I blogged once last year on the growing use of tasers in schools, and I came across another such story today, this time from Ohio:
A Westerville North High School student who stripped naked, lubed his body in oil and ran amok through the school commons during lunch yesterday was arrested after police twice zapped him with a Taser.
The article treats the use of tasers as a minor point in what is otherwise just a local human interest story. A taser electrocutes its target with 50,000 volts of electricity and is excruciatingly painful. It clearly constitutes torture. It was never supposed to be used except in cases where the alternative was to fire a gun. For instance, here's the CBC:
Tasers are supposed to allow police officers to subdue violent individuals without killing them. A police officer can "take down" a threatening suspect without worrying that a stray bullet might kill or injure an innocent bystander.
Yeah, it would've been really dangerous to shoot a naked teenager in a crowded cafeteria-- what choice did the poor cops have?
I've followed the use of tasers and other non-lethal weapons quite a bit. Amnesty International keeps statistics on taser deaths, and theirs are actually among the most conservative of figures. According to a 2006 report:
Sixty-one people died in 2005 after being shocked by law enforcement agency TASERs, a 27 percent increase from 2004's tally of 48 deaths, finds an Amnesty International study released today.
More disturbingly, the taser seems to produce Abu-Ghraib style behavior in policemen (link):
In a massive report released late last year, Amnesty International documented hundreds of cases in the last three years in which Taser-happy police used the weapon on everyone from disturbed children to old men and women who didn’t follow orders fast enough to a Florida man — strapped down on a hospital bed — who wouldn’t provide a urine sample.
Given the behavior of taser-carrying cops, what kind of school principal could allow such a weapon to be present on school grounds? And what the hell are cops doing in schools in the first place? Are we such frightened sheep that one Columbine means we will accede to having our schools remade into boot camps?
I want to make a second point regarding taser use against children which I have not seen brought up anywhere. It has become clear that people on cocaine have a dramatically higher risk of dying from being tasered, even when they are young and otherwise physically fit. Even if you're not on cocaine the taser may stop your heart momentarily (it all depends on when in your heartbeat cycle the electrocution begins). Among taser victims whose circulatory systems are already stressed by stimulants, the chance the heart rhythm will be fatally disrupted or that the heart will not re-start is considerably increased.
And who are some of the primary users of stimulants in the United States? Schoolchildren, of course. Ritalin is extremely similar to cocaine, chemically speaking, except that its effects in the brain are stronger, and its cardiovascular effects last longer (reference). Adderall, an amphetamine similar to speed, has been known to cause sudden death due to heart attack or stroke, which is why it was taken off the market in Canada. Regarding Ritalin:
Ritalin, extensively prescribed to calm hyperactive children... should carry the highest-level warning that it may increase the risk of death from heart attacks, US experts recommended yesterday.
<snip>
This class of drugs, known as methylphenidates, are amphetamine-based and it is thought they could cause heart problems in some children and adults because they raise blood pressure [and heart rate, may I add].
<snip>
[The British version of the FDA] added that methylphenidate "is recognised to cause cardiovascular adverse effects", such as a racing or abnormal heartbeat and palpitations and increased blood pressure.
It's actually not that easy to find out how many schoolkids are taking stimulant medications. The most common estimate seems to be about 3% of schoolchildren, but the number of prescriptions written to children nationwide, divided by the number of schoolchildren in K through 12 schools, suggests it's twice that percentage. Among high school students, the number using prescription stimulants illicitly (not as prescribed, or without a prescription) is as much as 10% per year. Illicit use might mean once, or it might mean repeatedly over a long period (Ritalin and Adderall are addictive, after all). And although it's possible to buy Ritalin or Adderall online without a prescription, many studies look only at prescriptions filled. So in any given high school, I'd guesstimate that between 3 and 8 percent of students are on stimulants on any given day (but even then, it's highly variable between schools). The kids on meds (legitimately or illicitly) are disproportionately the kids with behavioral problems, who would be statistically more likely to run afoul of the authorities.
Someone's child is going to die from being tasered in school while taking stimulant meds. Of course, the school administrators and the police will pretend that it was impossible to predict that Ritalin + 50,000 volts would produce death... sort of like Condi claiming no one could have predicted planes flying into the WTC, in spite of months of warnings predicting exactly that.
Any principal allowing the use of tasers in a population where there is a minority group with major cardiovascular risk factors-- i.e. the typical American student body with its stimulant users-- is criminally negligent, and should be prosecuted if a student dies from tasering under his/her watch.