Taser Used on 11-year-old Girl Who Stole Food From a Kroger Store

CINCINNATI -- A police officer working an off-duty detail at a grocery store used a Taser on an 11-year-old girl Monday evening[August 6, 2018]. The officer was working a detail at the Kennard Avenue Kroger when his attention was brought to a girl who was involved in shoplifting food from the store.

The officer approached the girl who ignored the officer and walked away, ignoring commands to stop. The officer then deployed the Taser and struck the girl in the back. (KOMO 4 News, August 7, 2018)

"It hit my back real fast and then I stopped, then I fell and I was shaking and I couldn't really breathe," the girl, Donesha Gowdy, told NBC News in an interview alongside her mother. "It's just like you're passing out but you're shaking."

The fourth-grader said that she did not try to fight the officer and that she was not aggressive toward him.
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CPD procedures on use of force state, "The TASER may be deployed on a suspect actively resisting arrest when there is probable cause to arrest the suspect, or to defend one’s self or another from active aggression."

The procedure also notes that officers should consider the severity of the crime, the level of suspicion with respect to the fleeing suspect, the risk of danger to others and the potential risk of secondary injury to the suspect due to their surroundings before using a stun gun.

"An individual simply fleeing from an officer, absent additional justification, does not warrant the use of the TASER," CPD procedure states.
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There is likely more to this incident than is reflected in the initial reports in the press. What I want to point out here however is less the fact that a Cincinnati police officer deployed a Taser when maybe he should have used another option, but that this incident is reported in the Seattle, WA press.

This week we have also seen a 2015 YouTube video of an officer in Virginia Beach, using a Taser on a 17-year-old who refused to get out of a vehicle until his mother arrived at the scene of a traffic stop. [The officer claimed he detected the odor of marijuana coming from the vehicle. All marijuana charges were later dropped.]

With the ubiquitous nature of video cameras and 24/7 news reports, every use of force by a police officer has the potential to become national news.