Excessive force

DocBrain had a situation yesterday where a young psychotic woman pushed past him and fled from a locked psychiatric ward. DocBrain could only grab her arm as she flailed at him and could not stop her without using a martial arts move that might have broken her arm or at least dislocated her shoulder, so he let her go. Later, she was subdued by a group of people. Luckily, she had not harmed any patients in her rumspringa. DocBrain needed some safer way to stop her.

Let's assume that you get into a situation where the police need to come down hard on you. What would you prefer? Being shot? Billy-clubbed? Tasered? Shot with a tranquilizer? Kung-fu kicked?

This morning ABC News ran a story about the horrors of being Tasered. One young woman reported impaired vision after being Tasered twice.

This story had three major flaws.

• Structural injury leading to impaired vision is testable in many ways, but the results of such testing were not discussed in the news story. This implies that her symptoms had no organic basis and were just a hysteric reaction or perhaps malingering to get public attention.
• Did the police just pick a random person to Taser? This was omitted from the story, so the assumption is that she was a risk to others at the time she was Tasered.
• There was a safer, better way to subdue her. No alternative to Tasering was presented in this story. In fact, data not presented in the story indicate that many thousands have been Tasered without permanent effects. Those who require Tasering are often under the influence of drugs and alcohol which, alone or in combination, can be lethal or toxic. Blindness, for example, is a known adverse reaction to mixing alcohol with tobacco. Cause and effect. Cause and effect.

The story gave no solution, just sensationalized the woman's story. There were three possible motives for the story:

• Brutal police use Tasers to harm their victims
• Don't be a menace to society
• ABC or it's parent company have invested in a different technology to subdue violent people and are setting the public stage for such a product.

Typical news.