CBS2 reports that a Chicago police sergeant tasered 82 year old, 5'-1”, 160 lb. granny Lillian Fletcher last week. Workers with the city's Department on Aging saw her through the window of her apartment with a hammer in her hand, swinging it back and forth. The social workers called police. A landlord opened the door with a key and when police stepped inside, Lillian was seen swinging the hammer. Officers immediately wet themselves and, fearing for their lives, tased Granny Fletcher in self defense.
Fletcher's granddaughter told the Chicago Sun-Times that Fletcher suffers from schizophrenia and dementia. "She can be belligerent," Traci Taylor told the newspaper. "I just don't think they should be tasing 82-year-old women."
Amnesty International USA agrees, and voices concerns that police use tasers routinely rather than in cases of serious danger. In 2005, the Chicago Police department suspended the distribution of stun guns following the deaths of two people police shot with tasers. They've reconsidered that cautionary step in response to the surge in grannies with easy access to hand tools. About 200 cops have tasers and 150 more will be issued to field training officers.
Police stress the need for additional training and seek citizen volunteer taser targets to “help teach officers how to use tasers effectively when faced with physically intimidating perpetrators in life-threatening situations,” said department liaison patrolman Suzy Bluesuit. “Candidates should be at least as fierce as drunken blond waitresses or infants. Catatonic paraplegics, the blind, triple amputees, and patients confined to iron lungs” are encouraged to apply.
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