Police Shoot Girl, 12, With Taser At School
CINCINNATI — A Cincinnati-area mother says her 12-year-old daughter was humiliated and eventually stunned with a taser gun by Cincinnati Police inside Burton Elementary School Wednesday.
Why wasn’t the girl’s Mom called in? I wonder if getting hit with a taser at 12 years old is very good for a growing brain?
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I’ve researched this, and many Police Agencies are training officers to use Taser weapons as the first line of defense. If a subject struggles, shock them and cuff them. They believe a physical struggle is more likely to harm the subject, and close contact with an officer brings a subject too close the the officers side arm and other less than lethal weapons like pepper spray and batons. I’m not defending it, just reporting it.
Man, I feel for the cops. If they would’ve just grabbed her, the bruise marks would be on TV.
Nobody’s complaining that a 12-yr old acted so indignant toward authorities????? Disgusting.
wow, now the cops are becomming as lazy as the teachers.
How can anyone justify using a Tazer on a 12 yr old who was NOT being violent? What I didn’t find in the report was whether or not she was arrested before or after the incident.
I don’t think it is fair to say “nobody is complaining that a 12-yr old acted so…” blah blah blah
I am 23… which means I was 12 not so long ago that I can remember how I acted… and I was an immature (rightly so) little brat sometimes. When I look back at some of the things I said or did to my parents, I am almost embarrassed; but I was was 12… and obviously going through some things… how do you know what this little girls situation is? Maybe she has some things going on at home that are causing bad behavior? At 12… you can’t hold her responsibile for acting up. When you are 12, it happens. Stun gun in this situation sounds a little excessive to me.
“I’ve researched this, and many Police Agencies are training officers to use Taser weapons as the first line of defense.”
sure that makes lots of sence usually… BUT this was a 12 year old girl!!!
It seems to me that this is a rather brief article and that we’re not getting the full story. It’s disturbing to say the least, but I’m inclined to hold off on the indignation until such time as a more comprehensive story is written.
This said, many problems in episodes of Stargate: SG1 were resolved by shooting somebody once with a zat’ni’katel. Perhaps the police here were just fans?
– ME –
Seriously, the girl probably weighs 60 pounds, and according to the story, not being physically violent. To use a tazer is a tad excessive.
When I was that age, a threatened call to my folks is all it took to straighten me out.
Are we doomed…..
actually, I believe eletrical currents through the body (not in large doses) at growing stages help the brain.
So what if she was 12. YOu weren’t there, so you don’t know what she was doing…. I think police officers would have gotten blame whatever they did. Use physical force or the Stun gun. If they used it, I trust their judgement that they needed to use it.
I agree that the girl should not have been tazered, BUT the blatant disrespect of the authority of her teacher and the police officers is uncalled for.
They should have tazered her parents instead, as they have apparently not fufilled their obligation to society by teaching the kid to be respective of authority.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with corporal punishment, as long as it is not administered excessively. My parents spanke
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with corporal punishment, as long as it is not administered excessively. My parents spanked me, and in doing so taught me proper discipline and respect for authority – something today’s youth do not have.
Well I don’t agree with the method, but I’m sure she’ll shut the hell up instead of being confrontational in the future. Nothing like being embarassed in front of your friends.
Dan
I take it that you have never been stunned. If you have then you wouldn’t be wishing it on someone else.
The Tazer was introduced to America as a non-lethal method of last resort. To date there are several deaths blamed in whole or part to the use of stun guns. It was not introduced to be used to tranquilize the majority of incidents encountered by Police.
My son was 13 and stunned by another boy who bought a stun gun off Ebay . He died
If she had a knife or a gun I guess you could make a case for zapping her. If she was unarmed (and it sounds from the report like she was unarmed), then shooting her with a taser is the act of a prissy little coward. And if you have to use something to subdue her, why not use a net? How many nets could a police department buy for the cost of a single taser?
I figure the tazee felt like a big man….after all, what a power trip to taze a 12 year old GIRL. Wow, what next? Kick a puppy?
I’m sure there were other ways that this could have been handled.
(Although, it’s possible the person with the tazer was a 4’2″ 70lb midget, hired to do hall monitoring as part of some special enrichment program, although I doubt it.)
Yeah, let’s see… we’ve got this twelve-year-old girl who is arguing in class with another student. She gets told to stop and she then starts arguing with the teacher. The school administrators (plural) get brought in to bring things under control and they can’t handle her so they contact the police.
The nice policemen come into the school to diffuse the situation and the sweet, innocent little girl argues with them for a half hour so they taze her.
So, what’s a group of adults supposed to do with an uncontrollable twelve-year-old? Hmm, decisions, decisions…
Of course they tazed her. I mean, what else are you supposed to do? Huh? I mean really. All of you big men who are above tazing a twelve-year-old, how would you have handled the situation?
Would you have talked to her? Asked her nicely to stop? Wow, from the article, it looks like that was tried. Well, I guess you could’ve “sent her to the principal. Oops, looks like they tried that too.
Idiots. It’s not like the police just walked in and went all “Billy the Kid” with the tazer. She was told, over and over and over again that they were going to taze her if she didn’t calm down and co-operate.
Actions have consequences and it was obviously this little girls time to learn that life lesson. She was lucky the ploice in question had tazers, the alternative is nightsticks and I’m sure that would’ve left a mark.
Wow! Taser an unarmed, unless she is 6 feet 200 pounds with a black belt in kung something and doing a Bruce Lee impersonation, 12 year old girl. What have we come to? What a pussy cop. Seems more than one was acting up that day.
If the cop was going to get physical, and a taser is physical, it should have been adult enough to manhandle the cuffs onto her. What asses. All of them. A statement was made in school that day. What have we come to?
As a police officer for a suburban Midwest police department that carries a Taser on a daily basis, I know that it is impossible to judge the officer’s actions without understanding the full story. The blurb posted above doesn’t even come close to addressing the circumstances of the incident.
does a somewhat better job giving the circumstances.
Certainly the officer involved in this incident had to know that his use of force would be given extra scrutiny because of the age of the girl. Officers know that if they deploy the Taser on a 12 year old, considerable attention will be given to the event by both the media and department management. No officer wants that kind of attention if it is avoidable. Given the full scope of the incident (which none of us know) I’m sure the officer used his best judgement to end the incident with the least amount of injury possible.
FYI, police departments are notoriously risk averse. The Cincinnati PD is accredited, meaning that their officers are highly trained and professional. CALEA accredited agencies are highly regarded as “going by the book”.
I have been in four incidents over the last two years where the Taser was deployed (though not necessarily by me). I can say with certainty that in those situations, greater injury would have been done by the use of other intermediate weapons (i.e. pepper spray or baton) or by the use of hand-to-hand force than in the deployment of the Taser. I can’t even count the number of incidents in which I have been involved that did not escalate to the use of force merely because the bright yellow Taser was on my belt. I am glad that I have the Taser at my disposal and it is a tool that can help prevent injuries to me or those citizens with whom I come into contact.
Right…you can ALWAYS trust a cop to use good judgement. You see how they behave on any given day: hassling folks, acting like arrogant jerks, berating and abusing.
I mean, how many on here have gotten pulled over for some routine traffic stop only to be treated with no respect. I bet quite a few of you have. Only to get some lecture about driving and the law. I feel like saying, shut your mouth and write the ticket. I don’t need a lecture from some thug with a gun.
Most of them don’t think that they work for the people (protect and serve?) they think they are above the law. And then they wonder why they are so hated by the population at large.
My wife worked as the HR person at a Tenn girls correctional facility. A 13 year old ~ 110-120 lb girl started “going nuts” (my wife’s description) when she was being xfered to another facility. It took the facilities head (a large man ~ 250lbs and 6-4) the guard LT (50lbs lighter) and two female guards to restrain this kid. She fought so hard that all they could to is get her to the ground and have the nurse/practitioner sedate her. Of course the goal was to attempt to restrain her with out injury if possible.
Its very hard to restrain without undue injury, someone who doesn’t what to be restrained.
I don’t like that a 12 year old was hit by a taser, but after reading some more, I’m not sure I’d do differently.
So a taser is a humane, painless way for an officer to subdue a 12-year old girl? What the hell! How is using a taser a kindler, gentler approach than, say, twisting her arm behind her back a slapping on handcuffs?
Don’t they teach that technique to police officers anymore?
Of course when I went to school, they didn’t put up with this kind of nonsense. The Vice Principle would have grabbed her by the ear and dragged her to the office where she would sit until her mother came and got her.
A recent news clip shows a rather harmless looking little old lady being evicted in New Orleans. In the next second, she was forcefully tackled by police and held to the ground while being handcuffed. It looked terrible – unless the first 5 seconds of the clip are shown – where she produced a gun. Understanding that, she is lucky to have survived, albeit with bruises.
Another famous clip was of a trooper beating a lady in a highway stop; she failed to pull over promptly. He forgot about the dashcam and she got a chance to flog the officer and the state in court.
The point is that the police may over-react to a percieved threat. But unless there is NO provocation, it is hard to question their actions unless you have the whole story. The outcome of the inevitable court inquiry might reveal justifiable provocation. If not, the officers might consider a different line of work – or have it considered for them.
Question: Why is it that the police were brought in instead of her parents? It seems to me that bringing the police into a situation like this is unnecessary and a general waste of public resources. In fact, why is it that there is nothing about her parents mentioned at all?
I don’t know what official police procedure is for this sort of thing. But I do know that unless that girl was actively threatening/harming somebody or destroying school property, the police should not have been called upon in the first place.
So in my view based on what little I know, the blame for this situation rests solely on the school administrators for not bringing her parents into the picture.
– ME –
Apparently this is nothing new for the region. According to the below article, the minimum age for using a taser (or rather, for being tazed) is seven:
http://www.cincypost.com/2005/01/05/taser010505.html
– ME –
There is just something wrong about this. If the police threatened to use a Tazer IF she did not cooperate are not only wrong headed, but also a lawyer’s dream case. To threaten violence against an individual in order to force them to an unwilling act is assault. The threat makes no difference who it was made by; you, me, the Principal, or anyone else. It doesn’t matter if the threat involved a Tazer, a baton, pepper spray, or a 9mm Glock. It is illegal to threaten to injure someone. Force may only be used to defend oneself or to prevent injury or harm to another and that force must be reasonable to the circumstance.
The Cincinnati Police might be “certified”, but they also have a strong reputation for abuse. It was only five or six years ago that riots broke out because of abuse and discrimination by the Cincinnati Police. The Police Department had stated that the six black youths killed by Police were all justified and “by the book” too. As I recall, the Justice Department forced the city to implement changes to prevent this in the future even though they were “certified” then.
In my 35+ yrs of driving, the police have stopped me about five times. In every case I was treated professionally and courteously. Twice I was ticketed. Once I demonstrated the officer was wrong and the other I paid the fine because I was wrong. Having said that, I am white, clean dressed, and have blue eyes. My buddy at work is black and is stopped about once every month or two though we live the same life style and drive similar cars.
What probably happened here is like one of the first posters on this topic said. I used to be a police officer and our department required us to use the tazer as the bottom of our ladder of force. If it appeared that we were going to have to put our hands on someone, then we were to taze them. Period. The reason is because it is much less likely to injure someone than fighting with them. The police are in a no-win situation here. If they fight her, they are likely to injure her worse than the tazer would. Like a previous poster said, the bruises would then be on television and the mother would be saying that police hit her “baby”. Then, because the cop violated policy by not using the tazer, the city would hang them out there when they got sued and they would be lucky not to lose their job for violating policy. I strongly disagree with the poster who said that: “If she had a knife or a gun I guess you could make a case for zapping her.”
No, if she had a knife or a gun you could make a case for shooting her.
As for the person who says that she cannot be held accountable at age 12, please. When I was 12, I knew better than to argue with police and teachers. If she is that stupid, the tazer should teach her a lesson in punishment and reward. Even my dogs are smart enough to understand that if they are punished for a behavior, not to repeat it. My guess is that she will not do this again.
I taught in that school. Students are aggessive and defiant on a daily basis. The teachers and administrators there, like every school, have a very limited range of options to control behavior. Fights break out constantly, students and teachers are threatened, parents are typically uninvolved in their children’s lives. If the police were called, it had to have been a series of behaviors that appeared totally out of control. Trust me, they are not called for minor infractions. There is dangerous behavior in inner city schools. If you haven’t been to one, take a tour. It’s overwhelming. You will come away with a whole new opinion about discipline in our educational system.
I think it is disgusting how a police officer can do that …arnt there better things for them to do than beat up a 12 yr old girl wen she hasnt done anything!!
If that was a law to do that there wouldnt be enogh police officers to do the job of shooting 12 yr od girls for arguing !!!
i also wanted to know if the police officer got in trouble of any sort??
how disgusting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!