Texas Police Shock White Woman, 72, Making Nightly News in Brazil

Cross-posted at the Police Brutality Blog and the Electrocuted While Black blog in the afrosphere.

I live in Brazil and I just saw a scene on the nightly news here, from the US state of Texas (click here for video), that disgusts me, and will shock and astound Brazilians nationwide. A Texas police officer was arguing with an elderly white woman during a highway traffic stop, stemming from a speeding ticket. The police officer is easily a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than this slightly built white woman, and yet he ultimately fires an electrocution device at her and she can be seen falling to the ground. She is a wrinkle-faced white woman who is seventy-two years old.

Would the police officer have shot this woman with a handgun if he not had an electrocution device available? Of course not! Police officers don't shoot elderly white women at traffic stops. So, the electrocution device served as a new tool of curbside behavior management and pre-trial punishment that, unfortunately, often results in death or serious injury. Should you really risk killing an elderly woman as part of issuing a traffic ticket?

There is no good reason for "Tasers" to exist in the USA today, any more than there was "an appropriate law enforcement role" for gas chambers in Auswhich, Germany. While it's true that people who died in the gas chambers escaped being burned at the stake, that is not a sufficient rationale for the existence of gas chambers. And the threat of being shot to death is not a sufficient rationale for being electrocuted instead.

Even as President Obama attempts to change the world's impressions about America's ruthlesseness and violence, local police officers are making television news around the world, electrically shocking little old white ladies into submission.