Green Oasis

David Simon’s article about police killing people in Baltimore with token accountability has scared me more than any other story about the state we’ve allowed our civil liberties to get into. It makes me want to subscribe to my local daily which I (and my parents) have never done.

(via kottke.org)

I avoid posting all the police abuse stuff that I hear about if for no other reason than that there’s so much of it. The quantity threatens to make me blasé about the subject. This story (and others) makes me shake my head in disbelief.

Police tasered a 17-year-old boy who was in paramedics’ care because he had a seizure. When he woke up, he became disoriented and frightened due to a condition known as postictal psychosis. He struck a paramedic and the police attempted to restrain him by tasering him twelve times!

The police and paramedics lied in their reports stating that he had only been tasered twice despite ample physical evidence to the contrary.

The idea that the taser is nonlethal makes us too willing to use it. Tasering someone twelve times is excessive. It’s fortunate that this didn’t end in tragedy.