Your NZ Police at work – tasering a man to death

Here’s the wonderful NZ Police as they taser a man to death, go along to the footage and watch them at work…

…this on the day that we learn Police used a taser on a mentally unwell man in a Police cell…

Police taser use on mentally unwell man ‘excessive’ and ‘unjustified’

The Independent Police Conduct Authority has found that a South Auckland sergeant’s use of a Taser on a mentally unwell man at the Counties Manukau Police station was “contrary to policy, excessive and unjustified”.

Police were called to a South Auckland address on April 27 last year after a 111 call about a man wielding a large knife and threatening to self harm.

When police arrived, the man’s family told them he had been cutting himself earlier in the day with a small pocket knife and that it was possible he still had this knife concealed on him.

Officers arrested the man for possessing an offensive weapon and took him to the police station. He was told he would be strip searched and was taken to a small cubicle to wait for officers.

He refused to remove his clothes and police advised him that if he did not, they would cut the items off him.

As they tried to remove his clothes the man resisted.

A sergeant entered the cubicle and used a Taser twice on the man, his actions caught on the room’s CCTV camera.

…hilarious stuff.

Will anything happen to the Police? Probably not.

NZs weird authority worship culture allow the Police to do what they like, and we have a Political class that only care about get-tough-on-crime rhetoric, not holding Police brutality to account.

The Independent Police Conduct Authority still don’t have the budget to investigate all complaints independently and they still have no teeth when it comes to their rulings.

The thing that is most concerning about all this abuse using tasers is that the rules on taser use are incredibly clear, a Police Officer can only use a taser if a person has a weapon on them and are threatening use of it against the Police or other people. The Police CAN NOT use a taser for mere non compliance, they can’t use it if you are refusing to follow their orders. You have to have a weapon and be a present and real danger, but what we are increasingly seeing are Police using tasers just because they can.

In a properly functioning democracy, the population demand from their politicians that there be checks and balance over Police power, in NZ, we unquestioningly cheerlead the cops and hand them vast powers with barely any oversight.

Many NZers still believe that anyone questioning the Police are communists, we need to grow up as a culture before we will start demanding accountability from Police brutality.