Pueblo deputies shock 'errant' 10-year-old with Taser

The problem is that the parents aren't allowed to discipline the child. Parents hardly have any rights when it comes to their children due the actions of a small handful who abuse those rights. Even worse, the parents are foster parents who have even less rights when it comes to discipline. If parents could discipline their children they wouldn't need police intervention.
Secondly he is a 10 year old boy for Christ sakes. I am the mother of 2 boys of similar age. How many 10 year old boys have the emotional capacity to understand and control their emotions. Even worse he is in foster care which means more than likely he is far more emotionally immature than most other 10 yr olds. He was either abused or torn away from from his family with out cause both actions which stunt emotional growth.
I promise you, I, despite being smaller in stature than the majority of police officers could have easily restrained the boy with out the use of tasers. Tasering was by far unnecessary force, and a disgusting action on behalf of the police. The boy was not armed with a loaded weapon but a freaking lead pipe.
I used to work in a mental hospital as an intake worker. I frequently had to take down psychotic people who had 5 times the strength of this boy. I was trained on how to do this with out causing injury to my self or the patient. Are you telling me that police aren't trained how to do this? If they aren't will then I am frightened, and certainly do not want them coming to my rescue.

reply to post by djvexd



you are the one who needs to come back at reality. then you need to take a good long hard look at what is going on... it is fact that kids today are more out of control than ever and that is because parents are not allowed to discipline their children by spanking them. there is no reason tot aser a 10 year old. a 10 year old could not swing a pipe hard enough to damage someone fataly or anything especially if the pipe is as big as said then he would be able to barely swing it. i dont know what kind of crap you are trying to pull justifying what the cop did but it is complete and utter bull. you are the one who needs to come back to reality. you grab the pipe and take it away there is no way a 10 year old wouuld be able to out run you with a 2 foot pipe let alone swing something that big and heavy hard enough to injure all you had to do was grab the damned thing seriously. you are not right in the head. you need to come back and look at how screwed up the children are at this period in time and then look at how behaved they were when people were allowed to actually discipline their child. i am irate at this moment in time that someone could be so idiotic and delusional. the only time a child should be tasered is if they are threatening someone with a loaded gun not with a stupid pipe. you make me sick.

reply to post by calstorm


I like you and agree with you 100%. i was a cna for the mentally handicapped and the patient i took care of was schizo autistic and many other things and he had wild behaviors everyone who worked for him had to be trained how to take him and hold him to the ground without injuring him or yourself. this person had the strength to throw a tv out of his bay window and the tv that was thrown took 4 grown ment to bring in and he threw it all by himself and is 28 years old.if the cops could not take care of a 10 year old without a taser then they do not need to be in the police force!

Here is the irony I see....

If parents discipline their kids to harshly [as with a tazer] they can be charged with felony child abuse; that negates the "take responsibility for your kids" argument.

Strangers on the other hand [LEOs] can, by authority of the state pretty much do whatever they want with other peoples kids.

God help us.

Someone not connected with the foster care system needs to find out what led up to the fight between foster father and foster child. Sexual abuse in the foster care system is rampant. I'm not saying this is the case here. I am just bothered by the fact the child has no one looking out for his best interest.

[edit on 4-12-2009 by eradown]

What we have here are multiple failures of society.

Parents are becoming more and more reliant on cops to do their parenting for them. There are a few reasons for this. With the growing prevalence of government in our lives parents are conditioned to think of the government as the answer to their problems and it has spilled over into child rearing. Parents are legitimately afraid to take control of, or punish, unruly children. For fear that they themselves would be in violation of ever tightening restrictions on what constitutes a politically correct punishment. So they call in the cops to protect themselves. Sometimes it's just plain old laziness on the parents part but the reasoning above is valid.

With the rise of the Tazer police are instructed more and more to use it. The individual cops in the recent rash of tazings, may or may not have had a moral opinion of whether or they personally felt they HAD to use the tazer, but the issue is that the procedures they are required to follow, say yes taze anyone who is not fully cooporating. I used to blame the overzelous use of tazers on lazy cops who just don't want to deal with a situation. Simply taze, incapacitate, arrest. Now I tend to blame the "system" or whatever department is in charge of writing the uniform cops tazer instructions. (DOJ?)

Before the advent of the tazer these situations were always handled. I do not recall hearing reports of cops being thrashed by a ten year old throwing a temper tantrum, nor do I recall stories of broken ribs or other severe damage being caused to a ten year old as a cop was physically restraining them. Come to think of it, it's only fairly recently that cops are called to respond to a rampaging ten year old at all.

The tazer can be a useful, even life saving tool. when used in the context it was meant for. Unfortunately it has become "the easy way out" and it's use is often the first thing on the mind of officers in similar situations. Combine that with parents who are afraid or just to lazy to take control of their child, and these taze reports will become so common place that no one here bothers to post a thread over it.

It is a very telling and sad commentary on our society.

Originally posted by IntastellaBurst





Well what the hell would you guys do if that maniac is coming at you with his freakishly miniature physique....... probably wielding some type of plastic hammer he stole from a construction playset while in a crystal meth induced rampage ???


.... what would you do indeed !!!!


Come on . . we're not talking about "Chuckie" here !

But if we were . . . I recommend running over the SOB with a truck,
. . then throwing him into a blast furnace . . the little . . . . . .

reply to post by whaaa


Seriously? Police are called as a last measure. When you can't handle things by normal means. I don't advocate tasering kids when they misbehave. But when they go to the extent that this little bugger did, AND YOU DECIDE to call the police, expect him to be handled in the most effecient manner. As I said before Cops ARE NOT babysitters nor parents, when you call them on a child it is because you cannot handle the situation yourself.Edit: to add most officers have families and kids...you think they go around the house tasing their kids? No. things like this are done as a last measure. Bottom feeding trolls sort through the civilian reports to find these incidents and then blow them up to make it seem like every cop hates everyone, everything, and every kid. So the run around shooting and tasing anyone when ever they get an itch. You are sipping on the froth without tasting the cider.

[edit on 4-12-2009 by djvexd]

[edit on 4-12-2009 by djvexd]

reply to post by Kurotachi


Really? So you think at 10 a child could not swing a 2ft. pipe at a human head and kill someone? Umm...it's called physics and it only takes 5000N≡ 5000Pa . WELL within the range of a healthy 10 year old boy. So do some math before you post.

Why do idiots turn this around on the police, why do bliss ninnies always ask why a big policeman can't disarm a 10 year old instead of asking why a 10 year old ignores the orders of a police officer to drop a potentially deadly weapon.

In my day I would have expected a severe beating from the cops for doing this, and rightly so.

We haven't become de-sensitized to the use of the police force, it's the other way around, we have become sensitized to it.

Errant boy is misleading. Under certain circumstances it is perfectly legal for a child to use even deadly force to defend himself. The police were right to taser and not kill the little boy. Now the police need to follow up and find out the boys side of the story.

One of these days . . a taser is going to trigger something in an
errant little boy . . and he'll never be the same again.

Where have we come when we realize that parents are now so
restricted that they are scared to administer a spanking . . .
( it could be construed as child abuse ).

Yet we bring in the police . . grown individuals trained to help out
in a domestic situation . . . only to let them taser our kids ?

You've got to be kidding me ?

Why not just buy the tasers and do the tasering ourselves ?
( it would save a housecall ).

[edit on 4-12-2009 by SIEGE]

I bet a lot of parents out there read this story, looked at their kids going apes**t, and thought, "Damn, I wish I could get me one of those tasers."

I suppose it could have been worse, before the age of Tazer's they probably would have just shot him 17 times and planted an AK -47 on him.

I had several "knee jerk" reactions to some posts but I'll restrain myself a bit...I feel as though police have become very dependent on that device and with good cause in most situations. Key word there being "most" I was not there so I can't say exactly what took place, only gather a visual from the article provided.

I can't imagine how one officer alone could not have physically managed the youth, I see failures on so many levels here which many of you have already pointed out. I'm disappointed in the LEO's that feel warranted to use this type of force on young children...but it's law that gives them the authority to do so. When I think of the police officers we'd hear about 20 years ago rescuing a little girl's kitty from a tree by climbing up after it, I can only picture a officer of present tasing the runaway to get it down.

Far fetched I know, but I never thought I'd see the day when these tasers would be used on our youth unruly or not. I'll give an example, I recently had a conversation with an animal control officer in which the subject of dealing with especially aggressive dogs came up, I asked if [they] were allowed to taser them in extreme cases, the answer... no that would be cruelty to animals.

What I gather from this? It's ok to use a taser on human children that could potentially hurt an officer but it's not ok to use said device on say a rabid pit bull.

[edit on 4-12-2009 by alyosha1981]

reply to post by djvexd

As I said before Cops ARE NOT babysitters nor parents,....

I agree with you on this point, However if the government would allow parents to discipline their children (within reason) then maybe there wouldn't be so many parents calling the police to handle their out of control kids these days. Many parents are so afraid that if they discipline their kids child protective services will be at their door to take their kids away that they don't know what to do to keep their kids in line. I sure don't remember people calling the police on their kids when I was a kid, but then when I was a kid your parents could give you a good whack when you needed it and the government stayed out of it.

to add most officers have families and kids...you think they go around the house tasing their kids?

State trooper Mike Wooten does....

He was found to have violated state policy for using a Taser on his 10-year-old son,

www.washingtonpost.com...

And hey Walter Schmidt doesn't seem to have a problem zappin the kids of his co-workers, and some of his co-workers even gave him permission to do it.

correctionofficersgoingwrong.wordpress.com...

And apparantly he's not the only one.....

More than 40 children shocked with stun guns while visiting prisons in April may not have been the first ones zapped, according to a report released Tuesday.

A corrections officer told investigators she saw a similar demonstration at a prison about five years ago.

The report included hundreds of pages of documents gathered during probes ordered after the Department of Corrections learned children ages 5 to 17 had been shocked at three Florida prisons on April 23, “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.” Three employees were fired and two resigned. More than a dozen others were disciplined.

“The exercise that I participated in has been a common practice. At no time did I believe that any of the students were in any risk,” wrote Weisner, who had been with the department for 11 years.

Common practice to shock children ages 5-17 ???!!!

search.cbsnews.com...

No not every cop hates everyone, everything, and every kid, there are some very good cops out there. However there are also some power hungry bad cops, as well as some cops that are burned out and need help, or need to be off the force.

Taylor described the physique and size of the boy, who's name hasn't been released because he's a juvenile, as that of a "normal 10-year-old."

The sheriff described Myers as a "thick" man at 6 foot 2 inches tall.

The boy was struck by two darts in the preferred target zone, one in the lower abdomen and the other in the left leg, Taylor said.

www.chieftain.com...

I just find it hard to believe that a man of that size couldn't subdue a normal sized 10 year old without resorting to the use of a taser.

I don't think all cops are bad, but i believe that tasers are being over used and the use of tasers should be reevaluated, perhaps they should only be issued to seargeants. I believe that the use of tasers is having an ill effect on our police force, making otherwise good officers lazy and too easily prone to use a taser before attempting to diffuse a situation.

reply to post by alyosha1981

I recently had a conversation with an animal control officer in which the subject of dealing with especially aggressive dogs came up, I asked if [they] were allowed to taser them in extreme cases, the answer... no that would be cruelty to animals.

Very good example, it helps to put certains things into perspective

With all due respect ask that animal control officer how they deal with aggressive dogs.

I wanted to say to everyone who has posted here that I have been short with you and I do apologize. Very passionate about the topic, I don't mean not tasering kids, I mean the subject of running officers down for doing the job they are called out for. I stepped out of line on more than a few occasions especially with chise61, calstorm, nuprose1, Intastella Burst, Kurotachi, and whaa.

I understand where you are coming from, but as a mother of 2 boys of similar age and an advocate for foster care reform, I too am very passionate about this.