Congratulations! Your comment has just received enough votes from the community to earn you 1 Power Point. Thank you for your quality contribution to VideoSift.

This achievement has earned you your "Silver Tongue" Level 7 Badge!

In general I agree a person should [for their own sake at the very least] shut the fuck up and do as instructed by police.

However, that is secondary to the well-being of the [real or fictional] fetus in the suspect's womb.

Many people, regardless of race, gender, or station in life, have little control over their temper and go ape-shit nuts ignoring the authority of law enforcement. In 99% of the cases, I'd say the officer is right to tase or use force against the offender to achieve compliance, however this is the 1% where I feel someone has to be concerned with the safety of the unborn child.

Even if the mother is too dipshit crazy to be able to put her baby's safety ahead of her outrage, at least the sanity of an officer should come into play and beat her up in a way that they won't be jeopardizing the safety of the fetus.

Don't obey an officer's orders repeatedly and dare to resist? Get tased. Get wrestled to the ground. Get kneed in the back. Hell, even get into a choke hold.

But pregnant, unarmed, and presenting no physical threat? Break her arm and punch her in the face if you have to, officers. Just avoid the taser and physical trauma to the uterus region in general.

(I know; radicals will say the baby doesn't deserve to be born into the world with a mother who is too dipshit to obey officers, but I think it deserves a fair chance at life [or at least not to be potentially murdered for its mother's disobedience].)

I am really torn here, I agree that the cops are not able to test for pregnancy on the scene and ave to assume that a combative and struggling person may be lying to get a chance to escape. But I've been the husband during a pregnancy so I know that it is difficult to lay down on your stomach with a baby on board. I think the right answer would have been to cooperate calmly and ask if I could lay on my side with my hands behind my back as I am pregnant. Calmly explaining during a high stress situation would likely get through this without the risk of endangering anyone. And if it did escalate I'm very glad that they opted for taser over pepper spray. Pepper spray would likely do much more damage to the mother and the unborn child.

People have been tased to death. I'm sure it's not impossible for a fetus to suffer severe trauma from a taser.

This is sickening. They are some pretty big guys with tactical training. I'm sure they could have subdued her by grabbing her arms and twisting them behind her back or something.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'pregnent, taser, police, brutal' to 'pregnant, taser, police, brutal, police brutality, abuse of power, sickening' - edited by lucky760

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Student Tasered After Asking John Kerry Questions. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video 14 yr old girl Tasered in the Head by Police Chief. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

This may run long, so bear with me.

Law Enforcement employees tend to come from two specific groups of people. The first group is going to consist of people who actually joined up to try to protect people and make things safer for them. They are idealists who may grow jaded over time; because realistically if your only input on what being a LEO is the internet and reality TV, you are not prepared for the type of mental assault you will endure day in and day out. I'm not talking about angry people, but stuff like drawing circles around little chunks of brains on the highway from a teenage girl that went through a windshield.

As an officer at any level (except maybe a small town), you are going to see the absolute worst side of humanity on a daily basis and you aren't on a tour of duty like the military. You don't get to 'rotate' home and put it behind you. This will wear on anybody who is not a sociopath, it will grind you down to a nub. You could see professional help for this, but I will go into that later.

The second type of person who goes into law enforcement is someone who likes authority, a sense of power over someone else, a bully. This person is in the job because it gives them power over others and the law will protect them because it is vaguely worded in SO many cases. This person will shrug off the effects that cripple the first type over time, because they feel in charge of every situation. After a while, if they don't tone it down, they will get caught. Thankfully the cell camera and the internet tends to be helping clean them out due to their own incapability to see they can't ALWAYS be in charge, but it will be a long road because this group is the BULK of the ones that join LE organizations.

Now why do these two groups tend to be the ones that you are going to run into on a consistent basis? The simple, hard answer is that we pay our front line LEO's very little compared to other services that risk their life or experience the mental grind. Your average patrol officer is going to pull a median salary of about 35k with comparable benefits to someone working in a office job. A firefighter is going to pull around 45k and scales up much quicker, not to mention their benefits are beyond good. EMT's make about the same as patrol officers, but their benefits are also very good and they don't have the same stressors. I know that ranges will vary and State LEO's are very well paid on average, but we are talking about the people you are going to encounter most often.

If you have to choose between a job where you are going to be considered a 'hero' or a job where everyone is going to be biased towards you being a 'villain, and the hero jobs pay better, which would you logically choose? Assuming of course that you are not sorted into one of the two groups I described, most are going to run away from serving in LE. In fact, this is why more of the 'bullies' tend towards LE and the 'idealists' don't. So you already have created a situation where the 'stormtrooper' mindset is going to prefer this job and haven't considered options to rectify it. The people you don't run into that much are going to be the people that took college and got pushed through the ranks quickly. If you didn't take college or just took an Associates Degree, you have to beat these people out. It is extremely hard to do that, even if you do your job much better than they did.

The final factor that runs into this is the mental issues I mentioned earlier. If you seek help from your employers for mental stress, they are going to handle it differently if you are a LEO. You are going to find out quickly that you are expendable. If you seek help and get classified as PTSD, you set a chain of events in motion that is inexorable. You will be rotated to a desk. You will see a Psychiatrist who will prescribe anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication. This person will meet with you for around 15 minutes 3-4 times a week, ask you questions, and ask if the medication is helping. If you return to functional status in a month or two, you get put back on duty. If you don't, they put you on short term disability for up to one year. Your visits drop to once a week, then once a month. One year later, your employment is terminated. They hire a new recruit and start the cycle again about the same time that you start your short term disability. You get to try to salvage your career in anyway possible, hopefully you paid through the nose for long term disability, or you can try to find a smaller department that doesn't bother to dig too deep on background checks.

Other related fields like firefighters/emts comprehend PTSD and work with their people much harder. They have better benefits so you they can see outside therapists as much as needed. There is less stigma if you have a problem, because they understand. You go on the fritz as an LEO and you will overhear people who used to respect you call you weak or a pussy. Sadly this type of thing happens at all levels of LE, even as a State Trooper you are expendable.

In any case, the point to this essay is that the system is flawed and is going to drive out the good LEOs and save the bad ones to protect itself from litigation. Protect yourself at all times with video, be advised of the laws and loopholes in them that bad LEos will exploit, and don't force confrontation with a LEO if there is a loophole. If the man had stepped outside and talked calmly, the incident would not have escalated as it did. In this case he did not inform himself of the loopholes correctly and got tasered (which was improper, they didn't warn him correctly or anything), and the LEOs look like villains again.

Quick question I often pose to people that don't trust police. If there were a different legal attitude towards prohibition, especially of drugs, do people suppose their attitude towards officers would change? I find that most often distrust of police stems from discomfort with the validity of the laws they are enforcing. I suppose there is also this sense of abusive authority types, i.e. the guys attracted to the gig for the badge and gun. Still, I think most people's trust is undermined by the law, not the enforcement. I find that most cops are professional and polite if you show them the courtesy of treating them like polite professionals. This is a case where I have absolutely no problem with officers being a bit heavy handed in their enforcement. Given the severity of the allegations, a miss would be a more costly error than a false alarm. They could have done without the taser and the obstruction charges though. That was just retaliatory.

Since it is a domestic violence call, the judge would have to look at precedent cases. There are countless state level cases that uphold a warrant-less entry in the case of possible violence to someone in the home, visible or not. Brigham City v. Stuart is one that went to SCOTUS and further cemented the situation.

Based on the that sadly broad ruling, if a 911 call is made claiming even possible domestic violence, police can force entry into a residence to see if everyone is ok. I don't like it or agree with it, but they will walk on any charges from the entry.

I do think they could call the immediate use of a taser into question, however.

Absurdity. So she was drunk and unruly and they land a plane to get her off.

Why not just let the attendants have tasers to "quiet" the problem passengers, and a roll of duct tape and some rope for them to wake up wearing?

No cell-phone pictures on an American Airlines commercial flight? Probably some bullshit rule associated with 911, the biggest clusterfuck of a coop of all time.

ok people.
if the cops want to enter your house without a warrant, they need what is called:

"EXIGENT CIRCUMSTANCES"

ie: imminent danger...etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_States_law

did they have it in this case? doesn't seem likely. and it is noted that in this possible domestic violence situation they immediately tasered the woman.

for less than a gun, even less than a deploying taser, you can buy Class IV lasers that will instantly blind people... and are rechargeable.

Get em before they're banned and you have to buy kits for them. Fuck a gun, these things will burn their face off and let the perp live to be punished more... good times.


http://wickedlasers.com.hk

My views on guns: They are good because they kill undesirable life, they get me food, and they prevent forces that might harm me from harming me. All things that a grocery store and a taser can do.