be the first person in the UK to die after being shocked with the electro-shock weapon. A Home Office post-mortem reportedly found that he had died of “natural causes”.
if he died of natural casues ,how could it have been htat he died of a taser?

@1 Well it depends on how broad you want to cast the net that is meant by “natural”, for example a man killed by the spectres of those killed by jilted lovers would most definitely have died an “unnatural” death. Being shocked to death by a taser is bloody well natural compared to that.

Lee Griffin and I had a polite squabble about tasers on one of the riot threads a few days ago. And a couple of years ago, LC had a thread about disproportionate use of tasers across English (UK?) constabularies. Usage of tasers is high in some places and almost non-existent elsewhere.

In the case above in Cumbria, the victim was alone at home when he was tasered. It is reasonable to follow a general argument for use of tasers to disable people who resent a mortal threat to police officers or citizens. The taser is supposed to be the non-fatal alternative to shooting somebody who presents a mortal threat.

So far, there is no suggestion that the victim was armed with a gun, and he was alone. For police officers conducting a non-violent negotiation, there was no threat. And no need for a taser. (I have broken my personal rule about discussing rolling news where the information is unsubstantiated, and if the facts of this case turn out different, I’ll reflect.)

Charlieman, just looking at the guy:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-14562296
- if I were a policeman, and enforcing the law required arresting him at his home, and if he starts making trouble… using a taser seems perfectly reasonable to protec the lives of officers.

Perhaps it’s good to wait for post-mortem to determine if the taser was even one of many contributors to his death. It could also be just the shock of being arrested, or pepper sprayed. Or steroids, which may have caused him to have not only a lot of muscle, but also a lot of aggression.

(The steroids is just speculation, but doesn’t sound entirely unreasonable with a guy with that kind of looks.)

@4. pjt: “Perhaps it’s good to wait for post-mortem to determine if the taser was even one of many contributors to his death.”

I have no predictions either. But what I have learned is that the taser is the “non-lethal” alternative to a gun. And that the taser is used in circumstances where a gun would never be used.

The state strikes again, got to keep to the one a week quota.

Taser is definitely not generally lethal – which doesn’t mean that it couldn’t contribute to injury or even death. But the same is true of batons, and anything else, as well as wrestling without any weaponry or materials: the person that is arrested may always have a heart attack and die, and then the police is accuased of murdering people. Silly.

An old classmate of mine (not police) helped the doorman at a restaurant when a drunken customer attacked people. He just restrained the man, did not hit him in any way, did not use any weapon of any kind. The man got a heart attack. My mate got a prison sentence and had to pay support to the dead man’s children for the next 15 years – and all he tried to do was prevent anyone getting hurt. (This was not in Britain, but I think outcomes are very similar there.)

Naturally every death should be investigated, but looking at the picture of this person, I would be very surprised to find that steroid use weren’t a significant factor.

pjt,

It seems to me that giving the cops better ways of killing us is stupid. Given that they are in – no way – constrained from killing us. Quite what, apart from the decency of an individual cop, stops them is beyond me. It is also, apparently, beyond the ability of parliament to legislate in a meaningful way about this. Or you to figure it out.

If a cop kills you, do not expect justice.

Expect to be dead and expect to have a gravestone that says:

“I was stupid, but also a criminal that deserved to die.

At least, that’s what the cops said.”

I’d have thought that most of us would have thought that the death of Jean Charles de Menezes might have suggested that the police are not to be trusted.

Clearly, you think otherwise.

[8] “I’d have thought that most of us would have thought that the death of Jean Charles de Menezes might have suggested that the police are not to be trusted” – I take your point but would phrase it slightly differently.

I”m sure most individual cops are trustworthy but there seems to be a very serious problem with the way complaints against the police are handled (i.e. very little chance of officers being held accountable for wrong doing).

I think this is a very important question but one that is usually dealt with (on blogging boards) in absolutist, black or white terms.

In other words there is a surprising lack of nuance or absence of contextualising information that seems to ne explored in far more detail when other morally ambivalent actions are being discussed (look at all the analysis that too place as a result of the recent rioting).

The police are frequently stereotyped as fascist pigs, or goons of the state who are expected to play by the rules in all situations (while being filmed by the public).

As I say the question as to why individual officers lose it sometimes deserves a little more thought than the lazy sort of stereotypes that would be very quickly dismissed by the LC community if applied to other groups.

>It seems to me that giving the cops better ways of killing us is stupid.

That’s paranoid and silly. The police generally does not want to kill people (though there are always individuals who are exceptions, and there the cure is to take them out of the police, not make work difficult for all the good cops). Giving the police tasers does not help them kill people, quite to the contrary: other tools (like batons and sticks) are more lethal and can be wielded wrongly with more impunity.

The police are seriously harrassed for every case of death of someone in contact with them, however innocent they obviously are (though in some cases they aren’t – that’s why all deaths and other serious incidents must be investigated). Same for injury. And every discharge of the taser involves so much paperwork that no one is going to do it just for fun. In fact, many British police officers (as well as elsewhere) avoid being trained with taser just because it is a danger to their own career. It doesn’t make sense to manage the police like this.

Other means of stopping offenders are often more dangerous than taser. They are also more dangerous to the police. Making the police afraid of criminals is not a good thing for our liberties.

Once again, just look at the picture of the man who died and think yourself, how would you work it out if you were a policeman. Would you just run away? Is that what you want the police to do in face of recklessly behaving criminals?

>As I say the question as to why individual officers lose it sometimes deserves a
>little more thought than the lazy sort of stereotypes that would be very quickly
>dismissed by the LC community if applied to other groups.

Very well said.

Seconded @11.

>I’d have thought that most of us would have thought that the death of
>Jean Charles de Menezes might have suggested that the police are
>not to be trusted.

About as much as the Tottenham riots suggest that Londoners are not to be trusted.

Sure, the police makes mistakes. But if we totally try to eliminate those mistakes, we’ll suffer more from unintended and intended actions of others.

Aside from the fundamental problem that an innocent man was shot and killed by the police, a problem with the de Menezes case was the seemingly inevitable misinformation from ‘the police’ and ‘sources’, which was faithfully reported by the media without questioning (until later), and the apparent ‘closing of the ranks’ to avoid accountability and obfuscate what happened. And this misinformation without swift correction does not occur in just the most important cases but also the most (relatively) trivial, such as the injuries sustained by the police during the Kingsnorth climate camp.

This does not mean ‘the police’ are trigger-happy – the statistics do not bear that view out whatsoever, given the number of occasions on which firearms are discharged (of the order of 10) out of the number of authorised firearms operations (of the order of 20,000) a year (although my guess is that if Inspector Gadget got his way, the numbers would be incredibly bad). What it does mean is a continued erosion of our trust; that when death or something else bad happens, such as in the case reported by the OP, we can’t trust that ‘the police’ did everything right, and this isn’t good in a system of ‘policing by consent’ where “The police are the public and the public are the police”. It furthers the view of “Us and Them”, division and inevitable but ultimately baseless antagonism.

We could do with much less ‘closing of the ranks’ by police and less ‘they are all evil’ from other members of the public.

(Incidentally, an interesting thing about the phone-hacking saga is that a spotlight has been put on Fedorcio, who is accused of being partially responsible for misinformation in the de Menezes case. ‘Only’ six years after the killing…)

ukliberty:
>Aside from the fundamental problem that an innocent man was shot and killed
>by the police, a problem with the de Menezes case was the seemingly inevitable
>misinformation from ‘the police’ and ‘sources’, which was faithfully reported by
>the media without questioning

Yep. And here the point is, in my opinion, that the real responsibility for this does not lie with the rank and file of police who walk the streets (and sometimes carry guns and even shoot people). They are never the ones who talk to the press, they never pull the strings of publicity. Instead, they face inquiries and potentially lose their jobs and pensions as a result of an error they made in a situation where they had little opportunity to think, consider and plan what to do.

The shady communications of the police in the de Menezes case was not the fault of those who were involved in the shooting and in the hunt for 7/7 bombers. They were working under great pressure. They surely made mistakes. But that is inevitable, because policing sometimes requires making split-second decisions on the face of sheer terror and fear. In such circumstances, I think it is understandable, even if wrong, that an innocent man may get shot.

What is less understandable is that the political echelons cover up, confuse and get away with it. *They* don’t have to make the decisions in a split second in fear of their lives. They work on their desks; the pressure is political and from the public, but it would be their job to take it. They have more than a second or a minute to decide what to do. But they want to look good to the press, in order to advance in their careers.

(I am a complete outsider regarding these cases: I don’t work for the police and I don’t even live in the UK, but I see the same pattern in discussions regarding the police in Britain, and Norway, and other countries. As you can see, the more I see what the mainstream media and Inspector Gadget are about, the more I start to trust the latter.)

In 1999 four police officers gunned down Amadou Diallo, a 22 year old black male from Guinea – the shooting is discussed at great length in “Seven Seconds in the Bronx” (chapter 6 in Gladwell’s ‘Blink’).
http://www.gladwell.com/blink/guide/blink_guide.pdf

Why the cops shot this man might shed some light on the De Menezes incident?
Gladwell suggests our usual cognitive processes can be disrupted during times of extreme stress, for example, when we sense mortal danger, and heart rate exceeds 145bpm.
To a certain extent training can go some way to ameliorate this phenomena but simulation of life threatening situations is not the same as the real thing.

Once highly aroused Gladwell uses the analogy of ‘arguing with a dog’ (or a drunk), if we think of De Menezies we have to remember that officers (incorrectly) believed he was an armed terrorist.

Some American police services have taken to virtually banning high speed chases – if memory serves the beating of Rodney King followed a 100+mph police chase?
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lapd/kingarrests.html

Amnesty criticises police Taser use after death

Those pesky undead human rights NGOs, eh. Now, apparently, you can’t even kill ‘em!

We could do with much less ‘closing of the ranks’ by police and less ‘they are all evil’ from other members of the public.

Presumably that’s why they keep murdering members of the public.

“You’ve got to kill people, to have respect for people. You’ve got to kill some people anyway. You can’t kill everybody. ‘Cos you wouldn’t have anyone left to respect you if you did.”

13 well aid as for Amnesty they said the IRA were being given a hard time by the tory press in the late 80′s, lost all respect for them after that.

Another one murdered.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/24/man-dies-taser-arrest-bolton

Three deaths in the past two weeks, according to today’s Times.

Another one murdered by self:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-14661544

Jacob MIchael, 25, was probably killed due to incompetent restraint. The Guardian http://bit.ly/qqqlcq

See: Restraint Asphyxia – Silent Killer, Part ONE http://bit.ly/qwaL2x

NYPD training video: Positional asphyxia 2003 – YouTube http://bit.ly/eRBQRq

The police wrongfully kill people all the time due to incompetent restraint. It is as well known mechanism of death in the criminal justice system; regular citizens or caretakers would be charged with manslaughter at least. Demand better training of the police.