Don’t taze me bro!

Stories like this one are why I’m very, very hesitant to ever buy into tales of police brutality.

Summary: police officer pulls over a car with no license plate. Driver has a warrant out. Officer calls for backup. Driver shoots and kills them both.

There is a huge stigma attached to police officers, especially among folks of my particular political bent. The idea is that if an officer uses force or weapons in any situation ever, no matter what the other party in the altercation is doing, they are in the wrong. Cries of “excessive force!” and “brutality!” go up, and everyone rallies to the banner. How dare an officer use deadly force against a fleeing suspect who only looked like he was reaching for a gun!?

Well, it’s because if cops aren’t in that mindset all the time, and if they don’t treat every single situation as though it could turn deadly at the drop of a hat, they get gunned down in cold blood during routine traffic stops. The split second you hesitate to think about how your actions might be perceived by a sensationalist media is all it takes for some nutbar to end you.

Stories like this are the logical endpoint of a society who wants protection and security, but only if it doesn’t inconvenience them. This is why I don’t feel bad for your idiot friend who got in a cop’s face after a night at the club and was promptly put on the ground even though he “totally wasn’t doin’ nuthin'”. If you’re told by an officer to hang up your god damned cell phone or you’re going to get tazed, hang up your god damned cell phone. He’s not tazing you because he likes hurting people; he’s tazing you because your evasion of his commands makes it less likely from his point of view that he’ll get back safely to his family that night.

And when someone puts a video of it up on YouTube, I am not outraged or sympathetic. I am amused. Braindead idiot ignores cop, gets tazed. Much better ending to the story than dangerous idiot ignores cop, father of three gunned down in cold blood.

11 comments to Don’t taze me bro!

  • FSS

    I agree with your viewpoint. It’s the first one that I’ve read on this matter that defends the law. People just seem to love bashing on cops because they’re the one’s that give you a ticket or throw you in jail for getting drunk. They’re the “bad guys of society.” Yet without the law, the government would just be anarchy.

  • Roger Mexico

    I don’t agree, but so be it.

  • God, I had kids like that all around me in College. I remember one time someone called the cops on some asshole and the police had him hold his arms out so he could be searched. According to one radical lefty that was cruel and excessive punishment. The argument ended with me holding my arms out for like 3 minutes or something, which was uncomfortable. The guy goes “See? It’s torture!”

    People have a loose definition of torture. It pisses me off too because I’m sort of left leaning to begin with and people like that make me regret it. Cops are people.

  • Nicola Nomali

    This still ignores the real and frequent abuse of the police’s power, along with every instance of people being brutalized or killed without presenting an actual threat.

    No officer should be permitted to harm innocent people just because he might have come under attack. If he’s actually being shot at? Sure, he should defend himself and disable his assailant. But if it looks like someone might be moving his or her hand in the general direction of his or her waistband, where a hypothetical gun might or might not be? No, he’s in the wrong. The risk comes with the job, and the job is to protect the people before himself.

    • Brickroad

      What a disgusting opinion.

    • Ossobucco

      My favourite part was “disable his assailant”. Because to kill him would be using excessive force, obviously. “Aim for the kneecaps, but only if you’re being shot at” should be the first thing they teach in police officer school.

    • You can’t protect anyone if you’re dead.

      These guys have one of the most deadly jobs in the world, and are held on an impossible pedestal. If someone is stupid enough to look like they’re reaching for a weapon when talking to an officer, they deserve to be beaten up for it. They don’t have the luxury to be lenient about things like that, or this happens. Which can also result in the death or injury of innocent people.

      Do some take it too far? Undoubtedly. But people have an amazingly low standard for what constitutes “brutality”. I’m actually personally amazed that, in Canada, there’s basically a large bend in the media that using a tazer PERIOD is brutality, when it seriously is the safest (if not second-safest) non-lethal weapon in their arsenal. What the hell are these people expecting officers to use? Batons (poster-boy of police brutality)? Rubber bullets (seriously almost as dangerous as real ones; more-so to bystanders)? Pepper spray (probably safer then tazers, but harder to use and can backfire on the officer)? Clearly it has to be their charming good looks.

  • Americans, especially out in California, like to side with criminals on issues like this. Because, afterall, cops are only there to harass citizens. Filling an imaginary quota because you drive like a moron, or are acting like you have something to hide by not listening to a cop.

  • Grant

    Behind you 100% on this. It’s funny because last night I was re-watching a program on the North Hollywood shootout, this morning, I see this. Bravo!

  • Alrenous

    Someone intentionally messes with dude holding a deadly weapon and dies as a result. Yeah, who’s fault is that, exactly?

    On the other side is that police brutality follows a power law distribution. Every cop gets some complaints because of the thin skinned or vengeful or because they overestimated the necessary force that day. Some few cops get ten or a hundred times that many complaints. It would be impossible for the rest of force not to know who they are. They never get fired, though, let alone charged.

  • XRumerTest

    Hello. And Bye.

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