Or maybe it's designed to inflict as much pain and humiliation as possible without permanent harm. Because that's how it's actually used by the police, to punish their victims for disobedience.
I was wondering about exactly that when I read the article. The description of how it works is really gruesome. Many policemen themselves have probably no clue how it works.
I'm mildly ok with this. The cops seem to use these pretty willy nilly for how painful and dangerous they seem. There's a kind of karmic balance in executives suffering the same ordeal that they unleashed into the world. Appeals to my sense of balance.
Well, it may not be the most constructive way of dealing with police abuses, but it's one of the vanishingly few consequences police have faced for their malfeasance and unfettered violence.
Yep. Imagine they beat Tyre only 20% as badly. He didn't die, but it was still a brutal beating. Would anything have come of it? The only punishment comes when cops go many levels beyond what is already grossly unacceptable behavior, and even then this punishment is far from guaranteed.
Ideally they'd be given corporal punishment by perfectly morally upstanding cops. This is cheap, fast, doesn't stop them working and doesn't put them in an environment where they're around lots of hardened convicts.
I leave the problem of getting perfectly upstanding policemen who will not abuse their powers as an exercise to the reader.
Isn't abuse of power the most terrifying when it is used not for the extraordinary, but for the mundane? The very idea that police abuse of power is "mundane" in some way is disturbing.
I'm not convinced this is true. Surely the power afforded to police attracts a disproportionate amount of recruits that want to use that power the wrong way.
Not that any individual policeman is sadistic by default, but the likelihood is higher than a random sample of people.
Some idiot cops recently threatened to arrest me for touching a bent pole on the street. I was examining it when they rolled up and then threatened to jail me for destruction of public property. It seems that they view abuse as a job perk.
How exactly does being shocked move the needle on how many militarized power-tripping clowns there are on the police force? How's that going to change the incumbent culture of badge protection?
Being shocked certainly hasn't stopped it from happening. So what's the secret?
I'm shocked this time because I haven't seen footage so bad. But I won't be shocked the next time...
the actions of police officers are not rational. many cops are willing to arrest people they don't like just to give them a hard time, even when they know the charges won't stick. cops NEVER get punished for this kind of thing. some cops just like making a hippy spend a night in jail because of the discomfort and inconvenience it causes to the detained person. don't be surprised when a job that grants authoritarian privileges attracts authoritarians with a sadistic streak.
Police are tools of the corporate elite to project their property. Anything to enable their laziness or cowardice is likely to be embraced, even if it's wrong because qualified immunity.
With the best possible motives, the goal of a story like this is to apply pressure on the police department to discipline officers who fail to exercise due care when dealing with the public.
Here two officers tazed someone who couldn't hear them and held them in jail for 4 months because one of them fell and broke their leg while trying to jump the poor kid who, again, couldn't hear them.
One of the officers was later fired for excessive force. Maybe if they'd handled this situation better that second incident wouldn't have happened and some 75 year old man wouldn't have have been unnecessarily assaulted by government forces.
Maybe with enough public pressure, we create a climate where officers are less likely to assault some guy with his hands up yelling "no ears" instead of throwing him in jail for 4 months for maybe rolling a stop sign.
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