Loss of Privacy

61-year-old Roger Anthony was riding his bicycle when he was shot with a stun gun.

Scotland Neck Police Chief Joe Williams said they received a call Monday night about a man who fell off of his bicycle and injured himself in the parking lot of the BB&T bank, 1001 Main St. The caller was concerned that the man was drunk.

When Officer John Turner arrived, he saw Roger Anthony pedaling away along 10th Street. He followed Anthony in his patrol car, briefly put on his sirens and lights and yelled out of the window for him to stop, but Anthony continued to ride away, police said.

Williams said Turner then saw Anthony take something out his pocket and put it into his mouth. At that time, Turner got out of the car and yelled for Anthony to stop. When Anthony didn’t stop, the officer used a stun gun on him, causing him to fall off of his bike.

Anthony was transported to Pitt County Memorial Hospital, where he was declared brain dead, his sister Gladys Freeman said. He was taken off of life support on Tuesday.

Freeman said her brother was disabled, suffered from seizures and had trouble hearing. She said he was riding his bike home from her house on Sunday night. Anthony lived alone in an independent living community.

Roger Anthony posed no threat, yet the police felt that using a taser was the best course of action.

What appears to most as a simple case of public drunkenness has put the Humphreys Sherrif’s department in the spotlight in yet another case of police abuse. Here are some of the reported facts of the case:

Darren T. Ring sustained cracked ribs and a punctured lung after he was stripped naked by deputies, beaten and shocked repeatedly with a Taser gun

The incident occurred after Humphreys County sheriff’s deputies responded to a report of gunshots in Waverly. Ring was not arrested for firing the shots but was drunk when deputies arrived, reports show. In a grand jury indictment, Ring was charged with resisting arrest, three counts of assaulting an officer and a parole violation.

The surveillance video shows deputies repeatedly telling Ring to stop resisting arrest while he is lying facedown in the snow with at least two deputies on top of him. Deputy James McCord wrote in his incident report that Ring kicked him in the testicles, poked him in the eye and tried to grab a fellow deputy’s firearm.

“He (Ring) was extremely violent towards all the deputies trying to restrain him,” the incident report states. “He was continuously kicking and spitting on the deputies.”

On the video a half-naked Ring is held down and intermittently kicked and struck with a baton for approximately 10 minutes.

Later, a Waverly Police Department officer responds to the scene as well. At that point, an incapcitated Ring is shocked repeatedly with a Taser while deputies instruct him to roll over on his stomach. In the video Ring says he can’t roll over. His attorney, Public Defender Jake Lockert, said his client was unable to move because of repeated Taser shots.

As taser is not supposed to be used as a compliance tool. It is supposed to be a weapon of last resort, much like firing your weapon, except it isn’t supposed to kill you like a gun.

Ring is requesting that he be released from prison after being held for five months in prison in lieu of bond. Ring’s lawyer states that he had committed no crime and that, even if he had, he has been severely punished for those alleged crimes. The officers involved in the incident have not been punished or suspended.

At the point in the video where the police officer is repeatedly yelling for Ring to roll on his stomach, he has, by my count been tasered at least four times. A taser will incapacitate you at that point that you are physically unable to comply. The result is that the police taser him again for not doing as he was told. It also appears that Ring is naked, while there is no apparent reason for stripping a man once he is cuffed, laying on the ground, and two officers are sitting on him.

Again, the officer yells for Ring to roll over on his stomach while another officer kicks Ring in the face. Yet another officer repeatedly hits Ring with a baton. There is no way that, when Ring is tased several times a minute, kicked in the head numerous times, and beaten repeatedly with a baton that Ring could reasonably follow any direction. Keep in mind that he was also drunk, so compliance is unlikely.

This incident goes beyond police abuse. They are torturing Ring for no reason. It is absolutely disgusting what these officers did and then lie on a police report that Ring was the violent one. The police here are nothing but thugs. Not only should they lose their jobs, they should be prosecuted for such behavior.

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team is currently using the Extended Range Electronic Projectile (XREP) taser rounds that fit into special rifles and expel a projectile much farther than the normal taser gun is capable of doing.

It’s fired from a 12 gauge shotgun from up to a 100 feet away. It’s 14 grams, has wing like fins that spread open as it takes flight. It has painful probes and pins that stick into your body. It packs all the powerful punch and stopping power of a stun gun and is enclosed in a 12 gauge shotgun shell and when it hits you it locks up your muscles.

John Angleton is the taser coordinator for the sheriff’s office and says, “It’s the most excruciating pain imaginable. It locks everything up. For one you cannot move. You can breathe because you’re screaming at the top of your lungs.”

The TASER XREP keeps a suspect down for 20 seconds instead of 5 seconds which is how long the traditional taser keeps a suspect down. The traditional taser also has to be fired from a closer range within 21 feet.

While TASER XREP rounds cost a hundred dollars each SWAT team members say they’re worth the price because they save lives.

I’ve written about the XREP before here.

Australia has made the news for its improper use of tasers. A call has been put out to stop the use of tasers in police work because they are leading to deaths due to overuse.

THE recent death of a Sydney man after being tasered by police is tragic, made even more so because it is only the latest example of inappropriate and often outrageous use of these stun guns by some police officers. Governments and police services need to justify how it is in the interests of the community that police carry such devices.

This week’s death in Sydney was at least the third recorded Taser death in Australia. Two men also died last year, one after being tasered up to 28 times by police in Townsville.

Their misuse can amount to torture, as well as lead to serious injury. In one case, a man in Western Australia received third-degree burns to 10 per cent of his body, including burns to his throat, after police tasered him while he was carrying a fuel container and a cigarette lighter.

The police argue that using a taser is safer than using a gun, which, in some cases, it may be. However, there have been more and more cases of tasers causing heart attacks and having detrimental effects on the human body and police are using them in situations where they do not need them.

If Tasers were only used to prevent recourse to handguns, one would hope we would not have seen the shocking incident in Western Australia, where it is alleged that police tasered a pregnant 18-year-old woman up to eight times.

It is also unlikely that we would have seen police in South Australia use a Taser to subdue a man in a mental health crisis, and New South Wales police might have avoiding use of a Taser against an 18-year-old at Carols by Candlelight to defuse a situation.

Statistics show that, in Australia, tasers are used disproportionately against the disadvantaged and minority groups, such as aboriginals. In this video, Kevin Spratt is tasered 13 times. This is after he was tasered 11 times a few days earlier.

“Mr Spratt ended up in hospital after the second incident with a tube coming out of his chest from a punctured lung.
“He was manacled to a hospital bed and sustained a shoulder injury as well. He was severely injured during the second Taser barrage.

“This is a cover up. If they were serious, they would have started an inquiry two and a half years ago – not last Monday, five days ago.

The incidents happened to Mr. Spratt in August, 2008. Australia, however, isn’t the only country misusing tasers. A mentally disabled teen was tasered in Philadelphia and died on Thursday. Patrick Johnson wasn’t a perfect kid, but there was no need for the excessive force leveled against him either.

The police had been called to his home a fourteen times this year, so it would be known that he was mentally retarded and probably did not understand everything that was happening.

According to police, at around 12:30 Thursday afternoon, two 911 calls, one by Johnson himself, were made to report a “person with a weapon.” When police arrived they found an agitated Johnson pacing back and forth from the house into the front yard. Police say he was breaking things and grabbing sticks or tree branches, which he tried to set on fire by using the kitchen stove, according to CBS affiliate KYW.

Police said when officers arrived, Johnson confronted them with a stick and at one point tried to set it on fire. They say that officers trained in crisis-intervention were called to the scene but that Johnson failed to respond to repeated verbal requests to calm down, and that a Taser gun had to be used to subdue him.

The first taser firing, according to the police, had no affect, so they tasered him again. Johnson fell to the ground and was taken to the hospital where he later died.

We don’t know how long they tried to calm Johnson down. We do know, that it wasn’t long enough. There is no way a taser should have ever been used in this situation. A more likely scenario is that the police were tired of coming to this man’s home and dealing with him, so they took the shortest route possible to end the situation.

“I feel like it’s ridiculous that they tased him. You can by just looking at him tell that he’s severely retarded and I believe they should have maced him or tried to tackle him instead of using a taser,”

Yes, that’s exactly what they should have done, but that would have required some effort on the side of the police to calm the situation. Instead, taking the easy way out has left a man dead.

EDIT: The second video was not playing right, so I removed it. You can view it on the CBS news site here.

Gerald Amidon was apparently sodomized by a taser, and then was threatened by four officers to be tasered in the testicles. Amidon apparently won at least a $150k settlement in court on Tuesday, although as a result, the settlement “contained a provision that officers were making no admission to violating the plaintiff’s civil rights”

You can find the full audio of the incident here.