Tasers 4 Autism: Police Taser Autistic Teen

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Chief Jimmy Price and a corporal have been suspended with pay, and two officers resigned following earlier suspensions, according to the Savannah Morning News.

City Manager Diane Schleicher told the paper a pending GBI probe of the May 21 incident "created the need for an internal affairs investigation."

Eighteen-year-old Clifford Grevemberg, in a lawsuit filed Tuesday, claims he was beaten and Tasered by Tybee police "without probable or reasonable cause or excuse," the paper reported. The suit states Grevemberg has autism and suffers from a heart condition, according to the paper.

But police reports say Grevemberg was intoxicated and struggled with officers before he was shot with a stun gun, the paper said. Grevemberg, who broke a tooth and got his face and legs scraped, was charged with disorderly conduct. The incident happened outside the Rock House restaurant on the night of the Beach Bum Parade.

The two officers who resigned had written reports about the incident; the corporal who was suspended approved those reports, according to the paper.

A lawyer for the officers told the paper: "They resigned because they felt they received a lack of support from the chain of command."

Price has led the department for 18 years.

http://www.ajc.com/news/tasering-of-aut ... 45859.html

At least the department is making changes now.

tasers are a brutal and rash shortcut to pacifying a person, certainly no better than truncheons about the head. you'd think in this day and age there would be a better way to handle disorderly folk than to torture them with intense pain.

On an eppisode "Jail" they pinned a woman to the ground, held a tazer to her skin and threatned to taze her if she so much as took a breath simply because she refused to take her pearcings out. It dosen't surprize me they would bully an autistic person for no reason.

A few things come to mind instantly while reading this.

1) Tazers are used far more often than they should be. Often when better defensive training should come into play. My cousin was a prison guard in Massachusetts during the Rodney King incident. Even he said they used excessive force. They probably would have used tazers then if they had them.

2) If the guy was drunk, what the hell is he doing pulling Autism into the picture? What has that got to do with it?

3) Drinking can and does magnify certain personality traits, often negative ones. Good reason for Aspies who tend to lose temper not to drink, or at least not to excess.

Anyone remember an old Bill Cosby monologue about drugs? He met someone preaching the blessings of cocaine. They guy said, "It enhances your personality."

So Bill asked him, "But what if you're an as*hole?"

Do you have any ideas for alternatives?


The only thing coming to mind are those directed sound wave devices that are being considered for riot suppression. Not sure how far they are into producing those devices.

there are submillimeter microwave pain generators which are aimed at crowds in order to encourage them to disperse- they impart a burning feeling upon the target. but what i would do first is forbid the use of 1 minute, 2 minute and 3 minutes long sustained torture sessions with tasers, they should be strictly limited to 2 second bursts, only muscle/nervous system disruption with no intentional infliction of pain as a primary deterrent. many cops routinely use the "drive-stun" pain-deterrence setting as an informal torture/corporal punishment device for folk who are already restrained, such as that florida college student ["don't tase me, bro!"]. no civilized society should countenance corporal punishment upon its citizens. i know a kung-fu instructor who could teach cops a thing or two about quickly and [relatively] painlessly subduing disorderly people without torturing them.

If you go on the site it says that his brother told the police that he was not drunk and that he was special needs....it says he has never drank.

Fair enough if so. The article linked to in the original post doesn't say anything about his brother or anything his brother may have said. Still, like I said, "Fair enough, if so."

That is why I usually try to use words like "IF" because you never know from reading anything on the Internet if what you read is either true or complete. That is also why it was posed as a question.

Thanks for clearing that up. By the way, where did you read about what his brother said? Is it there, and I just missed it?

Remember though, that my FIRST point is that tazers are used too often, and too often for the wrong reasons. I never excused the officers. Even if he were drunk, there are much better ways to deal with those situations than tazers. Tazers are unnecessary. If officers are trained properly they don't need them. They seemed to do quite well without them for decades before their use.

I would be in favor of some kind of a device that would fire a throw net over someone. Something like that would have been more appropriate and certainly less painful than using a taser. From what I understand tasers can be dangerous to people with a heart condition.

I would like to see something enacted that would allow police to detain an unruly person at the station (non-criminal type of detention) for a period of a few hours as sort of a time-out to let him cool off. A lot of potentially violent situations can be deflated when you have a time-out and let both parties cool off.

I'm a fan of taser guns.

I mean, I'd much rather have an under trained police officer draw on me with a taser gun during a super-duper Hulk smash meltdown [where I'm not hurting anyone] than with his or her Glock .40 cal....

He also had a heart condition, according to this story. In that case, the cops could of killed him if this had gone badly.

Well yeah, I do too.

But I'd much prefer someone with minimal training plugging me with a taser than with a 180 grain hollow point. Much, much more likely to survive the former than the latter.

The LAPD did have Tasers, and did use one on Rodney King, who's response to being "tased" was to laugh at the cops and rip the barbs out of his chest. What's interesting is how the Taser and it's lack of effect in this instance led to the later infamous use of batons in subduing King; the LAPD brass had presented the Taser as a sort of super weapon to the rank and file, only sergeants were allowed to carry them and their use was strictly controlled. Thus when King was seemingly immune to and actively contemptuous of the weapon, the officers involved thought they were dealing with someone high on PCP or who was incredibly tough. Combine that with the fact that the department had elected to only train their officers in striking techniques using the PR-24 side handled baton rather than locks and takedowns (they thought the more advanced techniques were too complicated for their officers to learn), and the reaction looks a bit less damning. Watch the complete video to see what I mean, not just the part that was shown on the news. The involved officers keep yelling at King to stay down, then striking him when he refuses to comply, as they'd been taught by their department. It still looks terrible, but if you know the background it becomes easier to understand that the leadership of the LAPD at the time was at least as culpable as the actual involved officers, and the reasons for their subsequent acquittal.