Then, as she falls, he yells, GET ON THE GROUND!

He's watched too much anime. =(

You know he practiced that in front of a mirror for hours the day it was issued. He has the spirit of all 10-year-old boys trapped in doughy southern cop bodies. TASER!!!

The Youtube comments to this are gold.

A brief summary of some of them:

"THAT BITCH GOT WHAT SHE WANTED!"

They happen in Portland all the time. With real guns.

And western Washington, don't forget western Washington!

People get tased constantly in California. Or shot. Whatever gun like object is closer to his free hand.

Bullshit. If he'd warned her three times that he was going to shoot her and then shot her with a real gun just because she didn't do what she was told, would that be justified? Cops shouldn't be using their taser unless they are in danger or someone else is. Just tasing (tazing?) old people because they won't put their hands on the car or whatever, despite them obviously posing no threat, is completely unjustified. This pig should be stripped of his badge and thrown in prison (general population) for assaulting an old woman like this.

I'd go even further and say that they shouldn't use it except in cases where they'd ordinarily use a gun.

But most departments are not so strict; many allow its use in all cases where the person is considered a "danger," without regard for age, health, or other factors that would allow one person to handle being electrocuted better than another.

Tasers aren't guns. They're a way of getting people to stfu and listen to the cop. If she had done what she was told, this all could have been avoided. Sure, he could have tried to fight her down... but why? Clearly she was going to just try and fight back anyway.

When he zapped her, she had her back to him and she wasn't moving towards her car. He's a shitty cop for letting this situation get out of control, he's a shitty cop for answering verbal abuse with force, and he's a shitty cop taking down someone who was neither fleeing or endangering him.

That said, he'd be a shitty cop whether he took her down with the taser or his bare hands, the zap gun isn't the big problem here.

The fact that she wasn't listening doesn't automatically justify anything beyond an arrest. Use of force is dealt with separately, AFAIK, and is justified later according to common law regarding self-defense.

Again, I just think tasers should be used a lot less than they are currently, and they shouldn't be used outside of what can be considered healthy adults.

And I guess there's just this sense that, regardless of what the system allows, she's lived long enough that she shouldn't have to deal with shit like getting tased.

It sort of goes along with Patton Oswalt's bit about how if you're 100 you should be allowed to strangle people, because if they can't defend against it they deserve to die anyway.

Two cents: Isn't appropriate use of force always a judgment call within broad regulatory boundaries? The question is, was there a better way to handle this than giving a geriatric pain in the ass the same treatment you'd give a belligerent twentysomething on meth that might actually pose a danger?

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