tasers

SayUncle has always been on top of taser abuse, and Kevin Carson now joins the fray with a post worrying about our further slide into a police state:

My dad was a cop, and a good friend of mine is a cop now. But every time I see a police cruiser behind me, I get real nervous. And if it follows me through a couple of turns, I just about go ballistic. I know my dad was a good man. I don’t know these guys, and an awful lot of people are attracted to the uniform for the same reasons as Dim in A Clockwork Orange. As jittery as cops are nowadays (what with the hostile occupied population and all), you never know when they’ll interpret the wrong kind of nervous eye-twitch as “aggressive behavior” or “resisting arrest” and taser you about 47 times or so–and then taser you some more for “not obeying instructions,” because you’re too busy convulsing in agony. And if anything happens, unless you’re lucky enough to be videotaped, it’s your word versus theirs. They’ll probably throw as many charges as possible at you to blackmail you into copping a guilty plea. As somebody once said in a comment thread over at Eschaton, I’m starting to feel like I’m in a Paul Verhoeven movie based on a Phillip K. Dick novel.