Original story This reminds me of the UCLA case. Here, as there, the situation was contained but the gaurds decided that it was better to use non-lethal force rather than be patient and de-escalate the situation. There seems to be a feeling within the law enforcement community that the taser is an acceptable means of encouraginc compliance, even in non-threatening situations. I've seen this myself in the field. We responded for a call of someone who had overdoseed and was now combative. At one point there were six people, three cops and three firefighters holding this person down, and it was pretty safe to say that he was no threat to anyone at this point. None the less, one of the cops threatened to tase him, to the point of removing the probes and holding the stun portion of the weapon under the subject's nose to try to gain his cooperation. It's not a nice thought to be living in a country where it is considered acceptable for the police to administer pain to elicit cooperation.
The UCLA incident came to mind for me as well. Less-than-lethal weapons like tasers, tear gas, and rubber bullets are clearly a bad idea, since it seems that the concept of "as long as I don't kill them, it doesn't matter" seems to be going through the minds of way too many people that are in the position to use these LTL weapons. Especially since trying to reverse the situation and use your own personal taser, mace, etc on a law enforcement officer would almost certainly become assaulting an officer which I expect is a fairly heavily-punished felony. And the requisite George Orwell paraphrasing: "All men are created equal, but some are more equal than others" (Animal Farm).
There's really no excuse for that. Saw the guy on the news today talking about what happened. Even if he was being aggressive, yelling, and telling to cop and the guard to f off, they had no right to taser him when he was holding the child. If he was being erratic and aggressive and NOT holding his infant, go ahead and zap him. He said he's bringing a lawsuit against the hospital and the police department, and rightfully so.
