Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain dead

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Jonas
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by Jonas »

AEmer wrote:That's not actually accurate. Anybody can join Hjemmeværnet and gain access to weaponry; primarily light combat rifles and non-concealable weapons, of course. And hunters can buy shotguns, no sweat. Both robbers and homeowners have access to weapons, and 1 in 100 homes in Denmark _will_ have a firearm tucked away somewhere.
Could you give me a source on the 1 in 100 homes statistic? Because that sounds... highly surprising.

Also, didn't they make it illegal for national guardsmen to bring their guns home with them?
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DDL »

VectorM: Norway, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland all have national service programs, and Sweden did until 2010, apparently.

These often* instill people with a proper sense of gun safety, control and discipline, rather than "Imma hold it sidewayz liek a badass" or similar. Access to firearms is obviously a factor (i.e. zero guns = zero misuse of guns), but even that is a pleotropic factor (do they make you fill out a fuckton of forms and take a training course and make you refresh that course yearly, or do they just hand you a gun and say "enjoy"?).

Plus all those countries have fairly low populations. And high standards of living.

REAL LIFE MORE COMPLICATED THAN SINGLE STATISTIC shocker.


Regarding the actual issue here, I'd go with tragic accident. I don't really think we can even call it further than that.
I mean, unless we have statistics for "number of people rendered braindead by taser-induced pavement impacts vs number of people who are not" and similar statistics for "number of people who go on to cause mass carnage that could've been prevented by a quick tazing vs number of people who don't", we can't really call it either way. Shit just happens, pretty much, and from one isolated incident it's usually impossible to make a call on whether change needs to be implemented. This is just a freak accident that happened to have horrible consequences. It's not like he shot her in the head with a rifle, or anything.
In an ideal world policies would be decided based on meta-analysis of all the available information, but even then you would get freak accidents, to which people would cry "IF YOU DIDN'T DO X, THEN Y WOULDN'T'VE HAPPENED!!!!". While they would be correct, as long as the number still come out in favour of the current policy of "doing X" being better overall than "not doing X", then I'd say they should stick with it, since you'll get even more people crying out "WHY DID YOU NOT DO X", if you change.

TL:DR version: I'M SITTING ON TEH FENCE, HERE


Also, the comments on that dashcam video website are comedy gold. So much 'tard, in handy list form.



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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

It was a conservative estimate; I seemed to recall a 50k homes figure, though that would actually be 2%. Anyway, an easy calculation would go like this: The number of hunters who are members of Danmarks Jægerforbund tallys 95k
http://www.proactive.dk/da/Nyheder/danm ... rbund.aspx
supposing half of those have firearms at home, and supposing that there's not too many father-son hunters or hunters living together, you divide by the number of households, 2,5 million, and you get a bit more than 1% from hunters alone.

Hunters typically own rifles and shotguns, both of which can blow your head off, but they usually take good care of their weapons, and keep them locked up.

In fact, the black-market value of the weapons makes them a number one target for burglars and thieves: Whereas most stolen goods fetch a much lower price on the black market than they would on the open market, guns fetch at least as much on the black market as their worth on the open market.

This statistic, btw, looks pretty darn off:

http://ekstrabladet.dk/nationen/article1589908.ece

I've no idea where they come up with 750k weapons in danish homes, but I expect it's a few people owning a lot of guns; I expect some hunters probably own 10 firearms, and a lot will own 2.

But yeah, they're not as uncommon as you'd think.

@DDL

It might be a tragic accident that couldn't be helped, but it sure looks like negligence to me - I think he could've made a much better decision if the policies were right.
I mean, at least make it a rule that you don't taze cuffed criminals making a run for it. At least do that much. And charge the people in charge of the policies with negligent homicide for putting a weapon into the officers hand without instructing him in its proper use. Maybe the DA won't be able to get anyone convicted of anything, but this case looks open enough that someone should be charged, because killing a non-threatening person? Still a pretty serious crime, even if noone meant to do it.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by VectorM »

Code: Select all

REAL LIFE MORE COMPLICATED THAN SINGLE STATISTIC shocker.
Well, that was kind of my point. There are countries, that have far more guns than others, yet have less crime in general and even less gun related crimes. So there are many other factors to it all.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DDL »

AEmer wrote: It might be a tragic accident that couldn't be helped, but it sure looks like negligence to me - I think he could've made a much better decision if the policies were right.
My point was it was a tragic accident that totally COULD'VE been helped. Clearly if she hadn't been tazed she might not've fallen, but until we sit down with the statistics, we can't say for sure that the sort of policies that would lead to things like this NOT happening wouldn't also have knock-on effects on other situations, potentially in a negative light.

Bear in mind: if the cop had just grabbed her and she'd fallen and hit her head, one might equally expect people demanding to know "why he had to be so physical when he had a perfectly good tazer, coz ffs man, he outweighs her by like 150lbs!!!11".

It's only if we have statistics to show that physically restraining fleeing individuals is better (on average) than tazing them, that we can make a call. And even then: it's on average. Even with a well-implemented policy that considers all the factors involved, sometimes the response will be the wrong response. And a policy that DOES consider all those factors is going to be ludicrously comprehensive anyway, and runs the risk of being so context-specific that it's even more unwieldy than my attempts at AI programming:

"Suspect is fleeing!"
*checks suspect's sex*
*checks suspect's bodyweight*
*checks suspects current state of inebriation, calibrated for past case-history*
*determines suspect's mitigating factors (handcuffs, shoelaces, etc)*
*looks up suspect's likely hazard factor on a risk table*
*compiles*
*machine says TAZE*

"oh, nvm: she's fucking miles away now."

So, for instance, do we actually have evidence that the cop was not trained in the correct use of the tazer? Hell, do we even know if this counts as incorrect use? Apparently there were sufficient caveats in the definitions of appropriate tazing that he officially was entirely within his rights to zap her. So there's that. And it's not really negligent homicide: if he'd grabbed her and she'd fallen and hit her head, would you call that negligent homicide? If she'd run past him and he'd tripped her to stop her, and she'd fallen and hit her head, would you call that negligent homicide? If he'd tapped her on the shoulder and she'd had a heart attack, would you call that negligent homicide? Negligent homicide is more "deliberate stupidity that leads to death", like if he'd put her in the back but not checked whether he'd closed the door, then sped off at 90mph and pulled a sharp turn, flinging her onto the road.

Though clearly it's a tricky issue.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by bobby 55 »

Also she's been involved in a couple of hit and run accidents. If she managed to grab a vehicle and badly injur someone there'd be just as big a shitstorm about her not being stopped. That doesn't mean I think she deserves her current state.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by DaveW »

I recall seeing this yesterday on the Escapist (on my monthly check for ZeroPunctuation videos); frankly, I don't see the fuss.

While it's not objective, it's hard to ignore the fact that she's probably committed hit and runs, and was trying to escape while handcuffed doped up on cocaine. That's not to say she deserved it but she didn't do anything to help her own situation. So it's fair, I think, to say she had to be stopped from escaping. However the policeman tackled her, she would have probably hit her head. If he lunged at her and she fell, she would have. If he jumped at her, she would have. There's only so much you can do.

Maybe I'm just an asshole but I struggle to have any sympathy for her.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by Jonas »

Of course you don't have sympathy for her, literally the only things you know about her are that she's a criminal drug addict who was put in a coma while attempting to escape from the police.

If you want to, however, you might be able to distance yourself enough from that to see her as a human being - alternatively you might be able to learn enough about her to understand who she really was and how she ended up in such a sorry state. Either of those solutions might go a long way towards letting you have sympathy for her.

But there is literally nothing in it for you, in fact you're probably better off just shrugging it off as "drug addict does stupid thing, gets dead" and moving on with your life.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AEmer »

DDL, I see your point. There's only so much you can do to try to understand a situation before you must act.
I'm making a fairly large assumption, but that assumption is that police officers are allowed to taze people trying to evade custody even though they're not hostile or threatening. I think that's wrong.
I understand your point about optimizing police to minimize public damage. I get that notion, but I don't agree with it, and here's why.

Justice is a question of individual responsibility and accountability, and most importantly, we must never allow ourselves to be irresponsible on the individual level, even if it is more responsible on a societal level, because that would be travesty of justice.

For instance, what if you could snap your fingers and instantly incarcerate all those people who would or have comitted homicides ever, future, past and current, for the mere price of 1000 random heart attacks striking random people every year?
It's a much lower rate of death per year than the current system, but if you had the power to make that change, you would now be responsible for the 1000 deaths, not the murderers. Of course, it's a bit artificial to hold you responsible for the choice and not the non-choice (letting the murderers go free), but in the case of government, I believe it is a crucial distinction, and I believe that it's actually a reasonable perspective.

It's purely hypothetical example, but as a society, the onus is on us to act civilized even as we uphold civility. Sometimes you obviously can't afford that; sometimes, you need to be harsh and unfair to create mild and fair conditions. Sometimes, there really is a greater good.
But the civil justice system is not the place for that. It is for upholding and maintaining peoples rights, and creating an environment in which to live governed by law, and the first step in doing that is holding the practitioners of said law responsible under the law.

And look, to be clear, a girl is dead because this copper used means to stop her from running away that I believe should only be used if the copper had felt threatened. I find this a reasonable precaution for a weapon such as this.

I'm not saying that anybody should necessarily be punished, but I think someone here messed up, I think this was avoidable, and I think a judge and jury should have the final say in that matter...and the only way that would happen is if the DA decided to press negligent homicide charges, to have the issue resolved.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by Hashi »

To whoever is interested, this happened 5 months ago (I thought it was recent), and she still hasn't woken up and doctors don't think she will. So there you go.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by Jonas »

Fucking Hell Chris, the last post here was 4 months old. Did you really have to go and revive this?
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by ZeroPresence »

Censored, lol.
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by gamer0004 »

Da fuck? I liked that post :(
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by AgentOrange »

Pardon my curiosity, but what exactly did he even say?
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Re: Cop tasers a girl, who then falls and who is now brain d

Post by shadowblade34 »

And now we're keeping ig alive by wondering what the post said.
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