December 30, 2009

Taser Wednesday™ Continues

The shock heard 'round the world.
[UPDATE added below]

And now for the good news.
A federal appeals court this week ruled that a California police officer can be held liable for injuries suffered by an unarmed man he Tasered during a traffic stop. The decision, if allowed to stand, would set a rigorous legal precedent for when police are permitted to use the weapons and would force some law enforcement agencies throughout the state -- and presumably the nation -- to tighten their policies governing Taser use, experts said.

Michael Gennaco, an expert in police conduct issues who has conducted internal reviews of Taser use for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and other agencies, said the ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals prohibits officers from deploying Tasers in a host of scenarios and largely limits their use to situations in which a person poses an obvious danger.
As for the immediate trickle-down:
[Orange County Sheriff's Department s]pokesman John McDonald said the department's policy allows officers to fire Tasers at people who try to flee an encounter with police or who refuse, for example, to comply with an officer's order to lie down during an arrest. Those scenarios appear to be prohibited under the court's ruling.
Read the whole ruling here (pdf).

UPDATE: Reason Online wants to be just like me when they grow up.

...And, um, He's Coming Right For Us Too!

Ah, Chicago. There's two things you do better than anyone: hot dogs, and Taserin' folks in the midst of a diabetic seizure.
Prospero Lassi says he suffered a diabetes-induced seizure at home on April 9. His roommate called 911, and police from LaGrange Park and Brookfield responded, with EMTs from LaGrange Park.

Lassi says his roommate explained to police that he was having a diabetic seizure. Lassi "was not alert and could not move his body."

When the EMTs asked the cops to help them move Lassi from where he was lying on the floor, Lassi says, one of his "arms flailed during his diabetes-induced seizure, striking one of the LaGrange and Brookfield defendants. At no time did Mr. Lassi intentionally strike or offensively touch any of the LaGrange or Brookfield defendants."

Lassi says LaGrange Park Officer Darren Pedota responded by Tasering him 11 times, for nearly a minute, as he lay helpless. [italics added]
The story is exclusively drawn from Lassi's lawsuit, so we do not know the defendants' version of the events. Also no word yet if Lassi exacerbated the situation by refusing to take a shower before bedtime.

She's Coming Right For Us!

[UPDATE added below]

Anyone who's seen Poltergeist, The Exorcist, or Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants knows how terrifying little girls can be. Your humble correspondent grew up with two of them, and if Santa Claus had seen fit to deliver a Tiny Taser in 1985 rather than yet another Husky Helper toy, the Finch household would have been a very different place indeed.

Apparently Arkansas police officer Dustin Bradshaw shares our hypothetical six-year-old's mentality:
When [Bradshaw] arrived, the girl was curled up on the floor, screaming, and resisting as her mother tried to get her in the shower before bed.

"Her mother told me to take her if I needed to," the officer wrote.

The child was "violently kicking and verbally combative" when he tried to take her into custody and she kicked him in the groin.

He then delivered "a very brief drive stun to her back," the report said.
Bradshaw's boss, under pressure from the Mayor and the media, eventually suspended Bradshaw with pay (a.k.a. "vacation"), but not for Tasering the girl. The reprimand was for failing to videotape the encounter per department policy. Police Chief Jim Noggle actually defended the action itself as a benevolent alternative to breaking the girl's bones:
"We didn't use the Taser to punish the child - just to bring the child under control so she wouldn't hurt herself or somebody else," Mr Noggle said.

Had the officer tried to forcefully put the girl in handcuffs, he could have accidentally broken her arm or leg, Mr Noggle said.
And golly, it's not like he killed her or anything. The wholly incompetent mother is not off the hook, by the way, but had she electrocuted her ten-year-old for acting like a ten-year-old, she would be the one in jail.

Finally, just in case anyone is thinking "what's done is done"; Noggle also says the girl will face disorderly conduct charges. Stay classy, Arkansas.

UPDATE: Officer Bradshaw has been fired for alleged repeated failure to adhere to the department policy regarding the use of video cameras.

December 28, 2009

Your Kung Fu is No Match for My Scotty Karate


Drawn almost exclusively by its name, I recently tried a four-pack of Dark Horse Scotty Karate Scotch Ale. Expectations were high, especially considering the brew had to be imported by hand from the dreary plains of central Indiana (a wonderful birthday gift from my wonderful baby sister).

The wee heavy did not disappoint, and I was inspired to sing its praises on the Internets. At the same time, I did not want to cause Ted Stevens's email to be delayed, so first I looked to see if there was already a good review posted elsewhere.

There was:
...When it comes to flavor, Scotty Karate delivers in a major way. *This* is what I expected this big American-brewed Scotch ale to taste like. With a bigger body, we could be looking at greatness. Although there isn't an abundance of barrel-aged character, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Dark Horse put SKSA in bourbon barrels for at least a brief time.

Flavors include chocolate, golden toffee, butterscotch, sugared pecans, medium-dark fruit, and a tobacco, tea, and hop leaf bitterness that concludes each mouthful with a gradually tightening, focused flourish. It may be nothing more than an overactive imagination, but a phenolic peaty tanginess and a puff of smoke are present as well.

...I don't drink beer because of the way it looks or smells. I drink beer because of the way it tastes. Scotty Karate Scotch Ale is the real deal and should be sought out by anyone who loves a good wee heavy...
My own review would have relied heavily on phrases like "hells yeah!" and "way more beer-y", so muchas gracias to BuckeyeNation. Now venture forth, ScotticusFinch minions, and consume.

Wholesale Healthcare (and Eunuchs)

Inflammable means flammable? What a country!
Over at Hit & Run, reliable commenter P Brooks sums up Obamacare quite well:
And- goddammit!- if you make it mandatory for everyone, and prohibit risk-based pricing, it's not actually "insurance" anymore. It's a "buyers' club" for medical services.
Obviously, a buyers' club is great if you're an unemployed 50-year-old base-jumping, gator-wrestling smoker with diabetes and chronic dry eye; not so much if you're a healthy, risk-averse person forced to participate.

That's all I've got. Celebrating the birthday of the non-denominational Holiday Infant has evidently quelled my indignation.

If you absolutely must have something else today, hop across the virtual pond and read about Pakistani eunuchs winning the right to be recognized as a distinct third gender.

December 14, 2009

Are You Sure Officer O'Malley Was the One Who Broke Your Camera?

The growing national frustration with municipal police departments is not couched in a belief that all -- or even most -- officers act inappropriately. Rather, the frustration stems from the apparent unwillingness among police departments to recognize, condemn, and respond to misconduct when it arises.

In fact, police departments continue to innovate ways to make accountability more chimeric. Consider Chicago's new policy threatening criminal charges against people whose official claims of police misconduct are found to be without merit. While most people agree it would be satisfying to slap a fine on the Richard Heenes of the world, we have to remember exactly who's guarding the henhouse here:
A 2008 study by University of Chicago law professor Craig B. Futterman found 10,000 complaints filed against Chicago police officers between 2002 and 2004. That's more than any city in the country, and proportionally it's 40 percent above the national average. Of those 10,000 complaints, just 19 resulted in significant disciplinary action [suspension of a week or more]. In 85 percent of the cases, the complaint was dismissed without even interviewing the accused officer.
Furthermore, the 19-in-10,000 statistic deals only with complaints that were actually filed. According to the June 2006 US Department of Justice report on citizen complaints about police use of force, only one in ten people who believe that they have been abused by the police ever report the abuse.

Threats -- both explicit and implicit -- of financial and legal retribution are certainly one reason why.

Police officers are necessarily entrusted with authority over life and freedom, the two most important concepts in existence. It is unprecedented madness to also extend to them the continual benefit of the doubt. An officer wrongfully losing his job is terrible; a man wrongfully losing his life or his freedom is irreparable.

December 1, 2009

Man Outruns 12,000-Foot Tall Elephant, Makes Movie


Al Gore's advocacy film about the potential dangers of global climate change won an Academy Award.

Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy, being called "the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted [in the struggle against climate change]" by the Nobel committee.

Al Gore recently appeared on the cover of Newsweek as a 21st-Century Isaac Newton and was called an "Eco-Prophet" and "The Thinking Man's Thinking Man".

And Al Gore thinks the temperature at the center of the Earth is "several million degrees":
Conan O'Brien: Now, what about ... you talk in the book about geothermal energy...

Al Gore: Yeah, yeah.

Conan: ...and that is, as I understand it, using the heat that's generated from the core of the earth...

Al: Yeah.

Conan: ...to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it's a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot...
National Review Online blogger John Derbyshire goes ahead and tidies up the science for us laymen:
The temperature at the earth's core ... is usually quoted as 5000 degrees Celsius, though these guys claim it's much less, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.
To illustrate the enormity of Gore's wrongness, his claim is mathematically identical to saying the average height of an African Elephant is 12,000 feet, or that the fastest a human has ever run a mile is 0.223 seconds.

Did I know off the top of my head that the center of the Earth is actually around 5000 degrees? Of course not. But the spot on my mantle where there isn't an Oscar, a Nobel Peace Prize, and a framed copy of Newsweek serve as my excuse.

What's Al's?

Check out the whole Conan clip at YouTube here.