Jtgibson wrote:
Have you ever tried to hold down a person who is struggling? I can assure you that even with one person per arm and leg, the restrained person can still inflict considerable injury on the people restraining them -- including forearm smashes, punches, kicks, knee strike, elbow strikes, etc.
Yeah, I have held people down while they tried to get out of it. It really isn't hard to subdue a person (if you approach from behind anyway). He wasn't punching and kicking though. Lots of people, they could just bar his arms behind his back and...instantly in position for handcuffs.
If you think it isn't hard, then the person you were trying to subdue wasn't trying very hard to avoid you. Remember, the person being arrested literally doesn't care if he hurts anyone as long as he gets away.
Look, if they really had that much trouble to stop the flailing, sure. They didn't. In this situation they really didn't have any problem.
The videos make it pretty clear that they did. Even if you dispute that, the opposite is certainly not true, so you can't simply say they didn't have trouble.
I only saw tasering after he got hand cuffed.
Yes, after one hand was cuffed. Not both. At the point where one hand was cuffed, he became more dangerous to them.
If...he had been fighting them off him and someone got injured, using a taser to GET him subdued might have been used.
Good gads man, that's preposterous. You're basically saying every suspect deserves a free hit at the cops before they can be subdued with more force. The point of police work is to apply as little force as they need to to minimize the risk of injury to the suspect and themselves. They're trained extensively on that. That means if they feel during the struggle that an injury is becoming all too likely, they'll increase the force to reduce the risk. Without applying this basic bit of common sense, cops would rack up injuries fairly quickly.
If they tased him only after he'd hurt someone, it would literally be too late. Instead they chose the next best option: They tased him only after it was clear his struggling was putting everyone in a much more dangerous situation, and after he was warned repeatedly.
They still got him down after they actually tried. He was on the ground in this video without use of the taser. Perhaps you're right about taser being efficient and such, but it seemed excessive.
"Seemed excessive" is no basis to cast judgment on the officers when you know nothing about what it takes to do their job. They actually got him on the ground by accident; he and one of the other officers walking him out tripped. But getting him down and getting his arms and legs properly pinned are two different things, and it's clear at least that it took some struggle to do that.
The guys in cuffs in the end. He's on the ground. Still shouting. At that point he is tasered.
He was only in one cuff when he was tased. It's not as clear in that video (which incidentally is from the phone he handed to a friend). There's almost no point tasing a handcuffed suspect unless he's continuing to pose significant risk, but there's no evidence at all that he was tased after being successfully cuffed.
I'm saying any action past the point where he's already cuffed, not to mention on the ground, is just excessive.
"On the ground" does not equal subdued, so duh on that. "Already cuffed" was not what happened, and even then there are circumstances where tasing a handcuffed suspect might still be necessary if they're causing enough of a struggle. You really have no basis on which to say what's excessive and what isn't. And although the angle of this video is terrible, one thing that is clear is that he is not tased until after 1) he's been warned, and 2) he's started yanking his arms out of the officers' grasps.
Lummox JR
Being able to apply force and being able to apply the right force needed to subdue him are two different things. From the video it is not at all clear that they had any room to act differently than they did. He was struggling too much. Picking him up would have been far easier than restraining his arm. You're projecting some false ideas on how easy it is to wrestle a struggling person down and pin their limbs exactly where they need to be. Anyone who's weighed in on this who's spoken from experience has said outright that sometimes it takes even more force than this.
And this they tried to do, and he struggled out of their grasp once one cuff was on. I notice you did not address the fact that you were speaking out of ignorance; you still are. Handcuffing a compliant person is a completely different field from handcuffing a person who chooses to fight at every step.
First of all, you've proven you're in no position to make that judgment that they don't need weapons. You know jack about what it takes to do that part of their job, and your assessment of it boils down to pure speculation. Second, there's a huge difference between being able to subdue a man and being able to subdue him with minimal injury to himself or the officers. The use of a weapon may not strictly be necessary in all cases but police are trained not to use them until it's clearly a better choice than the alternative. If they'd given him another ten minutes to tire out, sure, they wouldn't have had to tase him, but they would have taken some needless hits and he would have been hurt worse in the process, and meanwhile he's still in the room causing a ruckus. So nobody would have been served by the police avoiding the taser; the only one who could have improved that situation was the student himself, by complying.
There's plenty of room for argument, since your argument has no basis in fact. The idea that the taser was unnecessary stems from an idea that it would have been easily possible to subdue him completely without injury to anyone, which frankly is ludicrous even from looking at the video even though you claim to have done so. And a loose cuff is indeed a weapon; it's a blunt steel object, that when open also has parts that can serve as a slicing edge.
He did in fact cause minor injury to one of the officers' legs. But if you're suggesting a suspect has to hit an officer before stronger force can be used against them, you're being ridiculous. An officer knows the longer it takes to get a suspect into cuffs and into a car, the more of a danger they pose. A guy who's flailing his arms about and kicking wildly even while people are trying to restrain them poses them a significant danger--often not life-threatening but still serious. Unless you're suggesting cops should simply let themselves pick up a scrape or a bump or two during every arrest, which would take a cumulative toll pretty quickly, then the assertion that they shouldn't escalate their force in these situations is irrational.
They had no reasonable choice but to do it as they did. You're coloring your view of this through your complete inexperience (which apparently extends even to the point of never having seen an episode of Cops), and through what appears to be a reflexive belief that anything that potentially can be called police brutality under any circumstances, automatically is. There are two possible interpretations of the videos:
The first one is where you fall, only you failed utterly to leave any room for doubt. And frankly, this interpretation isn't even reasonable, since the one thing that is clear is that he's struggling quite a lot. If a man is struggling that much, there's really no logical way you can say he was easy to subdue--particularly when you know absolutely nothing about what it takes to do so.
Lummox JR