Sorry I Tased You

by Joshua Maloney   At 1145, December 31, 2013, I started work like any other night. Sometimes, holidays are hectic to work as a police officer, but sometimes, they are eerily quiet. Having completed the Plymouth Municipal Police Training Center in December 2011, I had already finished the hundreds of hours the Commonwealth of Massachusetts requires to be a Police Officer and the additional weeks of training held in-house at Barnstable Police Department.    In the midnight shift roll call, the Watch Commander, Chris, briefed us on our town’s current events and problem areas and gave a humorous pep talk. I sat next to Katie, a newer officer married to Topher, a fellow Army vet with whom I went to the Academy. Toper was an OIF paratrooper with an Army Commendation Medal with Valor, whom I looked up to very much. He was the president of my police academy and a tough man. Katie had graduated from the same academy a few months before and had been cleared from the three months of Field Training about a week prior. This was her first overtime shift, and we were assigned to the outer sectors. Hyannis, the hub of Cape Cod, usually had a minimum staffing of four officers. In contrast, Marstons Mills/Cotuit, Centerville/Osterville, and Barnstable/West Barnstable had one each, collectively called the outer sectors. Katie was in Centerville/Osterville, and I was in Marstons Mills/Cotuit.       Topher and I at Officer John R. Kotfila Jr.’s Funeral in March 2016   After the roll call, Chris took me aside and asked me to keep in contact with Katie and ensure I could be there for her. Our first call together was in what I call the Bermuda Triangle of Centerville. From Race Ln to Rt 28 and Skunknet Rd to Ames Way sit dozens of interconnected neighborhoods with identical cookie-cutter ranch-style houses. It is easy to get lost here as it all looks the same, and there are limited street signs and no street lights.    I heard the radio speaker click and the unmistakable sound of the dispatch station microphone keyed. “222 and 224, from 374.” 222 is Katie’s cruiser number, and I was in 224, and because her cruiser was first, I knew it was in her sector, whatever the call was. The radio keys again, this time a more distorted sound. Katie responds, “222.” I already had the mic unclipped with my pointer finger base knuckle touching my upper lip with the mic encapsulated in my hand. I press the hand mic button and hear silence followed by a beep. The end of the beep indicates the mic is hot and transmitting. “Ged,” I say lightly as slang for “Go Ahead,” and then release the button.    Dispatch responds, “222 and 224, blankety-blank street for an intoxicated teenager at a house party”. These can go one of two ways: the person is either drunk, combative, and doesn’t want to cooperate, or they are so incredibly intoxicated they cannot be uncooperative. We arrived with the COMM Fire, and they started evaluating him immediately. “He should go to the hospital,” I heard a paramedic tell a friend of the drunk kid. Katie approached me. “Should we place him in Protective Custody (PC) and bring him to the station? Do we need to do anything else? Any charges for minors possessing alcohol or supplying to the homeowners?” Good questions, I thought. In a supportive manner, I responded, “Well, I think having his stomach pumped and waking up tomorrow will be enough punishment for his possession of alcohol. The people at the party called 911 instead of trying to hide the alcohol, which is what we want people to do. I think the hospital is the best place for him. If he gets wild down there, we still have the option to PC him to the station from the hospital.”    With just a few notes entered in Katie’s cruiser’s Mobil Data Terminal (MDT),  we were clear and headed onto the rest of the night in our respective sectors. About an hour later, at about 0130, I hear the click and clear sound of the dispatch mic open. “222 and 224, start making your way to blankety-blank lane for a report of a father-son domestic.” I knew the call would be volatile because dispatch didn’t give us the time to respond. They needed to get as much information out as quickly as possible while allowing us to head there.   I flicked the first four switches on the center console-mounted emergency lights and made a 3-point turn to reverse my direction towards the call. As always, I ran through what I could encounter when I got there. Katie and I should not use sirens within a few miles of the house; we should shut our emergency lights off before entering the neighborhood and kill the headlights before eyesight to reduce the likelihood of someone running away or barricading themselves. Katie and I should meet on the street and approach the door together. Domestics are some of the most dangerous calls cops go to; kitchens are full of knives, people can use their knowledge of their homes against us to hide weapons, and people can hide themselves and ambush officers.    As I arrived, I saw her cruiser with no lights on and the front seat empty. I stopped my car across from hers, killed the engine, and in one fluid movement, pulled the keys out of the ignition, opened the door, slid out of the vehicle, and to my feet. I saw Katie in her blue uniform stepping up the well-lit front steps as I began to run across the front yard. As I moved, I put on leather gloves for protection and called myself off.    The front door was open, leaving only the glass storm door that supplements many Cape Cod house fronts. Behind the door, an older man was on top of a young man, father, and son, I supposed. I guessed the one on top was the assailant. As I ran across their front yard, Katie stood on the stoop’s edge and said something to someone inside the house. I ran up the two steps, ripped the storm door open, and grabbed the man on top. The older man raised his hands and yelled, “he’s the one!” He pointed at his son as the young man lunged for his father. I grabbed the son by his shirt where he lay and dragged him out of the front door and down the steps onto the cold grassy lawn. He was kicking and flailing his arms as I was trying to get him on his belly to cuff him. He was a strong kid. In my peripherals, I saw Katie standing at the door, still talking to someone inside. I wrestled with the man until I got him on his belly, but I lost both hands. His hands went under his body as I tried to regain control.   I had tunnel vision, with my weight on my hips on him, and I was trying to get one of his wrists to cuff, but it is easier to stay out of handcuffs than it is to put someone into them. From the first fight I got into on the PD, I noticed my instinct was to fight by hand, striking with my palms, knees, and elbows. It seemed secondary to reach for a tool, like a taser, pepper spray, baton, or firearm. After what felt like an eternity wrestling with this guy, probably about two minutes, I concluded I would tase him. This wouldn’t be my first full deployment tase, and it was within the scope of its use. He resisted arrest; two officers had watched him assault another family member, and he was hitting and kicking me to get away.    In our two-week in-house training at BPD, we were taser-certified by Chris and Michael, the defensive tactics instructors. This block of instruction included the protocol for taser use, and a stress shoot building search in the basement of the PD with electricity-conducting foiled shooting targets. The training concluded with each of us being tased in the back by one of the instructors. As we were instructed to do before a full-pronged deployment in our training, the supervisor announced, “Taser, taser, taser.” I heard a snap and “Clack, clack, clack” from behind me. With a new officer on each of my sides holding me up, the two prongs hit the center mass of my back, one on each side of my spine. The prongs are about an inch long and are pronged like straightened fish hooks. They are long enough to deal with the thick clothing that people wear during Northeast winters. I was wearing a T-shirt, so I got the whole prong. I lost total control of my body and was assisted to the ground, where I continued to scream.  It felt like my entire body was between two pieces of thick metal with a jackhammer on top, crushing me more with each clack. I inhaled deeply after my exhaling scream and immediately began uncontrollably screaming as I emptied my lungs again. That five seconds felt like 60 seconds, and when it was done, I shouted, “fuck.”      On January 1, as I did many times in training and at the beginning of each shift, I released the clip on top of my Taser’s holster and pulled it out. I flicked the safety off and saw the lights at the end of the Taser turn on. I pointed it at his center back. I squeezed the trigger when I saw the red dot and light in the middle of his back. Snap, the blast door blew off, and wires piled on his back. “Clack, clack, clack.” Something was wrong. The taser prongs moved towards the man’s head and then over the grass. They were attached to something else, and the guy was still struggling. Katie screamed and shook her hand as the prongs and wires went with her. I saw the arch come from the wires and turned off the electricity. “What the #&%*@^%!,” I thought. She was shocked, staring at the prongs in her hand. As I realized I had landed two prongs into Katie’s hand, the man realized he had not been tased and was getting up again. The tunnel vision didn’t make me realize Katie had joined the fight when she had, and I didn’t know how long she had been there.    “You’re gonna need to tase him,” I screamed to her over the sound of the family members screaming. I looked at Katie, seeing the wires in her left hand. “Can you tase him?” It wasn’t proper for another officer to tell someone to use a weapon against someone else, but I was not going to chance electrifying the prongs in Katie’s fingers again. My Taser went back into its holster and stayed there. With one hand limp, she reached her other hand to her taser, unclipped the op, pulled it out, and squeezed the trigger. The five-second ride helped me get a cuff on and immediately get the other.    I picked the man to his feet and began walking him to my cruiser. Nelson, a veteran officer, showed up. He later reflected, “Taser wires everywhere. They went from your waste to her hand and from her waist to the guy. What the #&%*@^%!?” As soon as he got there, I asked him how we would get the prongs out of Katie’s hand, and his eyes gaped when he saw Katie’s gloved hand with two shiny prongs embedded into her hand. “She needs to go to the hospital,” he said right before he requested rescue for an injury to an officer’s hand. COMM Fire came out and transported Katie to the hospital. I got witness statements for the domestic battery and needed to explain the dynamic struggle we faced when the perp’s father asked me if Katie had tased herself. I still didn’t know how bad her hand was. Still, I shamefully told him I accidentally tased her and that she had the intestinal fortitude to tase the perp immediately after receiving a full-pronged deployment into her fingers.        Two Taser Prongs in Katies Hand   I transported the guy to the PD, where I briefed the watch commander. As a fantastic supervisor, he helped me articulate in the report how such an accident was made and explained how things like this happen in these volatile situations. Topher was called, and he came in that night. At the hospital, they needed to give her ketamine to detach her from the pain of having a barbed prong removed from the bone of one of her fingers. I saw her and Topher at this hospital, and I told her she could tase me back any time, and the department endorsed it.        Taser Prong in Katies Hand       X-ray of Prongs embedded in Katie’s Finger Bone   Katie forgave me, but she was out of work for several months, and I felt terrible. I got an idea from a sarcastic suggestion from a salty police officer one morning. “The least you could do is bake her a cake,” Kurt said one night to me. A good idea, I thought. Before she returned to patrol, I decided to make her an apology cake. I had never baked anything before, but I got cake mix, white frosting, and blue, yellow, black, and red decorative gel frosting. My military and police training taught me to follow the rules and consent to any instructions. I preheated the oven and mixed the ingredients. When the range beeped, put the square 8×8 cake pan into the oven and set the oven for the prescribed time. When the oven beeped again, I pulled the cake out but noticed a large divot in the top center of the cake. It looked like the cake had not risen in the middle, but I had followed instructions. I was confused but satisfied. Once it cooled, I removed it from the pan and frosted the top and sides in white. I used the whole container of frosting to fill in the large divot on top.   Then, in blue letters, I wrote, “Sorry I tased you” on the top half of the cake. On the bottom half, I drew the incident. I thought it was a decent piece of art, showing a male officer tasing a female officer. Her yellow hair and both of our police belts set the scene, and the wires from my hand to her hand. We both had sad faces.        Sorry I Tased You cake.   Katie was out of work for a month, and when she returned to work, I gave her the cake. She immediately realized the cake was not fully cooked and was inedible, but she told me the cake was excellent, and she knew I felt horrible about the situation. A few years later, we started to see memes claiming they received the cake after being tased by local police, but it’s two stick-figure cops. In the end, we got the bad guy, and he got tased too, but no cake for him.       Meme alleging cake was made and given to them after an incident they were the victim of (iFunny).   The cake became famous after I posted a photo to the Chive. The height of its glory has been the numerous times people have claimed to have made or received the cake because of a police encounter. It ended up in a Florida court case after a police officer tased a woman and sent her a photo I had taken of my cake years before.  It was initially reported that a former Escambia County deputy allegedly discharged a taser into a woman’s chest and neck as he was harassing her without provocation. The officer then tried to cover up the incident, attempting to apologize by baking her a cake. The victim’s attorney clarified later that the police officer sent the victim a text message stating that he baked her a cake and wanted to give it to her. The text message included a photo of my cake.   The story was first written in the Pensacola News Journal and went viral. Every news outlet jumped on the story, including Fox News, the New York Post, New York magazine, and Gizmodo.        An Ohio police officer apologized to a firefighter via a copy-cake (New York Post).   While stories of violence don’t often have valuable moral takeaways, I think there are a few gems in this story. Law officers are nothing but humans and are capable of the full range of mistakes and empathy that anyone is. Officers can be creative and use their top-tier communication skills to convey messages.            Special thanks to Charlie Daly for reviewing and editing this for me. See his website at www.DalyProse.com       Read more about me in mny other blogs on this site.