The taser's edge

Don't mark it down. It really isn't all that important to remember the date.

But years from now, when someone says, "Tasers were declared a form of torture by the UN? When the hell did that happen?" you can refer them to November 2007. Your friends at the coffee shop will think that you actually know what you're talking about if you can rattle off specific points in history for largely mundane circumstances.

It was in this month - that of the cardboard turkey cut-outs dangling in the aisles of your local supermarkets and nauseating Christmas muzak ceaselessly poking you from the speakers in the ceiling - that the "non-lethal" device known as the taser became America's latest obsession. And not a moment too soon!

Paris Hilton's fifteen minutes, which lasted five minutes too long, were over. Katrina and Iraq had become a national ball and chain, met largely with the same type of ambivalence that a businessman, Starbucks latte in hand, gives to the malodorous homeless man who shakes his pennies like Maracas in a tattered Starbucks cup retrieved from a nearby trashcan. American needed something on which to focus.

Enter the taser.

It all started a month earlier, actually, on September 17th to be exact. That's the day when the phrase "Don't tase me, bro" entered the national consciousness, via YouTube and a University of Florida student named Andrew William Meyer. If you haven't heard about it, or have heard the phrase but don't know from whence it came, there's a Wikipedia entry on the incident that is longer than most industrialized countries receive.

To sum it up in about 4,500 fewer words than the Wiki entry, the aforementioned UF college student, full of idealism and self-importance, started screaming during a speech/question and answer session given by Senator John Kerry. When Kerry directed the moderators to allow Meyer to have his desperately desired time in the sun, he stood in front of the microphone and berated Kerry on a variety of sensationalistic topics, including the movement to impeach Bush, as well as Kerry's membership in the "Skull and Bones" fraternity.

But Meyer wasn't cut off until he uttered the word "blowjob." Apparently, the moderators of the event had a no vulgarity policy - the nerve! - and they cut the mic. Predictably, Meyer went berserk and had to be restrained by police officers, and one of the officers pulled out his taser. Apparently, "Don't tase me, bro" is really copspeak for "Tase me, I'm acting like an asshole."

After coming down from the incident, Meyer has decided not to sue, but rather apologized for acting like a tipsy attention whore. He's even declared that the officers "Did nothing wrong." I imagine the students who protested outside the jail on the night of Meyer's arrest feel slightly foolish now.

All this, however, was just a warm-up for the tase-fest that was November.

A Polish man at a Canadian Airport died on November 15th after absorbing 50,000 volts from an officer's taser shot. This was actually the third taser death in Canada within the last five weeks. The Canadian Ministry has opened an official inquiry into the safety of the weapon, and hopefully, the world will discover if pale, cold men in silly red uniforms are more likely to be taser happy.

In the DC area, a twenty-year old man was tased to death on November 18th. Police used the taser on the man in order to help break up a fight. They successfully did that, as the dead man did indeed stop fighting.

But perhaps the most telling incident involving the use of the taser came about a week ago in Utah. Again, YouTube tells the story of how a young man with a bit too much attitude for his own good got tased for, ahem, refusing to sign a speeding ticket.

However, there's more to the story than just that. It started as a routine traffic stop, but quickly escalated into another tasergate when the man driving the speeding vehicle decided that this was a good time to exercise his cockiness.

The kid had a choice. He could have signed the ticket and been on his merry way, to continue on to whatever activity he had planned for the day. But instead, he talked back to the cop immediately after getting pulled over, he continued to flip the cop attitude, and then he disobeyed the cop's instructions and turned his back on him once he was ordered out of the car. I'm no expert on police psychology, but I do believe that type of behavior will tend to irritate Utah state troopers.

Before we get into the fact that the officer obviously overreacted (this was a case of idiot vs. idiot if I've ever seen one) and performed an illegal search of his vehicle, let's get one thing straight right here, and right now ...

Some cops are jerks. This has been true for as long as I can remember, and surely much longer than that. We as a society know this. Some cops take their duty to "protect and serve" very seriously. Other officers are more on the "harass and intimidate" plan. It isn't right. It isn't fair. It just is.

So when you get pulled over, there is a very simple set of responses to the questions that the officer will ask you.

"Yes, sir. No, sir. Thank you, sir."

There. No muss, no fuss. Anything else and you may turn a five minute traffic stop into a five year ordeal that probably won't work out in your favor. If you choose door number two, you, my friend, are a very dumb person.

So let me say it here: a traffic stop is not the time to take your first amendment rights out for a test drive. It is not the time to make a stand. It is not the time to let your testosterone out of its cage with an ill-advised attempt to impress your girlfriend. Take the ticket, and contest it later. Most people with an ounce of self preservation understand that.

Sometimes, life deals you a four-suited, 2-3-6-7-9 hand, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Quit pissing and moaning and minimize your losses as best you can. Those who don't get this concept get messed with by angry cops who are understandably tired of all the crap they have to deal with each and every day.

And let's face it. No one wants to listen to some self-entitled punk tell his "I can't believe how much of an asshole this cop was, and I acknowledge no fault of my own in this incident" story for years to come.

But there is a darker reality to all of this, which is: Tasers can kill, and cops have started to use them as if they were water pistols.

The whole idea of the taser was to provide a non-lethal method to handle situations that previously came to a halt and the end of a gun, or occasionally a nightstick. But now, it's becoming clear that many police officers are taking a "tase first, ask questions later" attitude.

This is why the Utah incident is so frightening. It's as if the rights that we Americans thought we had are no longer applicable in a post 9/11 culture. There were many different ways to handle the situation, but the officer let his incompetence rule the day. He treated the driver as an enemy combatant, not an American citizen. He then proceeded to conduct a. illegal search on the vehicle.

Warrants? Probable cause? Common decency? Thoughtfulness? Bah, humbug!

He didn't have to tase the kid. They're both lucky that he didn't become another taser fatality.

In the end, it seems to me that what is needed is something that seems to be sorely lacking these days, in many facets of life. Eureka! Education! Why not try educating officers more on how to handle situations without using their weapons? It sure beats using the general public - most of whom are decent, law abiding citizens - as guinea pigs in a nationwide taser experiment.

Evan Redmon gets a lot of spam. If you are not spam, please feel free to drop him a line at evanredmon@yahoo.com.