Death by Taser

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dejadeadnz

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#1734725 11-Mar-2017 11:56

Another misuse of the taser. Edit: see Rikkitic's post for the correct link.

The idiot involved in this case should be criminally charged. The fact that this occurred in a controlled environment like a police station and the taser was fired twice made it all the more unjustifiable.

Rikkitic

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#1734727 11-Mar-2017 12:11

Wrong link. Did you mean this? http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11814966

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

dejadeadnz

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#1734740 11-Mar-2017 12:17

Indeed. Thank you.

Fred99

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#1734755 11-Mar-2017 13:08

In that case above (and probably the other case I posted about too), in my opinion it's possibly symptomatic of lack of having a mental health system capable of dealing with those kind of situations.

It seems bizarre to me that an obviously mentally unwell person (self-harming with a pocketknife) should be dealt with by police at all, no surprise that he was uncooperative, and bloody ridiculous that a policeman in a station would - through lack of training or "common sense" - conclude that tasering the poor fellow was appropriate.

Cops in uniforms barking orders and issues threats / ultimatums to people who are probably psychotic and/or paranoid is an extremely dumb move.

I presume that the situation there (Auckland) is the same as Chch, with mental health services funding worse than "breaking" due to lack of funding - but severely broken.

Dratsab

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#1734821 11-Mar-2017 15:33

Because there's a weapon involved, mental health workers will not deal with the person. Once the weapon is taken care of they will. But yeah, some huge breaches of policy there. At the end of the day police stations are absolutely the wrong place to be taking 'mental health consumers' but, as you say, the mental health system is broken - it's been severely underfunded for a long, long time.

dejadeadnz

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#1735079 12-Mar-2017 00:20

A few years ago, my now wife (an emergency department doctor) was involved in an incident where a mental health patient was going through an episode and "freaking out" in the ER. The guy was huge and potentially very difficult to handle. But staff were starting to make some headway in calming him down, with my wife taking the lead, along with a helpful young female constable who obviously was either well-trained at handling such individuals or was (at a minimum) the kind of police officer that you want out on the street. Suddenly, this fat, middle-aged aggressive cop (who turned out to be the younger constable's supervisor and a Sergeant) came along and started barking orders and tried to physically interject by arresting the individual.

The female constable pleaded with him to shut his mouth and stop barking, which was clearly aggravating the patient. Then my wife and another staff member, at considerable risk to themselves, basically shoved the idiot out of the room and told him to get lost. It was probably only sheer embarrassment and the fact that quite a lot of potential witnesses were around that prevented this guy from coming back with pepper spray or more and fabricate some story of being assaulted by the staff. Anyhow, my wife and a number of others made a complaint to the police, which was backed up by the young constable (that must have taken some courage since experience tells me that cops are extremely nasty towards anyone perceived to be narking). Needless to say, it went nowhere.

A number of months later, Mr Useless Sergeant coincidentally appeared in a trial that I was involved in as a lawyer. And without one word of exaggeration, despite being a Pakeha New Zealander and obviously having English as his first language, his ability to speak English, pronounce simple words correctly, and to structure basic sentences grammatically was so lacking that the jury and trial judge had to repeatedly ask for clarification.

It's hard to imagine where the police dig up such useless individuals and how they manage to keep their jobs.

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