10-year-old is tasered by officer in Arkansas

Victoria Atencio
Post #5
The article that I found on the MSNBC website was about a ten year old girl being tasered by police in Ozark, Arkansas. The incident, which was a result of the girl being sent to a youth shelter, occurred after her mother had called police at which point the officer report explains that when the officer arrived on scene the girl was found on the floor crying and screaming. After refusing to follow the instructions given by her mother the mothers told the officer to use his taser gun on the young girl. The officer then proceeded to carry the young girl into the living room at which point she began kicking officer Bradshaw striking him in the groin with her legs and feet. These actions resulted in Brashsaw briefly stunning the girl with his taser followed by taking her to her destined location.
The actions administered by the officer in this case were taken to an extreme to the point of using excessive and possibly dangerous force on a child. The amount of control exerted by the officer demonstrates unnecessary reminders of the control uniformed officers have on society. Of course there are situations in which taser guns are extremely important in order to protect officers such as stunning individuals who pose a threat to the officer’s life yet the manner in which the taser was used in this particular case was an unnecessary form of control. A ten year old girl throwing a fit should not be administered bolts of electricity through her body as the solitary means of control. The article quotes the officer who administered a “very, very brief” stun with the taser yet they do not define the term brief and as a result begs the question as to what lengths officials will go in order to control any inconvenient form of disorder. If shocking a ten year old girl with a taser gun is deemed ok by society then who is to say that shocking a nine year old child is acceptable so long as the slightest amount of deviance is carried out by the child.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34014497/ns/us_news-life/