Taser Training at the Police Academy: Sweet-talking Brutality

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Remember the waterboarding debate?  Remember how euphemisms were used to protect torturers from  charges of cruel and unusual punishment?  I’ve just discovered another instance of language abuse in the law enforcement world.  We’re talking about ordinary police, here, not shadowy CIA operatives, but mechanism and effect are the same.  People are hurt.  Words are used as whitewash.    

Everyone (except NRA spokespeople) publicly admits that guns are dangerous.  They maim and kill. Tasers are different and better, we've been led to believe.  Criminals apprehended with less use of lethal force: how could this not be a good thing?  I tended to agree.

Then I began to read about cases in which tasered suspects died.  Worse, some of the dead had turned out to be innocent or, almost as bad, some were only petty offenders.  Aha!  So tasers, like guns, are dangerous weapons.  Like guns, they can be misused and overused by policemen with bad tempers and itchy fingers.

Often, when I’ve  read of torture sessions or of vicious beatings inflicted in the course of a routine arrest, I’ve wondered whether those who choose careers in law enforcement or the shadier echelons of national security service are brutes by nature, sadists on salary getting their jollies.  We’re encouraged to view police officers and the military as protectors or saviors. No hero of mine uses excess or gratuitous force in executing an arrest.  Nor do I feel safer in a society that condones torture to squeeze out information for any reason.

However, there’s a somewhat less depressing possibility.  The brutality too often exhibited by American law enforcers may be a learned trait, an attitude (with equivalent techniques) instilled, most unfortunately, during the course of training for police work.  The likelihood of this possibility was reinforced by an article reprinted on May 19 in The New Mexican from the Alamagordo (NM) Daily News.  (No link because the site isn’t a freebie.)   In this case, it looks as if the cops-in-training are conditioned to minimize the excruciating pain involved in experiencing tasering even as they themselves testify to the agony of having 1200 volts of electricity running from taser probe to taser probe through their bodies.

Here’s how some of the Alamagordo recruits described the experience:

•    When it hits, it shuts down your brain, all the sensory nerves and you just lock up.

•    Your muscles tighten.  You think you’re going to bend your knees and fall, but you don’t.  It locks you straight up and you fall forward.

•    It feels like it will never end....You hear all the stories, but you can never really grasp it until you get shot by one.

•    It was like being electrocuted—which it is.

•    It’s a five second ride.

•    It was a hell of a ride.

Please focus on those last statements.  The "ride" image is clearly not spontaneous.  Although the tasering experience is “five seconds of hell,” the law enforcement profession calls it a “ride.”  Like being on a Ferris wheel. Or a merry-go-round.  Or a cruise through the tunnel of love.  How can anyone object to that?

Going for a ride/being taken for a ride  has a long history in America of being misused as a euphemism for mistreatment.  You may be conned, if you are taken for a ride, or you may be dead.  Either way, it’s bad stuff made into a joke.  Is this the best way to encourage recruits to classify the experience of being tasered?   Sure, they can think of themselves as heros for shrugging off the pain.  But won’t they also be encouraged to use the weapons more lightheartedly than they should?

In the same minimization vein, the Alamagordo people pooh-pooh the idea that a tasering as such does serious harm. Examine the weird self-exoneration contained in the following statement:

Lots of people think it causes cardiac arrest, but it’s [meaning any fatal impact] because that person already has something going on with them.

Translation: in the natural course of police work, tasering is going to kill people who aren't as robust as police recruits.  But the fault won't lie in the weapon.  Oh no!  The fault will lie in the victim who couldn’t take it.

So, take your choice.  Many of our law enforcement people are brutes by nature or brutes by training.  Most likely the latter, given the abuse of language required to defend death-threatening techniques.  Waterboarding is merely “an enhanced interrogation” technique.  Tasering is merely “going for a ride.”

Hey! What are you civil liberties people so upset about?