It’s probably worth pointing out here that people die from Taser strikes all the time. Tasers are “less lethal," not “non-lethal.”

Cemeteries are filled with people, most of them Black, who went into cardiac arrest and died after cops shot them with Tasers.

Any cop who fires a Taser knows, because they are trained to know, that the action they are taking has the potential to be deadly. Yet it’s very rare to see any cop exercise even minimal restraint in the use of that “less lethal" weapon.

It’s hard to imagine that five or six police officers could not have handcuffed that man instead of firing a Taser at him. It’s hard to imagine they would have been in any realistic risk of harm by working together to arrest him without using weapons.

That doesn’t happen, because police culture in the United States is brutal. Cops are taught to use force that might kill people if they perceive even the slightest hypothetical risk to themselves or their colleagues. They are trained to believe that their perfect bodily safety is fundamentally more important than the lives of the people they’re supposed to be protecting and serving.

They are taught that suspects, even of minor offenses like an expired tag, are their enemies and that brutality is a desirable and useful way to treat those enemies.

Throw racism into the mix like water into boiling oil, and the result is not just predictable but explosive.