PROPAGANDA
AND PROTESTS

PHOTO: KELLY BRACKEN

Editorial
DAVID GRIFFITH

The public believes that TASERs kill, and
something must be done to change their minds.
YOU RECEIVED AN INVITATION LAST MONTH. I was supposed
to forward it on to you. But I took the liberty of deciding
that it wasn’t the kind of party that you would have enjoyed attending.
The invite came from a Chicago-based PR firm. They
wanted me to pass on to you their desire for you to attend
a “Non-Violent March Against Recent Police Violence.” I
guess they mistook the name of this magazine for “F--the Police.”
But I digress. The subject of this editorial is not the
anti-cop toxic waste that flows into my mailbox. It’s the
effect that all of this anti-cop toxic waste has on the average citizen when it appears in mainstream publications.
You see, media coverage of officerinvolved shootings and suspect
deaths have a great resonance with
the public. Consider the police operations in Chicago that spurred the
aforementioned protest rally.
In one incident, Chicago officers
shot and killed an 18-year-old
African-American man whom they
say flashed a gun at them. The community, with the help of professional protestors the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al
Sharpton, decried the shooting because the young man
was hit in the back. At presstime, the case was under
investigation.
The other incident that triggered the Chicago protest is
even more problematic for local officers because it could
deprive them of one of the most effective tools available
to law enforcement officers, the TASER.
During the first week of August, Chicago’s finest were
called to a home by a distraught woman who reportedly
informed them that her brother—a man who reportedly
had been arrested dozens of times and was violating a restraining order—was damaging the property. Official reports say the man resisted attempts to bring him under
control, and the officers shot him twice with a TASER and
gave him a dose of OC. He died.

Now, I don’t want to diminish the tragedy of what happened to this family. But they are now all over the Chicago
papers attacking the officers for using a TASER on their
loved one. Which is very dangerous because the Chicago
PD is skittish about TASER use anyway.
Chicago bureaucrats, like many public citizens, believe that TASERs are lethal weapons, and incidents like
this fanned by press coverage of protests by Sharpton and
his ilk are likely to reinforce that myth. Which could result
in Chicago taking TASERs away from its officers.
The autopsy was not released at presstime. But if it’s
honest and not influenced by politics, then it will most
likely conclude that this man OD’ed
on cocaine, and he would have died if
the Chicago police had responded to
his resisting arrest by hitting him
with Nerf balls.
Almost every “TASER death” has involved a cocaine overdose. But that’s
never the headline in the press coverage of these events. The headline always reads like the Aug. 5 headline in
the Chicago Tribune: “Man Dies After
Police Use TASERs During Arrest.”
Headlines like this have convinced
the public that TASERs kill. The irony here is that TASERs
have saved a lot of lives, both police lives and the lives of
people who might have been killed by police if they hadn’t been TASERed.
Demonizing such a beneficial tool is clearly part of the
agenda of activists. And unfortunately their propaganda
has convinced a lot of the public that TASERs are deadly.
Perhaps the only way to counter this propaganda is
through citizen education. Unfortunately, unless you can
convince the press to publish or broadcast a story praising the TASER as a life-saving device, then citizen education is going to be an uphill battle.
Still, that’s a battle you must fight. Because the goal of
your detractors is to deprive you of one of your most effective and benign weapons. Such a misguided decision
could be deadly for you and the people you serve.

✪ ALMOST EVERY

“TASER DEATH” HAS
INVOLVED A COCAINE
OVERDOSE. BUT
THAT’S NEVER THE
HEADLINE.

12

POLICE

SEPTEMBER 20 07