56 Year-Old Teacher Calls Cops for Help, Ends Up Tasered and Arrested

A primary reason a lot of us are highlighting incidents of police abusing people with tasers is that there aren’t good, comprehensive national statistics that could form the basis of a serious debate over their use. We have only anecdotes — many of them, almost every day — of cops tasering recalcitrant kids, the elderly, ladies in wheelchairs.

This one happened during the weekend:

Janice Wells called the Richland Police Department when she feared a prowler was outside her clapboard house in the rural west Georgia town.

The third-grade teacher had phoned for help. But within minutes of an officer coming to her backdoor, she was screaming in pain and begging not to be shocked again with a Taser. With each scream and cry, the officer threatened her with more shocks.

“All of it’s just unreal to me. I was scared to death,” Wells said in an interview with the AJC. “He kept tasing me and tasing me. My fingernails are still burned. My leg, back and my butt had a long scar on it for days.”

The officer in question is Ryan Smith of the Lumpkin Police Department. Smith was called to back up an officer from the Richland Police Department because the sheriff’s office in the county, Stewart, had no deputies to send.

Smith resigned as a result of the incident. The other officer involved, Tim Murphy of Richland PD, was fired for using pepper spray while trying to arrest Wells….

The details of the altercation between Wells and the officers have been fodder discussions in the two towns, which are only 10 miles apart. Some have speculated there was a racial component to the altercation between Wells and the policemen; Wells is black and the officers are white.

Stewart County Sheriff Larry Jones, who came to the house seconds after the last electric shock was administered, suspects the outcome would have been different if the woman had been white and the officers black.

“I don’t think they would have done a white female like that,” said Jones, who is black. “If they had, it wouldn’t have been any doubt about whether they need to be terminated.”

Much of what happened in front of Wells’ house was recorded by the camera on the dash of Smith’s patrol car. The Wells, hidden from camera view by the open door of the Richland patrol car, can be heard pleading, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that!”

“Get in the car. Get in the car. You’re going to get it again,” Smith answered.

Almost immediately there is another clicking as the Taser is discharged again and Wells screams.

“Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” Wells pleads again.

Smith, who quit eight days after the incident, remains unrepentant.

“I did what I had to do to take control of the situation,” Smith told the AJC about his decision to repeatedly discharge his Taser.

Yet his former boss, Lumpkin Police Chief Steven Ogle, was shocked when he saw the video.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Ogle said. “You don’t use it [a Taser] for punitive reasons, to prod someone. It was evident it was an improper use of force. He was an excellent officer other than that incident.”