Early Friday morning a 33-year man got into a scuttle with police outside a theater at Universal Studios Orlando. Reports say he was "pacing around, grabbing his beard, grabbing his head … being disorderly," and after police got involved, he became violent. One of the five officers present ended up Tasing him; the man -- 33-year-old Adam Spencer Johnson -- ended up dead.
There are plenty of "Don't Tase me bro" jokes out there, but this is anything but funny. It's yet another case that makes us question if police should be allowed to use Taser stun guns in situations that don't absolutely warrant them, and if perhaps they're too powerful.
I was just at Universal Studios Orlando last week with my children. While it's a great time, it's also ripe with potential for problems. Dr. Seuss Landing is nice and sweet, but the Universal complex is also full of bars, adrenaline, and crowds. So I can see why police would be swift to act when trouble arises, and I'm glad they are; but this man's death is concerning.
Perhaps he had some sort of medical condition or was on drugs that increased the effect of the Taser, as police say he wasn't acting rationally. So far toxicology and autopsy reports haven't been released and likely won't be for weeks. But even if there was a reason he was more susceptible to a taser, then there are likely others out there who could be as well. It scares me to think that someone could be killed by police for something minor, especially when there were five officers present.
Besides a few traffic tickets, Johnson had no previous criminal record. Friends and family say he was a nice, mild-mannered guy who didn't drink or take drugs. His boss, Jay Burns of Crown Shredding where Johnson had worked for several years, told The Ledger:
Adam was a very gentle soul, very soft-spoken. He was a loyal, valued employee who treated the business as if it was his own.
According to Amnesty International, in 2008, there had been 351 deaths as a result of stun guns since 2001, and more have occurred since. While I think police should have every possible tool to protect us at their disposal, that also sounds like far too many deaths. Even one warrants a much closer look at the power of stun guns.
Do you think police should be able to use stun guns?
Image via eviltomthai/Flickr
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Comments 12
Sometimes the police have no other choice but to use a Taser. If someone is high on drugs and violently out of control, there is no reasoning with them. I don't know enough details about this Universal Studios situation ( and neither do you) to say if the use of the Taser was warranted. I seriously doubt, in the highly litigious society in which we live, that police just use Tasers for the heck of it.
I don't know if this is true for law enforcement all across the country, but I have a friend whose son is a prison guard and all of the guards have to be Tased before they are qualified to use them. This is so that they understand how powerful they are, and they don't just use them arbitrarily.
The police were protecting the other 100,000 people who needed us.Are you kidding me.This guy sounds like a total crack head.
Wow the replies here are disturbing!
There were 5 "trained" officers there. The man may have been acting erratic but if he had no weapon there is no reason that 5 trained officers couldn't have contained him in another manner. This is over-kill; just like the power tripping cop in TX that tased the Granny w/ the foul mouth; so she was yelling at him...or the one that have tased small children!???
Tasers have a place; but many officers seem a might too quick to use them.
The police are too quick to tase or use another weapon on a person. They need to learn to use the training they got in the beginning. There has been a lot of deaths lately here in California from police in similar situations. It is ridiculous!!
they should have tried to bring him down 1st before tasering...especially if there was 5 officers and 1 person....
It is true that in law enforcement you have to go through training and be tazed yourself before being allowed to carry a taser (my husband says it sucks, lol). That said, police are human, just like everyone else, and tasers are tools just like guns. Some people are quicker to resort to what could be considered excessive force than others and accidents happen. If the officers deemed that he couldn't be safely contained without risk to others or themselves and he was acting irrationally, then they did as they were trained and used the tasers, which are safer than their firearms. I bet if they'd have tackled him and he got hold of one of their guns and shot someone, no one would blame them for shooting and killing him in return, so why get mad at what was probably as much of a freak-reaction to the tazing as anaphylatic shock is to bee stings? Some people just respond differently to different stimuli. For all we know right now, he may have been hopped up on drugs and that's what did him in, not the taser. I for one, would rather have the police contain an out-of-control person than to just stand back and let them endanger others.