Infant Injured as Result of Police Taser Gun
Houston Police no stranger to controversy involving Tasers
Mike Swenson
Real Inside News
August 14, 2007
A father, holding his infant daughter, was shot with a taser gun by a hospital security guard, according to an article posted today by the Associated Press, sending both crashing to the ground. As a result of the fall, the infant suffered permanent brain damage, said William Lewis, the infant’s father.
“Lewis, 30, said the episode began after he and his wife felt mistreated by staff at the Woman’s Hospital of Texas and they decided to leave. Hospital employees told him doctors would not allow it, but Lewis picked up the baby and strode to a bank of elevators.”, according to the article.
Further, ” Lewis, who gave the video to The Associated Press, said his daughter landed on her head, but it cannot be seen on the video. He said the baby continues to suffer ill effects from the fall.
“She shakes a lot and cries a lot,” Lewis said, noting doctors have performed several MRIs on the child, Karla. “She’s not real responsive. Something is definitely wrong with my daughter.”
Apparently, Houston police are no strangers to controversy when it comes to tasers.
According to an article in the Houston Chronicle posted back in January, tasers have done more harm then good. In fact, ” Officers have used their Tasers more than 1,000 times in the past two years, but in 95 percent of those cases they were not used to defuse situations in which suspects wielded weapons and deadly force clearly would have been justified.”
“Instead, more than half of the Taser incidents escalated from relatively common police calls, such as traffic stops, disturbance and nuisance complaints, and reports of suspicious people.”
Tasers, like the seen below, according to WiseGeek.com, “is a non-lethal self-defense weapon that uses compressed nitrogen to shoot two tethered needle-like probes at an assailant in order to deliver an electric shock.
The probes travel at a speed of 135 feet per second (41 meters per second) with a maximum reach of 15 feet (4.5m). When the probes attach to the attacker’s clothes or skin, an electric shock passes between them, through the body, incapacitating the assailant’s neuromuscular system. The attacker will lose all control and coordination. The taser will continue to apply the electrical charge in an auto-timed sequence of an initial charge of several seconds followed by many short bursts. This prevents the assailant from recovering from the initial shock and removing the probes. During this event the user can abandon the taser on the ground and escape.”
As was pointed out yesterday in an article I wrote regarding police brutality, NYPD officers are now being paid more money to be more “aggressive”. A 22 year old woman in Providence Rhode Island broke her knee after being tackled by officers during a protest. Matt Lapacik of the New York activist group “We Are Change” was arrested back in June for asking an aid of Rudolph Guiliani questions after the Republican Debates in New Hampshire. And and New Orleans police officer was acquitted last month of beating a 66 year old sober man on a sidewalk on Bourbon Street – an incident that was caught on tape.
This latest incident in Houston is just another example of the growing problem of police brutality in our country.
“I’ve got to wonder what kind of moron would Tase an adult holding a baby,” said George Kirkham, a former police officer and criminologist at Florida State University. “It doesn’t take rocket science to realize the baby is going to fall.”
