Police use Taser on blind man after stick mistaken for sword

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-19979184

Dumb ass plod.

And there have been calls recently - not from the police - for the law to carry guns.

Crikey - Chorley's where I was born. It's also where that oaf was from the other week who got imprisoned for posting bad taste jokes about the 2 little missing girls.

Now the duffers are tasering blind men in the street, in case their white sticks are Samurai swords!?!

It worries me to hear they're asking for for guns to replace their tasers. As if Chorley police are fit to be in charge weapons! They shouldn't be allowed pea-shooters, even. Seriously!



It's a bloody good job the old fella didn't have another stroke!

Forget giving the law guns, give them some fucking glasses

Or lobotomies.

Gilly wrote:
A few years ago armed police in London shot and killed an Irish guy that was carrying a table leg. He'd been in the pub and someone thought he was carrying a shotgun in a bag.
The marksman who killed him reported that the guy 'took up a shooting posture' when he was challenged so they blew him away.

Yeah, my brother was dragged to the police station, near Chorley actually, years ago, because he was carrying a fishing rod in a bag, which they thought might be a rifle. Chorley's a very small town btw, it's not like it's some big, rough city.

@ Hugo & Gilly... you're cops over there are freaking paranoid huh?

See, this is what gun/weapon control does to people... makes them think everything they see is a dangerous weapon and they haven't seen a real weapon in so long they forget what one really looks like. A table leg, a walking stick, a fishing pole?

The c*ntstables over here would probably be hot-footing it in the opposite direction, poste-haste, if they actually saw some physically fit looking man (with vision) wielding a real sword.

That gave me the giggles Gilly lol... if you ever heard of someone preparing to go after them with a sword, let me know so I can come over, can eat popcorn and sit on the roof with a lawn chair and watch (although roof may be a bit dangerous as we may fall off from laughing, but it'd be worth it).

StarsChildren wrote:
I'm trying to remember the last time they shot a guy who had actually done something wrong.

Nope, can't think of any at the moment.

Who was blind,the victim or the cop?

hugorune wrote:

Specsavers springs to mind.
I can imagine the shit he is getting on duty Dozy cnut springs to mind and needs to be sacked straight away

This is being presented as a 'mistake'. Are we certain that it was an error? It's happened before:



It will happen again. We know for a fact that they deliberately pick people who aren't very bright, and who are inclined towards authoritarianism, that's what they specifically test people for. That's what they're looking for. We know that from numerous court cases now:

abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95836&page=1#.Tv-OZSNWplw

There have been so many incidents of people being completely needlessly tasered, I would automatically assume that this wasn't an accident, and that the officer in question just felt like tasering someone, until it's proved otherwise. The people who do this are just jumped-up, halfwitted pricks on a power trip, who aren't bright enough to realise that they haven't got any power. Occasionally they get caught out, and then they apologise and pretend it was all a 'mistake'.

Yes, there was a case in the States somewhere, earlier this year, where a policeman 'accidentally' killed a mentally disabled man who was riding a bicycle with his taser - I can't remember if the man was hard of hearing, but he didn't stop when ordered to. Why did the cop want him to stop? Because, he claimed, he was afraid the man might hurt himself as he looked like he was riding the bike a bit precariously.

Gilly wrote: There's so many on Youtube that it's literally ridiculous. And they always come out with some absurd excuse for why it happened.

The real reason it happens is that the police officer in question wanted to taser someone and wanted them to feel the power of his (I'm yet to see a female taser someone, but I'm sure it will happen at some point, but we are primarily dealing with the male psyche here) authority over them, and thought that he was untouchable. And that even if there were some consequences that the police would close ranks. You know, like they did over Hillsborough. Like they always do. Like institutions always do. That's all there is to it.

That's not even an excuse. I think WUB is right, they just do it because they feel like it.

Yes. The initial logic on their introduction seemed reasonably fair, in that it's better to be tasered than shot - particularly in the States, where the policy, apparently, is to shoot to kill. I say 'reasonably', because I've read that the experts don't really understand fully themselves how the taser works the way it does, plus there's a likelihood of it proving lethal when used on people with certain medical problems.

But it seems that tasers are employed in so many instances now where it would never have been defensible for the law to have drawn their guns in the first place.

I watched another clip earlier this year of a woman making a nuisance of herself at a McDonald's drive in, when she had some gripe over something. She wouldn't move her car from the service hatch, so the police came & tasered her (I think more than once) in front of her 3 year old daughter.

Another thing I was shocked by was the number of people commenting that it served her right. Yet to me, it didn't look as though anybody tried to resolve things with her amicably. So to my mind, it's like they think they can use the taser to issue punishment to people, without the need for a trial - and a hell of a lot of civilians seem to approve! None of it's good.

Tasering someone sounds pretty brutal to me.

LesleyPumpshaft wrote:
It is... and has the possibility of being brutal towards the cops too if the person is eplileptic.
One of my ex's was...he was already hysterical because his girlfriend at the time who was pregnant, on the ground in the front yard in pre-term labor was screaming for someone to help, the EMT's stopped down the road and kept saying they couldn't find the place, cops showed up and told him he was being "disorderly"... well they tasered him and since he has epilepsy, it could go one of two ways, kill him or piss him off... it pissed him off. He beat 2 sheriffs up and an EMT, I think it was only 3 (one for sure ended up in the hospital), before the rest of them jumped on him

Gilly wrote: I think that in a way tasers are worse than guns. Because they're not as lethal as guns they remove some of the responsibility associated with using them. Some police officers seem to think they're no more harmful than pepper spray. Or maybe they just don't give a toss, but though there have been instances of police using excessive force with relation to guns, you'd have to say that these are pretty minimal compared to tasering. I don't think police officers wield guns with the same level of abandon because it's known that they kill people. It seems to have reached the point, in the States in particular, where it's almost as if the attitude is "oh, it's okay, they've only shot 50,000 volts through him, it's nothing to make a fuss about".