geo8rge

https://www.courthousenews.com/2011/06/29/37770.htm

https://www.courthousenews.com/2011/06/29/Tasered.pdf

EsoxLucius

Protect and Serve, ya know.

adablduya

i don't see any mention of charges for trespassing or some other reference to illegal or unauthorized entry (into the home) without a warrant. what kind of BS is that ?

f-ing a-holes. i'd sue the **** out of them for alot more than $25k a charge.

genec

What were the police chasing him for in the first place? The only thing I can figure out is "failure to communicate."

dolanp

Holy crap, the story is much worse than I imagined. That cop needs to go to prison.

beebe

Burn them at the stake.

Chief

Is it my imagination (or paranoia) or is there a rise in these instances where citizens are going about their lives, and a LEO comes along and causes chargeable crimes to occur?

The "beer summit" had to be held after the good Harvard professor was apprehended for being in his own house. I hear about these citizen/police conflicts almost daily where the officer causes a non-criminal situation to escalate into citizens being charged with a crime!

Can we not expect any better from these servants of the state?

Don in Austin

We make a lot of cynical comment about lawyers and there is a lot of cynicism about lawsuits, but this example proves how much we need them at times!

Don in Austin

Northwestrider

My guess is that it's always been like this, it's just that it is more easily reported today than it was in our past

Limey1212

What a pair of heroes! I thought a taser was supposed to be for defense, not shooting people, (in this case a minor), in the back. What excuse can they possibly offer? Incredible.

mnemia

The story is awful, but not surprising. And it encapsulates a lot of the complaints people have about police and tasers. The problem with them is that because they are non-lethal, the police feel free to use them with impunity whenever they want. So you get incidents like this one where they use them just to be sadistic.

Chris516

+1

Chris516

+1

skye

I have yet to meet a LEO who wasn't a complete rimlicker. These guys are probably the cream of the Dayton PD.

dougmc

I don't know, but I have my doubts.

Instead, I think they're simply better reported now -- that they've always happened, but now when they do, people post about it, often there's video of the incident, etc. If anything, I would expect them to happen less, as the police know the odds are getting higher and higher that somebody will be recording their actions -- and often the police themselves are recording their actions, and they'd have to explain the lack of such recordings to their superiors if there is an incident that makes them look bad.

Of course, I don't have any actual evidence to support (or disprove) this belief.

DeadheadSF

I'm willing to bet that it's a mixture. The prison "industry" is booming right now - the more people they fill them with, the more money private contractors that actually run many of the prisons make. Then, there's the revenue generation (extortion) side of it. California, for example, is in financial trouble. So the police are actively being used as armed thugs, ticketing and fining people for every possible violation, no matter how minor, because it pulls in money for the city/state/whatever.

Then, there's just the overall shift towards fascism/totalitarianism that's been going on for a long time in this country. Right now, for the first time ever, we can officially declare the USA to be a police state. They're actively attacking anyone and everyone for such "crimes" as filming/photographing PUBLIC officials in PUBLIC places doing a PUBLIC job on the PUBLIC dime. Police, as far as I'm concerned, are the rich man's army - a gang of street thugs tasked with maintaining the status quo at all costs.

Just my $0.02.

dougmc

Officially? Which organization sets the guidelines for an "official" police state?

Recording the police has always upset them -- this is not a new development. The only thing really new is that where before, only a few people had video cameras -- now almost everybody does.

And as for the crimes you're referring to -- only a handful of states have these wiretap laws that require the consent of all parties -- and these are the laws that police generally use when there's actual prosecutions. Without these laws, it's mostly just intimidation and if people are arrested, the charges are dropped -- which is still bad, but it's better than the wiretap laws.

In general, the situations that have made national news have involved the wiretap laws.

bhop

Those cops need to do jail time.

phoebeisis

This would never happen in New Orleans.
We have a very professional PD that never uses excessive force and they never cover up for one another.
Charlie

Dchiefransom

Genec, the police were after the kid because after the officer stopped him, which we don't know what for, the kid just took off without being released by the officer. We don't know why the officer stopped him, though.

Chief, the Cambridge professor was not apprehended for being in his own home, he was arrested for creating a disturbance outside his home after the police Sgt followed proper procedure in response to a call of someone forcing their way into a house by forcing the front door open with their shoulder. It's not like a professor at Cambridge would ever feel "entitled" and throw a fit instead of thanking the police for actually doing their job correctly. Too bad we didn't have a video on YouTube of that incident. Interestingly, what wasn't reported widely about that incident is why the front door needed to be forced open. I read that it was a previous break-in that messed it up, and the university hadn't fixed it yet. When I read the different articles on that incident, I was comparing it in my mind to the US Supreme Court case of Carolyn Warren when she sued Washington DC over the police there not doing their job properly to help her.

Digital_Cowboy

I may be mistaken, but I could have sworn that the article made it clear that:

a) at least the first officer on the scene knew the MINOR CHILD
b) knew that the MINOR CHILD is mentally handicapped/disabled
c) that the first officer on the scene took the MINOR CHILD's garbled speech to be a sign of disrespect leading to his being pepper sprayed and tased
d) the MINOR CHILD who suffers from a mental disability/handicap not knowing what was going on attempted to return to his parent's/mother's home in an effort to enlist her help in understanding what was going on
e) whereupon the first officer on the scene proceeds to escalate things by calling for backup and said backup coming from multiple jurisdictions

Agreed, that we still do NOT know why the officer (who from all indications knew the MINOR CHILD) stopped him. See the first paragraph from the article to support my claim.

Chris516

The article did say that Officer Hooper knew all those things ahead of time.

genec

LOL Good one. Don't they just shoot first...

Chief

Dchiefransom,
I guess my point was more concern about lack of constraint & intelligence on the part of police. In the case of the "beer summit" professor, there was no crime occuring, and there was not going to be a criminal event. The neighbor THOUGHT they saw something suspicous; fine.... they called police. How come it had go downhill once the police appeared?

This is sort of a "tree falls in the forest" perspective.... If the neighbor was apathetic, & no report made, all would have been well for everyone. Across the country, how many homeowners came home from work, and had to shove their front door open with a shoulder? A few I suppose, but how many of those scenarios will escalate into a "poo" storm because an investigating LEO can't keep his ego in check?

Given that a hundred different officers had made the contact with the disabled kid on the bike, what percentage would have led to a calm, civil outcome? I fear that the odds are sliding in the wrong direction in our current society.

If no crime is occuring, then contact with police should not lead to arrest. We pay these guys good money to keep their cool, stuff the ego, and sort out real problems from imaginary ones.

I can dream right!

dougmc

Playing devil's advocate here, it's entirely possible that this MINOR CHILD's speech really was a sign of disrespect.

After all, "mentally handicapped" can mean a thousand different things, and most people so labeled are perfectly capable of being disrespectful to police officers when the situation warrants.

Now, the police should not be busting skulls or tasing folk just because somebody was disrespectful to them, whatever the circumstance, but that's another matter ...

We've only heard one side of this that I'm aware of. I imagine the other side will of course say that everything that happened was appropriate and such, but we should at least give them the chance. And then it ends up in court and witnesses and evidence will appear and maybe the truth will be divined. Maybe. Or they'll just settle out of court and we'll never know.