that are mearly driving". How would somebody driving a car, who hit a person lose there lives? I saw a kid get knocked over once, the driver (although panicked) was fine.

The individual endangered herself, not much can be done about that. As stated just above, the driver would have been fine. The cop is paid the put his life on the line (as they always say in those stupid American tv shows like "police wildest car chases 5").

What if someone swerved and caused a massive pile-up?

OT: If it is true she was planning on running into the highway, I think the tazing was within reason. She was on drugs so she could not clearly think of what running into heavy traffic could cause and although the brain damage cause by the fall (or the drugs) is unfortunate, I feel it is better than what could have happened.

Edit: He probably should have done the tackle and turned himself so he hit the ground first as a previous poster pointed out

 

[RN7]

And what is the issue here? Tasers are for zapping fleeing suspects. She shouldn't run away from police, especially after being arrested already.

It's a "justified use of force" issue. Yes, a tazer is used to incapacitate a fleeing suspect, but one also has to consider the dangers involve, the threat level of the suspect, and if a safer means of capture can be utilized.

However, I agree with you. The girl shouldn't of run and it is at fault. But the other side also poses a valid, truthful point; the officer should have consider the dangers of using the tazer in that particular situation.

 

[DazBurger]

this was just an unfortunate accident which was her fault for fleeing

Same question for you then: Is someone taking a step sufficient excuse for murder?

Can I answer that question as well?

No, there are no excuses for murder, but I see no murder going on here, just an accident, at worst, manslaughter.

Manslaughter and murder is far from the same thing.

 

[omega 616]

I just realized, American cops always seem to go to the next level. Person fleeing, chase? Taze? Shoot to kill? English cop = chase, American cop = Taze.

Person armed with weapon (not ranged) Taze or shoot to kill? English cops = use bin, American cops = 10 bullets ....


I think we all know the vid I am talking about with the 10 bullets.

Where does all this "***** had it coming" posts come from? Should she have ran? Fuck no but it's what criminals do, just because she did something wrong doesn't mean she deserved to have a few thousand volts in her ass! She wanted freedom, not to assault a policeman. Did she deserve to be zapped for a hit and run? If she caused a problem while the cuffs were being put on but not after! If she runs, chase her or call in help if you are unfit.

Although the unfit thing is a joke, they should have constant fitness evaluations. Not to mention constant psych evaluations and under cover people who weed out bent or overly aggressive cops, so the law is always fair and none of this "brothers in arms/don't snitch on fellow cops" bullshit. Cops shouldn't be above the law.

 

[DoPo]

Ever watched a movie? The good guy never gets hit by a car! (unless it's to make the film reach 90 minutes).

And this matters exactly how?

I have to ask "clearly endangering the lives of that individual, yourself, and countless innocents that are mearly driving". How would somebody driving a car, who hit a person lose there lives? I saw a kid get knocked over once, the driver (although panicked) was fine.

I saw a kid that ran through the street once. A driver was about to hit him but panicked and almost hit a sign instead.

Also, some friends of mine[footnote]OK, not all, a couple were just people I knew[/footnote] were travelling back to my home town [footnote]University students, coming back home for the weekend. Final and second to last years all of them. So it wasn't their neither their first ride and certainly not their first trip from Uni back home[/footnote] a dog surprisingly ran across the road and the driver swerved in order to not hit it but lost control of the car, went out of the road and hit a tree. Three of the five people in the car died instantly, another one almost made it to the hospital. The last guy survived but still has a limp and I assume the occasional nightmares.

My anecdotal evidence beats yours.

 

[ScreamingNinja]

I'm sorry, what?
Take a step?
Yea, a full out escape/run from police station is not a step.

Please answer the question, yes or no is sufficient. Is murder justified?

Sorry, you can't just Yes or no something like this. She shouldn't have run. She got Tasered. She was already in cuffs, which means she already knew she was in the shit.

You run from the cops, bad things happen. It's not that hard to understand. You risk your health when you pull stunts like this.

 

[Agayek]

No real sympathy, a bunch of priors and coke/oxycontin in her system and running from the cops.
Comply with the damn cops and don't complain that you get hurt when you resist arrest.
Apparently she was involved in 2 hit and runs when this occurred....so yea drugged up and driving on the streets, good riddance.

Pretty much this. If the reported facts are accurate, I feel absolutely no sympathy for her. It was an accident, shit happens, move on with your life.

 

[Bat Vader]

Yeah, using the taser was unnecessary.
However, I can't feel bad for her, as she was clearly already sufficiently brain damaged to try to run from a cop after being handcuffed.

That's plain stupid to say. You face years and years in prison under barbaric conditions for something as small as drug possesion, the cop they send after you is an obese slob who can never keep up, and you say running is a weird choice?

Running is the only logical choice in that situation.

How is running the only logical choice? Running from a police officer is the worst logical choice to make. Running from the police just gets people into more trouble. The logical choice would have been to cooperate with the police officer.

 

[svenjl]

This may have been noted previously, but I would like to observe that if the cop HAD chased and tackled her to the ground, might that not have also caused serious injury due to his mobesity (that's morbid-obesity for the uninitiated :-D)? Landing on her would have crushed her like a car compacter. My god, broken ribs, punctured lungs, kidney and liver damage. She'd be fricking dead.

 

[omega 616]

Ever watched a movie? The good guy never gets hit by a car! (unless it's to make the film reach 90 minutes).

And this matters exactly how?

I have to ask "clearly endangering the lives of that individual, yourself, and countless innocents that are mearly driving". How would somebody driving a car, who hit a person lose there lives? I saw a kid get knocked over once, the driver (although panicked) was fine.

I saw a kid that ran through the street once. A driver was about to hit him but panicked and almost hit a sign instead.

Also, some friends of mine[footnote]OK, not all, a couple were just people I knew[/footnote] were travelling back to my home town [footnote]University students, coming back home for the weekend. Final and second to last years all of them. So it wasn't their neither their first ride and certainly not their first trip from Uni back home[/footnote] a dog surprisingly ran across the road and the driver swerved in order to not hit it but lost control of the car, went out of the road and hit a tree. Three of the five people in the car died instantly, another one almost made it to the hospital. The last guy survived but still has a limp and I assume the occasional nightmares.

My anecdotal evidence beats yours.

Was a joke, do we lose our sense of humour around this kind of stuff?

Which is why it says in the English highway code don't swerve for any animal, instead of a dog dying a few people did.

If you really want to avoid hitting something, emergency brake, providing the people behind aren't stupidly close there should be no problem. Swerving is a stupid idea, can hit anything when you do and you lose control. Braking just means a little whiplash and maybe a few sore heads from butting things (for people no wearing seat belts).

ABS is designed for harsh braking and having a safe distance is there so if there is an emergency braking person in front it means you don't ram them.

 

[psijac]

Where does all this "***** had it coming" posts come from? Should she have ran? Fuck no but it's what criminals do, just because she did something wrong doesn't mean she deserved to have a few thousand volts in her ass! She wanted freedom, not to assault a policeman.

Why are you cutting so much slack for a criminal? Even a upstanding citizen of the law would be tazed if they tried to run away. Brits live a bizaro world where law breakers get more rights than subjects

Also the article says, "her mother, says she is in a vegetative state" As in not her doctor but her mother. If she is smart she would say that regardless of the facts just to lay down ground work for the inevitable lawsuit against the City and Police Dept. $$$Cha-Ching$$$ And the vegetative state certainly could not be from the numerous drugs her daughter takes recreationally

 

[Vanilla_Druid]

Alas, that officer wasted $60 of the taxpayers' money by tasing the woman whom he could have just grabbed. I kind of find it sad how there are people who are so callous, that they justify brutality with a Bill O'Reilly-inspired: "She should have not fleed the autorities" mantra. I say to those people: have a heart. Two wrongs just do not make a right.

 

[Fidelias]

I think the police officer was right, in this situation.

She was involved in TWO hit-and-runs, then tried to escape from the police twice. The first escape attempt you could chalk up to fight-or-flight instinct, but the second was just her being a complete idiot.

A lot of posters are saying that the cop couldn't catch her because he was too fat, but that might not be true. She was a fit young woman high on drugs and adrenaline, I'm not sure anyone could've caught her.

Now, about the tazering. He chose to tazer her because using a gun would definitely kill her, and she was moving too quickly to tackle her.
Those of you saying that he should've tried to just grab her in his gentle embrace obviously have never gone to gym class. If they were both moving as quickly as possible, he would have used at least as much force as a tackle, and tackling her would've probably had the same result.

The tazer (regardless of protocol or guidelines) was most likely the best possible choice in that situation.

Now, should he have just let her get away, because she wasn't presently a threat...

NO, SHE WAS INVOLVED IN TWO HIT AND RUNS, YOU IDIOTS!!!

Letting her get away could mean serious injury or death to innocent lives!

There was no way the police officer could have known that his actions would cause her to become a vegetable, and the tazer was not the direct cause of the injury.

That said, it does piss me off that he shows no regret over her state, I would expect him to show a little remorse over his actions, but just because he's an asshole doesn't mean he's wrong.

 

[Lightning Delight]

I have no sympathy for this woman. She was arrested and she tried to run. The cop's job was to stop her, which he did. It was an unfortunate accident that she was severely injured, but it never would have happened if she hadn't run away in the first place.

Now then. Was a taser necessary? Would it have been better to tackle her, or to simply try to grab her? Perhaps. However, it is easy to judge these things from our position. For the cop, it was a heat of the moment decision. A taser was an effective way to end the conflict, so he chose that option. If he broke some sort of protocol for using a taser when he wasn't supposed to, he should be punished only for breaking protocol. Everything else that happened was the consequences of him doing his job.

 

[omega 616]

Why are you cutting so much slack for a criminal? Even a upstanding citizen of the law would be tazed if they tried to run away. Brits live a bizaro world where law breakers get more rights than subjects

Also the article says, "her mother, says she is in a vegetative state" As in not her doctor but her mother. If she is smart she would say that regardless of the facts just to lay down ground work for the inevitable lawsuit against the City and Police Dept. $$$Cha-Ching$$$ And the vegetative state certainly could not be from the numerous drugs her daughter takes recreationally

A criminal is still a person and should be treated as such, not "you did bad thing now pay!". The entire country isn't "obey the law or have the snot beaten into you then charged".

Rules and regulations are there to make sure justice is served no vengeance then justice. It is cops duty to protect and serve people not protect only the good and serve ass whoopings to anybody who steps out of line.

If they step out of line warn them and if they run chase them and capture safely again, minimize accidents ... especially in a country where suing people is a constant thing that happens over every little thing.

I do sometimes think UK police are a little too soft but I rarely see American cops be anything but severe.

 

[Shumiry]

Is this a troll? I have to assume it is, but I'll give it credit and say it's a pretty good troll. Nice prose.

If it isn't a troll, well, I already said something along these lines a few posts up, but basically, we don't pay cops to dish out punishment based on criminal's actions. That's what we have legal courts for. No matter what the girl did wrong, it wasn't the cop's place to punish her for those wrong-doings, and her crimes do not justify the cop's actions. This would be true if she were a serial killer, jaywalker or, indeed, hit-and-runner.

I'd have to agree if she had been subdued and THEN he tazered her and she fell. But she already demonstrated an ability and willingness to evade arrest and to escape her bonds. She demonstrated a blatant disregard for her own life, and, more importantly, the lives of those around her. This wasn't a cop taking it upon himself to teach a crook a lesson. This was a man making a split-second decision to stop a fleeing suspect who could, demonstratably, at any moment slip her cuffs, and what next? Grab a gun from a startled officer? Run into the road and cause a car to swerve?

If there were any ambiguity to the nature of the crimes, if there were any dispute as to whether or not she was, in fact, the party involved, it would be a different story. But there wasn't. The officer, the victims, and everyone involved knew that she was the one who did it, and was, therefore, a real and present danger to those around her.

He didn't tie her up and beat her, or stand over her tazering her mercilessly, he made a judgement call to stop an incredibly dangerous, unstable individual.

The lawyers aren't going to go to court about this and say, "Well do you have any proof that she was, in fact, the one in the car that hit so-and-so?" Everyone already knows it. The law doesn't exist to be followed to the letter in all instances regardless of circumstance. People want it to be that way because it would make things "so much easier". But it doesn't work. When that's the case you end up in the scenario we have now, where the law is so convoluted and misunderstood that nobody really knows what it all means.

I understand that that's a slippery slope and that we don't have a perfect solution right now, but we're not going to get there by condemning the use of reason in favor of mindless obedience. We need to interpret these things in a case by case basis, and establish a system of guidelines, which is more or less what the police have.

In another case, perhaps this would be deemed excessive, but it isn't another case. It's this case, with this extremely unpredictable, capable, and dangerous individual. Even a small girl can kill a big man if she gets her hands on a suitable weapon, and she already demonstrated her willingness to endanger the lives of others.

 

[Raesvelg]

The same answer I give pretty much every time a topic like this pops up: Natural selection in action. This is how nature thins the herd...