Tasers and Teens

Earlier this week, there was a confrontation in Indiana. A person was being “combative” and threatening several others in his vicinity. Cops had previously been called to this same location to deal with this person for similar behavior.

Apparently, there was some effort by the cops to subdue the person, evidenced by the statement in every news report I’ve seen that the person was “slapped”. When those efforts failed, the person in question was tasered.

Now, this is a routine scenario, right? Happens every day in every State, and in many cities both rural and urban and everything in between.

Well… not exactly. You see, the person in question this time was a 10 yo kid.

Now, as usual, we have several people defending the kid, saying that something else should have been done. In a not-so-usual twist, among the most vocal in this are some Libertarians.

I’m not one of them.

You see, I’ve been trained in Juvenile Justice restraint techniques, everything from gentle requests all the way to slapping hand and ankle cuffs on. I’ve worked in Juvenile Justice-linked facilities, and I’ve been a teacher of grades 6-12.

I’ve worked with kids, both at the DJJ-linked facility as well as in my classroom, that I didn’t stand a chance at physically restraining, and I’m a decently large adult male.

But apparently the kid in question was normal sized, maybe even somewhat small, being 94 lbs at 10 yo. Reading between the lines on the news report linked above, it appears that the daycare he was at was at their wits’ end. I’m sure they tried several different things to try to get this kid to calm down, and I’m sure they had tried several different techniques over some weeks. I say this because the cops had already been called about this same kid once before, and daycares, like schools, don’t just call cops willy-nilly – contrary to the impression you get from just reading the news. So the daycare finally took the most drastic step it could – it actually called the cops. Not just once, but twice in as many days.

I’m also sure the cops did the best they could in the situation that presented itself. Again, APD’s ineptness aside, I don’t think even an APD cop would have just tasered this kid for no reason at all. Most cops are on the job because they try to do the right thing, and I’m sure they gave verbal warnings and commands ordering the kid to stop being a threat to others. Finally, the kid apparently slapped one of the officers.

My training in DJJ pretty much said that once a kid physically hit you, you still had the responsibility for keeping him as safe as possible, but your options opened up to pretty much everything in your playbook – up to and including less than lethal weaponry, such as mace and tasers. Only when presented with a genuine life or death situation were you allowed to use deadly force – which the officers did NOT do here.

It is clear from the reports that the kid in question would not stop himself. He was such a danger to others around him that the cops had to be called to begin with. Once on scene, he continued to ignore law enforcement directives and continued to be a danger to others. When officers tried to subdue him, be still remained combative, slapping one of them.

So the officers did the one thing they could to actually stop this kid and prevent him from being a danger to others or himself. They disabled his control of his body via neuro-muscular incapacitation. In other words, they stopped him from beating the crap out of kids (or at a bare minimum of trying to) by tasering him.

It sucks that some kids are so grown physically that they become a danger to others, even before they have grown enough mentally and emotionally to have full control over this danger they present. It sucks that sometimes, the responding officer’s options are limited by the sheer physical size differential between themselves and the people they have come to stop.

But at the end of the day, ONE person was responsible for this 10 yo kid getting Tasered.

And it wasn’t the cops.