Feature Story

Stunning Decisions

After deaths and cautions, still no consensus for stun gun use on youths.

Correction: The article below incorrectly stated that in 2005, Chicago police accidentally killed a 14-year-old in a residential treatment center with a stun gun. The youth suffered a heart attack, but lived. Ever since Miami police drew flak for using a stun gun on an unruly 6-year-old student in 2004, and Chicago police accidentally killed a 14-year-old in a residential treatment center with a stun gun the next year, law enforcement and medical organizations have struggled to decide if the devices should be used on children. Except for a few places – like Dalton, Ga., where the police department has all but banned such use – the question remains far from settled.

This is completely disgraceful.  That 10 year old had burn marks on her back after the incident.  If an adult had used a hot iron to make similar marks on the 65 pound little girl, that adult would be in prison.  And frankly, anyone who uses a stun gun on a small child belongs in prison -- I have seen some tapes of cops using those things and often the use seems as much about power and punishment as basic control.  I watched a tape of a frightened, 98 pound 13 year old girl get stunned by a huge crew cut officer - he held her against the car and calmly told her to stop struggling - he could have easily put the cuffs on but CHOSE to stun her - with an almost gleeful look on his face.

The police should never have been called in the first instance in the 10 year old's case.  The girl was on the floor, in a balled up, fetal position, crying and having a tantrum. This is a defensive, not offensive position, and is often the result of an abusive environment.  

If I had come across a situation like that and ascertained that the base of the argument was that the child did not want to bath, I would have told the idiot mother to back off and let her kid cry it out, the same way that parents have for hundreds of years.  Walk away - stop being a control freak. 

Instead, the moronic, badly trained police officer injected himself into a situation, terrified a small child to the point of hysteria, and brought her from a defensive postion to an offensive postion.  Beserk implies that she was breaking up the house - not lying on the floor in a fetal position screaming and crying.  If youth workers are involved in these cases, they really ought to re-examine their priorities.  I can remember having a meltdown at that age myself - and if I feel like doing it in the privacy of my own home at my current age then I ought to be able to do so.  Shouldn't children have the right to throw a tantrum in the privacy of their own home now and again? 

More importantly, you should consider that any mother who advocates the use of a stun gun on her child has likely exhausted other brutal forms of punishment -- perhaps routine beatings and smackings have lost their fear factor on this poor little girl.  WHO is looking after her best interests?  The court should appoint an attorney to intervene on her behalf and find a guardian who will not advocate tasering as a control mechanism and response to misbehavior.

The police officer taught that child that she has no legal rights against abusive behavior -- that she has no basic right to privacy and that if she disobeys her parent, then the police will intercede on the abusive parent's part to inflict brutal, horrid punishment -- and that the child then has no legal recourse -- no equal protection. 

Youth workers need to get over themselves if they support the use of stun guns on little children.  It is child abuse, pure and simple and perhaps some other things that you do likewise qualify as abuse.  Anyone who considers what happened here to be legally or morally correct has a screw loose -- the police officer could have admonished Mom not to call 911 except in the case of a real emergency and he could have taken her into another room, sat and had coffee and waited for the screaming to stop.  Or, he could have left since no crime had been committed, and he could have called juvenile services and initiated an investigation -- especially after the mother advocated inflicting abusive pain on her own child through the use of a stun gun.  If the "mother" had advocated shooting the child, would the police officer have done that as well?  What is this - abuse by proxy?