by Emmett R Smith
http://www.mankatofreepress.com/local/local_story_057002752.html
ABOVE Is the link to the Mankato, Minnesota, Free Press report on 27 February 2008, of the release — at last — of the Minnesota State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) report on the December, 2006, death of rural Amboy, Minnesota, resident Mr Jeffrey Skjervold, in the course of a tragically bungled police-operation.
The report as a professional matter between police officers of different agencies and jurisdictions objectively does not assign blame to any officer involved, and it is further indicated that Mr Blue Earth County Attorney Ross Arneson will not seek charges against anyone officially involved. Personally, I am aghast to learn now what is revealed above, as I know the officer involved in the mis-deployment of the Taser in the Skjervold death, and he is a fine man and a “good cop,” and I cannot begin to imagine how badly he must feel haunted at times, by all that went so very badly to Hell that December night now just over fourteen months ago.
It is clear to me — and, I hope that you will see it too, though obviously none of this can be of any comfort whatsoever to the Skjervold heirs — that there are victims of more than one sort, in this awful business. Below is my commentary to Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), which featured a news-item today about the two Blue Earth County, Minnesota, Taser-related police-supervised deaths to occur here to “persons of interest” in just one year, from December of 2006 to December, 2007:
THE Suicide after wounding and the shooting to death at another time by Blue Earth County deputies and Mankato police, of two county and city residents in just twelve months, highlights locally a mounting body of evidence of problems with the Taser. As a “preferred” method of subduing especially distraught or mentally-ill persons, twice now in Minnesota’s Blue Earth County alone it has backfired. The subject of interest to police in both cases was only stimulated to yet further excitement and wound up either dead of a self-inflicted wound or else “needing” to be shot to death. As I know personally through my seasonal work in past years at the Mankato Salvation Army Men’s Shelter one of the officers involved in one of the instances of Taser-failure, and as he is also reputedly one of our most-experienced and finest law-officers in this jurisdiction, I submit that he as well as those killed is arguably a victim in this case, although in a different manner as a serving police officer. Specifically, I perceive that the police broadly are very possibly being misled as to the efficacy and “universal” applicability of the Taser, as a kind of a “come-along” gimmick. If so, the fault redounds exactly to unduly cheerful and over-optimistic marketing. The Taser it appears is being aggressively marketed by the manufacturer at this time. There is just now of course a window of funding-opportunity, represented not only by the availability at this particular time of free money from the Homeland Security setup, but also of funds from police-confiscation of money and property from persons arrested for illegal activities such as drug-dealing. Also, the Taser corporation lately has been developing a program of ladies’ home Taser-parties. The Taser in all of these contexts and on the face of it certainly must seem to be a Heaven-sent alternative to simply shooting outright the uncooperative and the menacing. But what if in certain types of cases the Taser in fact works directly oppositely as intended, for example with the mentally ill? Is the Taser corporation keeping CENTRALIZED records of adverse reports? If they are, then can I, as a trained and credentialed public administrator for example, ask the Taser corporation for statistics of reported problems and expect to receive an ACCURATE account? The situation is highly unsatisfactory at this time, and this is shown above all by the wild array of statistics concerning Taser-caused and Taser-related deaths. Depending on which source one initially accesses in even a cursory Internet search, something like two hundred to four hundred or better deaths are ascribed, thus far, to Taser problems, either from possible mishandling or simply wrong-deployment. The greatest concern now of all is whether cash-strapped local jurisdictions have been tempted too far in relying on the Taser, as a kind of universal solvent, and a cheap substitute for such ongoing activities as inservice-training in dealing with the mentally-ill? Or even just the further perfection of non-lethal SWAT techniques? All-in-all, the only intelligent decision increasingly is to have at this time a moratorium on further sales of the Taser, until we are for once and for all all altogether on the same page.
RESPECTFULLY,
Emmett R Smith & cet
[Emmett R Smith all rights reserved 1 March 2008]
Doc, your points are well-taken, but the general reader might find it hard to wade through all the issues raised. I realize it’s a first draft.
To simplify:
Experienced officers with excellent reputations have used tasers in recent local encounters that have lead to death and/or injury to both citizens and law enforcement personnel.
The question has arisen as how the taser became the solution of choice for so many law enforcement agencies? The apparent answer is that it enables law enforcement to quickly and efficiently subdue someone without having to use deadly force. And no doubt this argument has been used extensively by the Taser [Corporation] in order to sell their product.
But in the recent cases in Blue Earth County, it appears that the taser has worked in the opposite way than…intended: instead of calming an incident, it…enraged the victims of the tasering, causing them to do things that they probably wouldn’t have done otherwise and endangering the lives of the officers, ultimately ending in the death of [two citizens.]
Furthermore at least one death in Minnesota this year was the result of a heart attack following a tasering. World wide evidence may point to at least a 1000 heart attack deaths and to perhaps another 2-400 deaths due to possible mishandling or wrong deployment of the tasers.
It appears that society needs to take another look at the taser before it is continued to be used by law enforcement, or worse yet, put into the hands of the general populace, as is purportedly being done in California.
[MR theotherdoc intelligently uses the verb-form tasering -- intelligent, we say of it at /Bodwyn Wook/, as the whole process of employment by police agencies of the Taser is to begin & in the first place, alas, simply sub-moronic; and, accordingly, the prevailing american newspaper usage of "tasing" as a gerundal verb is, in the words of an intelligent rural Minnesotan of to-day's oldest generation, "just too -- -- --hole for words! It's affected as -- and makes you think that the dumb -- -- -- all had Latin like we did, which they sure as -- did NOT...or else they wouldn't be cops and Democrats in the first -- -- place, -- --! The general -- -- IGNORANCE just plain --s me OFF!" -- BW]
It is pretty easy in a marketing round to avoid collecting negative data, complaints and so on. Just instruct employees not to open any obviously identified complaints that get through junk filters, that they are being dealt with by someone else. Also since as a rule cold emails (and calls) are often directed to different addresses within the company, do not yourself pull them together or look them over in a connected way. Since it is always true that there is more to do later and of course you know you will have to get to it — eventually — tell any employees who may idly notice correlations, that these are known to be pending and will be dealt with later by senior management or whatever. Always in such cases emphasis to the
employee(s) the forward position of the company in sales. Absent any mandate to report flaws this altogether should help defer bad publicity until profits have been optimized and company assets have been transferred or otherwise disposed. Additionally when files are searched periodically it should be conducted by learned counsel and not other stakeholders. In other words you do all you can to be able to reply “honestly” that no serious problems are known at this time, performance of product and market satisfaction _does_ undergo “periodic review” and so forth. None of this is criminal as such and it all is part of a “forward style” that enables managers to follow the lead of marketing across the board and to concentrate first of all on profits — on behalf of stakeholders as, indeed, managers are mandated to do.
In other words you can depend on a lawsuit coming along
and want to put away as much income elsewhere as possible beforehand.
Do you assert then, Ms wench320, that the Taser Corporation very possibly is following this line?
It is fifty-fifty I would guess, three to five anyway if they are a wholly owned subsidiary of Morning After Pill LLC, or whatever! The goal is get a whole lot of money and hideaway anyway fifty percent that you pay only the taxes on you can’t beat. Getting sued is like people sending porn offers on the internet, it _will_ happen to you. Anyway, the strategy is that MAP then dumps a lot of book keeping on the Taser line, it’s broke and so screw you. It is the main job of a good tort attorney to sort out the screwing around, and he or she is more or less always up for bids in case you didn’t know it.