I saw this story when it first broke, but I wanted to give the Minnesota State Patrol a chance to explain their deployment of a TASER in the incident, seeing as how I have only heard positive comments about the agency in the past, and felt that they deserved the benefit of the doubt.
Since they apparently choose not to explain their involvement, I go forth with my comments.
A 29-year-old Fridley, Minnesota man, by all accounts young, healthy and happy, dies after being TASED by one of five Minnesota State Troopers following a car accident on Interstate 694 Tuesday afternoon. Here it is on Saturday night, 5 days later, and the peasantry is still completely in the dark as to what happened. "Officials" will only say that Mark Backlund was "uncooperative".
Just what in the heck does that mean? Did he refuse to sign a ticket? Give them the finger? Did he not pull his car into the breakdown lane when asked to do so? Did he do something serious that would explain and justify clearly why they needed to use a TASER, such as assaulting one of the officers? Exactly what did he say or do to warrant shocking him into oblivion? More importantly, at least to me, why can't the five trained state troopers present at the scene control one apparently unarmed man, regardless of what his behavior was, without resorting to TASING him?
It looks like we're going to be waiting quite a while for some answers, as the ol' clam-up seems to have started:
"Public Safety officials declined to release basic incident response data requested by the Star Tribune under the state's open records law."
Why even have an open records law, if the muckety-mucks are just going to ignore it whenever they please? Why do people, both private citizens as well as news organizations, continually have to resort to filing lawsuits to get information like this, when they're supposed to be able to walk into police headquarters and obtain it? You need more time to review the camera tapes and TASER footage? Fine, I guess. At least give the radio traffic and incident reports to the media, as they are supposedly publicly available information that is to be given out almost immediately upon request.
If Mr. Backlund was endangering the officers, himself and/or other members of the public and couldn't be safely subdued another way, then the TASER was correctly and properly used. If he was being a pain in the ass and one of the troopers decided to short-circuit an argument, or if he declined to obey a request without resisting or becoming violent, then there is a BIG problem with the TASER deployment. It's one or the other. How long does it take to figure out which it was, especially since a fatality resulted from the incident?
Behavior such as this by police agencies only gives the impression, whether justified or not, that there is something that they're trying to hide. With both major Twin Cities papers hounding the State Police in a way that I haven't seen in quite a while, I don't think stalling as a tactic is going to work much longer.
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3 comments:
I completely agree with your comment about the open records law in Minnesota. I've frequently heard people of law enforcement persuasion suggest if someone doesn't have anything to hide they won't mind (cameras|questions|databases|etc) and yet here is a government agency not revealing what it knows. I certainly don't want a criminal case compromised because certain information is released to the media, but best I can tell the MSP hasn't suggested anything like that.
I do have a question about this statement though:
"or if he declined to obey a request without resisting or becoming violent"
Wouldn't the act of declining a lawful command by a law enforcement officer be by definition resisting?
What I meant by "not resisting" was something along the lines of a protestor standing on a street corner and not moving along when ordered to by a police officer. If the officer moves to arrest the protestor and they don't put up a struggle, i.e. they just stand there and let themselves be handcuffed and carried off, I don't see the need for pepper spray or TASERing, no.
Sorry for any confusion, I guess I should have put it something like "refused to comply with verbal commands, but did not struggle or physically resist the officer".
With your clarification in mind, I certainly agree with you. I would hope "uncooperative" in this case means more than simply:
"Come here"
"No"
zzzzpppptttt
Do keep in mind that someone who is willing to disobey verbal commands from an officer needs to accept they have created a confrontation that registers on the use of force scale. A peaceful demonstration where everyone knows the protesters are simply there to get arrested and released for the purpose of civil disobedience is one thing, a guy not responding to verbal commands on the side of a freeway is totally different thing that will require escalation by the officers on scene.
To what level that escalation achieves probably depends on your opinion of the taser's lethality and how much risk of injury an officer should be expected to assume.
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