An Arkansas woman called the cops for a domestic dispute, not because her husband was beating her or anything like that, but because her 10-year-old daughter wouldn’t take a shower. Oh wait, it gets better. The cops show up and take this woman’s crap seriously, and try to put the little girl in cuffs and arrest her. For “disorderly conduct”. For throwing a fairly standard temper tantrum. But the girl, understandably at this point, if flailing around and refusing to cooperate with anyone, and so at the mother’s request, they tased the little girl.
Now the little girl is in a juvenile facility and is being charged with disorderly conduct. For, again, not wanting to take a shower when her mother told her to.
oh, and also this:
I hardly know where to begin. That some people are bad parents, and might even think calling the cops on a 10-year-old is a good idea, is not too much of a surprise: after all, noone gets handbooks, it's all make it up as you go, and some kids can be real jewels, so to speak. That the cops would show up and agree to participate at all, appalls me. That they would use potentially lethal force and shoot her with 50,000 volts of electricity for throwing a temper tantrum is just horrible beyond belief.“We didn’t use the Taser to punish the child - just to bring the child under control so she wouldn’t hurt herself or somebody else,” he said.
The police chief said his department has never had to Taser a child before. But he said if the officer tried to forcefully put the girl in handcuffs, he could have accidentally broken her arm or leg.
I've almost become inured to the stories of criminally corrupt, inept, power-abusing cops in the USA (and Arkansas seems to make a speciality of them), but this, this is just ghastly. It's not corruption, just a sense of casual brutality and violence on a scale I had never quite grasped before. Truly, the police are the biggest and best-equipped gang.
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