View full sizeA Syracuse police officers practices using a Taser after getting it in this photo from Feb. 17, 2005. A Syracuse woman has filed a federal lawsuit over the use of Tasers in city schools.Syracuse, NY - A Syracuse woman today filed a federal lawsuit challenging the police use of Tasers in the city’s schools.
Sheila Weatherspoon claims her 15-year-old son was recklessly injured when police used a Taser on him and handcuffed him while breaking up a fight between two female students at Fowler High School on Sept. 28, 2009.
“The police officers’ actions were an unfortunate but inevitable result of the City of Syracuse’s policies and practices governing the deployment of armed police officers in Syracuse public schools, which were designed to govern police activity on the streets of Syracuse, not the hallways and playgrounds of its schools,” Weatherspoon claims in the lawsuit filed on her behalf by the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Syracuse police said Officer James Stone, a school resource officer, fired the Taser at a girl he determined to be the main combatant in the second of two fights that broke out as school let out that afternoon. Authorities said the Taser missed the girl but one of the probes struck the male she was throwing punches at.
The following day, police and school officials defended the officer’s use of the Taser to try to stop an assault.
Named as defendants in the lawsuit are the city, Stone and Officer James Morris.
The lawsuit claims the city’s policies fail to “acknowledge the important differences between regulating adult criminal behavior and regulating children within the educational environment.”
The complaint also charges the city fails to treat Tasers as weapons capable of inflicting serious injury and death. The police department’s practices encourage officers to employ Tasers in a manner that poses undue risks, especially to students monitored by officers in the city’s schools, the complaint alleges.
The complaint further charges that police receive no special training before being assigned to the schools and that the city’s policy regulating the use of Tasers makes no distinction between using them on adults on the street or on children in school.
Weatherspoon claims her son, identified only as “A.E.” in the lawsuit, suffered serious injury and continues to suffer pain and emotional distress as a result of his encounter with the police at Fowler that day.
According to Weatherspoon, her son was new to Syracuse from Michigan and did not know most of the other students at Fowler. One girl he did know had asked to borrow his cell phone as they were leaving school, she contends.
When the youth saw another girl running toward his friend, he stepped in between them to prevent his friend from being hurt, Weatherspoon contends. She maintains her son was trying to break up the confrontation between the two girls when police and school officials arrived on the scene.
None of the officers made their presence known before Stone discharged his Taser, striking her son in the arm, Weatherspoon contends. Without any warning, the officer then pulled the trigger, subjecting her son to a painful shock, the mother claims.
The officers then handcuffed her son as he lay on the ground in front of 30 to 40 students, many of whom were telling the officers that her son had been trying to stop the fight, Weatherspoon charges.
Weatherspoon’s lawsuit charges the police assaulted her son, used excessive force against him and subjected him to false arrest and false imprisonment.
The lawsuit seeks a declaration that the defendants violated the U.S. Constitution and New York State law. It also seeks compensation to be determined at trial.
Calls have been made to the police department and the city’s law department seeking comment on the lawsuit.
Read our previous coverage of Tasers in the Syracuse School District.