Alabama cops Tasered girl during seizure at concert and arrested mom for trying to help: suit

[marmar]

An Alabama woman claims police repeatedly shocked her and her teenage daughter with Tasers as the girl suffered from a seizure during a hip hop concert.

The woman, whose name was not released, filed a federal lawsuit last week against five police officers and the police chief from Rainbow City and three others from Gadsden, as well as the Center Stage venue where the concert was held, reported AL.com.

The 32-page suit claims police used a Taser at least three times on the child’s chest as police officers pinned her to the ground Jan. 16 while she endured a grand mal seizure, and other police officers who were nearby failed to intervene.

When the girl’s mother tried to help, officers knocked her to the ground, handcuffed her, shocked her with a Taser and then arrested her.

The city attorneys for each town declined to comment on the suit, and representatives from Center Stage – where recording artist Kevin Gates performed during the incident – did not return calls seeking comment. ..................(more)

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/alabama-cops-tasered-girl-during-seizure-at-concert-and-arrested-mom-for-trying-to-help-suit/

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Complete and utter assholes.

I'm sure it's far too much to hope they'd be even fired over this. More likely it'll just earn them a paid vacation.

[Enthusiast]

32. +1!

[DetlefK]

2. Don't worry: The cops will be fine and the town will pay the damages.

[frylock]

3. fuck tha police

[lpbk2713]

4. It's good to wear a MedicAlert bracelet.

But of course that would rely on the gorillas being clever
enough to know what it is and to actually look for it.

[jwirr]

5. Exactly. And I'll be damned if I would call these cops for help in any real medical emergency.

Unfortunately if you dial 911 for an ambulance they send idiots like this along. I wonder if any one has asked the officers what they thought they were doing?

I hope the judge has a child who has seizures.

[Catherine Vincent]

9. They are good to wear,

But in my case I always snag them against something and break them. I broke 2 of them (transplant recipient) so I just stopped wearing it.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

11. True, but these kinds of cops don't look at those....

They're looking for an excuse to be thugs.

[awoke_in_2003]

16. The victim is black

Pigs aren't going to let facts get in the way.

[Cal Carpenter]

19. Yeah, and then the cops would have said they thought it was a knife

and of course she wouldn't drop her weapon, so.....

[Enthusiast]

33. "Quit reaching for my gun!"

And other bullshit.

[uponit7771]

20. Not so if you're black, makes no difference to angry \ skeered cops

[Person 2713]

28. Those look like metal which could be used as a weapon . Might save

some peoples lives but cause others to get shot .

Even if the area doesn't care about people like this or what happened you would think there would be concern about taxpayer dollar lost in lawsuits but it keeps happening with a rare firing or two.

They are not trained to identify a person in distress.???
I thought they are suppose to put something in a persons mouth during a seizure to keep them from biting themselves NOT hurt them with a taser and kick ass their mom

[lark]

6. P.I.G.S

with apologies to all actual 4 legged swine out there.

[Iggo]

7. Yay, Cops!

They're the best!

[tblue37]

8. Cops will do this to anyone, but they are more likely to do this

if their victim is a PoC. Are you surprised to learn that the child and her mother are black? Somehow I wasn't. The extreme brutality and unwillingness to hear anything the mother said were hints.

[jwirr]

21. I was not surprised.

[Ilsa]

10. Bastards. nt

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

12. They are so lucky......... that they didn't get shot. nt

[Person 2713]

30. Exactly the seizure could have been labeled an "attack on the leo"

Hip hop concert means too many witnesses with phones so they toned it down to taser

[Vinca]

13. I think in addition to the lawsuits filed against municipalities,

cops should be held personally liable. If they opt not to purchase liability insurance, they can sell their homes, their cars and liquidate their retirement funds to settle a suit. It would make them think twice . . . maybe.

[Person 2713]

31. Good idea as many professionals need liability insurance

My friend is a. Scuba instructor and needs his own insurance
http://www.seidiving.org/instructor-resources/insurance-center/

Otherwise why think twice if no skin in the game they can be reckless and taxpayers chump the bill while they vacation for a month with pay

[d_legendary1]

14. Its not the first time police use tasers on epileptic seizure victims

http://www.nhregister.com/general-news/20140126/epileptic-man-files-suit-against-hamden-police-over-use-of-taser

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2675812

Some of those people go to jail for resisting arrest.

[jwirr]

27. I am now thankful that my little lady has severe epilespy.

[Logical]

15. "To Protect and Serve" LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL nt

[awoke_in_2003]

17. ...

?v=1391661600

[uponit7771]

22. +1

[awoke_in_2003]

24. I tried to link to one that didnt have

"Government" across the top, but it wouldn't work

[Logical]

29. +1000 nt

[Ino]

18. And where were the good cops?

Maybe endearing themselves by pretending to write tickets to 3-year-olds. Gotta love 'em!

[hobbit709]

23. On the same fantasy planet as good Republicans

[Initech]

25. When the police are the bad guys, who polices the police?

[ladjf]

26. Sadistic morons. Bad combo for having lethal weapons. nt

[Sunlei]

34. Its the same across the world. Give them an electric torture device and they will use it.

[tblue37]

36. They use Tasers the way cattle prods are used--to "herd" their victim, to force him or her

to move in whatever direction the "authority" demands, and to do so instantly. And if demands are not obeyed instantly, then the wielder of the device uses it to punish the victim for not submitting as thoroughly as the almighty one wants to be submittef to.

Of course, many cops are sadists who will take advantage of any opportunity to cause pain to a helpless person, and many are also white supremacists, who look for any excuse to assault PoCs, especially if they are black. Combine those two tendencies (and I guarantee they *are* often combined in individual cops), and you get the ones who insanely brutalize innocent black people, even minors like this girl or like Dejerria Becton (the 15-year-old girl assaulted by Eric Casebolt at the McKinney pool party debacle).

Cops *know* they will almost certainly not be penalized in any way for acting on these tendencies, so they make no effort to control their ugliest impulses when an opportunity arises to brutalize someone.

Add to these factors the fact that cops are NOT sufficiently trained (or at all in many PDs) to recognize or properly deal with many disabilities and medical conditions--e.g., epilepsy, diabetes, deafness, etc.)--and you get situations in which even those police officers who are not deliberately looking for an excuse to brutalize someone or to abuse POCs are all too likely to mistake a disability or medical condition for noncompliance, deliberate resistance, or even an attack on the cops.

Unfortunately, too, in addition to being poorly trained, the officers in all too many PDs have been selected for qualities that not only do not include the ability to think clearly and to control aggression when their adrenaline is pumping, but that actually make clear thinking under pressure highly unlikely. Oh, and don't forget how many cops use steroids to bulk up their physique.

All I can say is that our only hope for turning things around is the widespread availability of inexpensive videotaping capability and the ability to spread those shocking videos across the internet. The Civil Rights movement was helped a lot when Americans who were more comfortable burying their heads in the sand were forced by films broadcast on the network news shows to *see* how viciously the police officers in the South attacked obviously innocent and nonviolent black people, including women, the elderly, and little kids.

It gets harder and harder for the deliberately uninformed to continue believing that police brutality, especially against PoCs, is an uncommon thing or that it is perpetrated by just a few bad apples. With so much incontrovertible visual evidence, decent people eventually have to recognize that such violence is a not a bug but a feature of policing in the US. They will also be forced to realize that far from assuming that cops are more credible in a dispute over what happened in a given case, they must assume that cops often, perhaps more often than not, falsify their reports and deliberately lie, even under oath, to justify wrongful arrests, brutality, and murder and to help convict those who are on trial, whether the defendant is guilty or not.

[Sunlei]

37. Police press the prod to the skin to torture/punish people.

[raven mad]

35. This is absolutely believable.

I know that area - and can guarantee you don't want to be a "minority" and be there, regardless of venue (concerts, football games, whatever).

I would not go back to Alabama for all of Trumpster's money.