Cops and tasers: 72-year-old Kathryn Winkfein zapped and sent to jail after traffic stop

June 4, 3:50 PMSandusky County Politics ExaminerMichael Stahl

Previous Next

15 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Sandusky County Politics Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Seventy-two-year-old Kathryn Winkfein was tasered and arrested following a traffic stop in Texas recently. Her account and the yet to be released evidence (despite media request) from the police camera differ radically. The "constable" in question claims that she was "using" profanity, and became violent.

Frankly, it is hard to imagine a situation where the use of a taser on a woman of that age could ever possibly be justified, unless she were actually attacking with a knife or gun, which is not alleged. Besides being simply indecent to do such a thing to an elderly woman, people of that age are quite likely to have some form of medical difficulty, making the risk of taser death much higher. For a working police officer to claim the need to resort to such force against an elderly woman strains credibility to say the least. Indeed, were this to have occurred between an orderly and this woman in a nursing home, the orderly would likely be looking at charges.

The people who really should be standing up and shouting about these sorts of encounters are all of those decent police out there, who really did get into the job to do some good, but instead they and the local bureaucracy tend to try to cover up the matter, as they did with my dead neighbor. That makes them equally cupable.

UPDATE:

The dashcam video has been released!

 You be the judge. Could this paragon of public "service" have defused this situation? Well, as soon as she got out of the truck, she wanted to sign the ticket-why not just let it end there? But I'm a lunatic.

To keep up with the growing police counter-culture that permits the viewing of ordinary people as untermenchen do look to Will Grigg's blog:

Pro Libertate

Other related stories:

NJ man beaten on tape

Jailed journalist Sam Dodson

And how screwed up the system really is

Travis County Sheriff issues statement on this case-"....I am in awe of what happened"