Haha! I read the last line as ... interfering with a police officer's rap
Jedi light-sabre beats Taser in Oregon parking-lot fracas
For those of you who've ever wondered, like you do, whether the Jedi lightsabre or the Taser is the more effective weapon, we're delighted to report that the electric dispenser of justice is no match for Obi-Wan Kenobi's mighty glowing tool. Police mugshot of David Canterbury For proof, look no further than the case of David …
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Friday 16th December 2011 13:05 GMT M7S
@ Richard39, I think to be fair to the cops
He's wandering around, ranting and waving something which could (perhaps not all police officers are experts in the subject of the rigidity of children's toys) give someone a very nasty whack on the head (leading to concussion, sub-dural haematoma etc) or (end-on) a jab in the eye rupturing the visceral tissue. Also should they fail to successfully restrain him he might go on to dash into traffic (result: he sues them for failing in their duty of care, or a car crash ensues in which someone else gets hurt) or he could just run about and whack someone else on the head if he slips out of their grasp (restraint training doesnt make an office Chuck Norris).
He's already assaulted three people and the officers on the ground probably dont have time at that immediate moment to ascertain how badly this has been done. I expect that there's probably a procedure of escalation of warnings in line with escalation of "force" and whilst me might not be in a suitable condition to understand and comply if such warnings were issued (and I wasn't there but neither, probably, were you) but you've got to be reasonable about such things.
OK they're paid (unless they are the equivalent of specials) to take risks to protect the public but this doesnt mean that they have to return home to their families mutilated or disabled as a result of people wishint that police work was like Dixon of Dock Green.
I'll agree that there are plenty of times when police officers over-react or get it wrong, sometimes down to genuine mistakes, sometimes down to being belligerent and unprofessional. From what I see here I think that the intial deployment of a less-lethal option, but one trying to avoid direct physical contact given the information they probably had to work on was not unreasonable.
Dont think that grappling someone is an injury free option. In many cases significant trauma can occur, to all parties involved.
But the headline and tone of the article is quite entertaining.
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Friday 16th December 2011 22:11 GMT Figgus
You are far too logical for this thread. This lot seems to be the Daily Mail readers of El Reg, and logic has no place in their rhetoric of blame.
The fact that tasing is better than getting your ass whipped by a baton or having 4 cops hurl you to the concrete seems to be overlooked by most of the posters here.
If taking someone down and restraining them is so easy, I'd like to see most of the OMGPOLICEBRUTALITY crowd pull it off. Sadly, they are clueless about reality and find it much better to criticize this and go back to playing counterstike.
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Friday 16th December 2011 21:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Latest advice for scallies and chavs everywhere
Remember lads, all you need to defeat the taser packing heat of the bobby on the beat is a 15.99 light-sabre from the shop that we know as toys-r-us, toys-r-us, toys-r-us!
Either that or a mobile faraday cage!
That gets me thinking of a new experiment for /bang on the beeb ;-)
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Saturday 17th December 2011 11:10 GMT Destroy All Monsters
The midichloridians are strong with this one!
But really, how many degrees of "actions that are frowned upon" are there? And do you count up or down and is 0 included?
And then they throw in the meaningless "arrested for resisting arrest and interfering with a police officer". Hah.
Sounds like imperials. They were not the Boys in White, perchance?
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Sunday 18th December 2011 18:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Some technical details about tasers for those interested...
Note - this info goes way beyond what the manufacturer will admit, so the certified taser "experts" will not be aware of any of this.
The 1999-era M26 taser has a waveform that actually is a very short pulse of high frequency. These two characteristics actually did help to make it arguably reasonably "safe" with respect to direct cardiac effects.
Where it all went wrong was the 2003-era X26 taser. They changed the output waveform to also include a DC offset pulse that repeats at the 19Hz PRF. This component (the majority) of the output waveform is no longer short duration and no longer high frequency. They've unintentionally abandoned two key safety features for a trivial 5% increase in effectivity. The death rate PER DEPLOYMENT approximately doubled with the introduction of the X26 taser. The overall taser-associated death rate jumped from several per YEAR to about ten per MONTH.
Even one of the company's own experts has confirmed that the M26 has a wider safety margin than the X26. In other words, they've confirmed exactly what I've stated above.
For those that still refuse to accept the cause-and-effect relationship between being tasered and sometimes being dead, please respond to the taser's 'Curious Temporal Asymmetry' argument (Google the phrase).
For those that still feel that "tasers are safer than guns", please realize that tasers replace lower and safer forms of force in 99+% of all deployments. So your point is obviously true, but rarely applicable.
To be clear, the evil swirling around tasers is related to the waveform design error that makes the X26 far more potentially deadly than is reasonable, and the false claims by the manufacturer regarding the risk of death from the X26 taser. It's the false claims about safety that increase the usage pattern to the point where all sorts of people are being tasered, and the occasional non-violent subject is being killed by police (that have been fooled by the false claims).
I hope that this detail helps to clarify the complicated background of the actual problem with tasers.