Yet another city seeks to allow police to use torture devices
by digby
San Francisco:
No-taser advocates’ struggle to defeat SFPD’s push for tasers was audible throughout 14 2012 Police Commission meetings, a Nov. 14 Mental Health Board hearing, and the Dec. 6 Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee hearing, where ACLU attorney Micaela Davis presented the letter to Supervisors Eric Mar, Christina Olague, David Campos and John Avalos.
Unanimous citizen comment at the Dec. 6 Public Safety Committee hearing aligned perfectly with ACLU’s stance.
“San Francisco doesn’t want tasers! San Francisco doesn’t need tasers!” said first presenter, Lisa Marie Alatorre. Instead of setting “a national precedent,” Suhr promotes “a new, shiny, lethal weapon to use on people in mental health crisis.”
Alatorre introduced well-coordinated public commenters highlighting national and state “lawsuits and respected studies” exposing the “harms of trigger-happy police officers who rely on excessive force instead of decent, culturally-competent de-escalation tactics that could have saved lives.”
Public commenters proceeded one by one to address the five central issues raised in the letter: costs, injury and death risks, disproportionate impacts on mentally ill people and people of color, and police misuse and abuse.
There is good evidence on all those issues that tasers are counterproductive.
Nobody ever makes the argument that shooting citizens full of electricity is a form of torture. The fact that it doesn't usually take more than a few seconds of its extreme pain to get compliance doesn't alter the fact that it is torture. It proves it.
h/t to GP