Thinking Out Loud
My turnaround on Tasers
This week's column.
Even as Guilford County was debating, once again, the wisdom of police officers carrying stun guns on school grounds, four teens were being arrested in Wake County on Nov. 12 for a bringing a .22 caliber revolver and a butterfly knife onto the campus of Broughton High School.
The pistol turned out to be unloaded, but a knife requires no ammunition.
One day later, warrants were issued for the arrest of another teen for allegedly threatening a mass shooting at an Alamance County middle college.
In yet another incident not quite as near, but still too close for comfort, a South Carolina 11th-grader stabbed a school resource officer multiple times before being fatally shot by the officer. The confrontation occurred on Oct. 16 at Carolina Forest High School in Conway, less than 20 miles from Myrtle Beach. It was the second violent death on school grounds in four years. In June 2006, an 18-year-old Carolina Forest student was stabbed to death by her boyfriend.
The Oct. 16 tragedy especially resonated with one Conway resident, Walter Grey Richardson.
“You have the same crimes in school that you have on the streets,” said Richardson, who now lives less than 2 miles from Carolina Forest. “Parents just don’t want to open their eyes and see that.”
Richardson also happens to be a retired Guilford County sheriff’s deputy. He served as a school resource officer at Northeast and Northwest high schools for 12 of his 26 years with the Sheriff’s Office.
He was so moved by the incident and so troubled by the Taser debate in his home county that he wrote a letter to the News & Record. The school board in Guilford County “should take a look at Carolina Forest,” he wrote.
Truth is, the question of Taser use — or not — in schools is a tortured choice between the schools we want and the schools we have.
The schools we want wouldn’t need armed police officers and sheriff’s deputies in the first place, just the steady hand of a firm principal and the support of tough teachers and strong parents.
The schools we have can be harsh, unpredictable places where the problems of the larger community tend to spill at times into the hallways and classrooms.
Richardson described his experience as an SRO in Guilford County as “a very, very rude awakening.” “I dealt with everything from strong-arm robberies to assaults with weapons,” he said.
That’s not to say most students don’t respect authority or the rule of law. In fact, what’s good about our schools is as good as ever. But what’s bad is much worse.
I saw evidence of that firsthand while volunteering at Jackson Middle School several years ago, when a glaring seventh-grader called her teacher a “monkey” and threatened the woman repeatedly before being sent home with her mother.
Richardson, who retired in 2005, was not equipped with a Taser. In those days SROs carried a retractable baton called an Asp, pepper spray and a gun. “The schools, at the time, were against us having pepper spray,” Richardson said.
Sheriff BJ Barnes and High Point police Chief Jim Fealy discussed the Taser issue Thursday in a community panel in High Point. The Guilford school board and law enforcement officials plan a second discussion of the issue on a date to be determined.
But it’s unlikely that any significant changes will result. Both Barnes and Greensboro Police Chief Tim Bellamy have insisted that their SROs should be armed no differently from other officers in the field.
Look, these are our children, Taser opponents fire back. They also question the safety of stun guns as alternative to firearms.
But, as Richardson notes, even unarmed students can pose a formidable threat. “I’m 6-2 and I weigh 250 pounds,” he said. Then he described the challenge of handcuffing a 6-4, 300-pound student who did not want to be handcuffed.
Of course, the student Tasered at Ragsdale High School in September was only 5-foot-4 and weighed 155 pounds. But she had threatened two faculty members and assaulted the deputy.
Meanwhile, most studies find that Tasers rarely cause death or serious injury. A 2007 study by the Wake Forest University School of Medicine found that, in 99.7 percent of 1,000 cases in which police used Tasers, the person shocked suffered only scrapes and bruises. When officers resort to guns, we don’t need any studies to know the dangers.
And as Barnes pointed out Thursday, in three-and-a-half years since Tasers have been carried in Guilford schools, they have been used only four times.
Maybe that’s why I found myself squarely on one side of the issue two years ago. And find myself squarely on the other side today.
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