Taser Use by Athens-Clarke County Police Should Be Investigated

Last April, Dantonio Pittard fell asleep inside the Kroger on Highway 29. Police were called. Less than one hour later, after being tasered five times by an Athens-Clarke County cop, Pittard found himself handcuffed and sitting in the backseat of a police car, on his way to jail for trespassing and obstructing a law enforcement officer, both misdemeanors.  

I’ve gotten to know Pittard since early March, when the Athens Area Courtwatch Project posted a $33 cash bond to get him out of jail on an earlier arrest. Since then, he’s been arrested and jailed at least a half-dozen times on misdemeanor charges. His last arrest, on Apr. 27, was for public indecency. He’s been in jail ever since. Neither he nor the Courtwatch Project is able to post his $1,000 bond.

“They [police] see me anywhere I go, and they stop me and ask me what I’m doing, where I’m going,” he told me last spring. “They always be watching.”

Pittard is 41 years old and essentially homeless. The courts have barred him from several family residences. He also struggles with mental illness. His public defender is seeking to have Pittard evaluated to determine if he is competent to stand trial.

On Apr. 16, a little after 7 p.m., a Kroger manager called police to remove a sleeping Pittard from the store. When a police officer arrived and instructed Pittard to move on, he complied. In the meantime, the store manager decided that he wanted Pittard barred from Kroger altogether.  

The police officer located Pittard in the parking lot, walking away from the store, and asked him to stop. Instead, Pittard ran toward the highway. While he was running, the officer reported that Pittard “pulled his pants up showing what I believed to be pre-assault indicators.”  

Wait a minute. Pulling up your pants is a pre-assault indicator? Come on. Really?  

Yes, really. “At this point I deployed my Taser to stop him…” the officer reported.

Other cops arrived on the scene and surrounded their suspect. According to the police narrative, Pittard became “combative.”  

“I cycled my taser for a second time to prevent [Pittard] from becoming combative again.”  

Then, “[Pittard] began reaching to remove the probes from his body. I cycled my Taser for a third time. During the third cycle, Pittard started removing the probes from his body, so I cycled my taser for a fourth time.”  

And still: “Due to him moving his arms and actively attempting to remove the Taser probes from his body, I believed the Taser was no longer showing NMI [neuromuscular incapacitation] for the past two cycles, so I shot my second set of Taser probes, and this last cycle did not achieve NMI on Pittard as well.”

The police officer’s report concluded: “I holstered my Taser… we finally got both arms behind his back and officers were able to successfully handcuff him, double-locked behind back. I safely removed the probes from his body.”

No doubt we should be thankful that Pittard is still alive. Another police officer might very well have used his or her handgun and shot a fleeing African-American man in the back.

Still, it should be cause for great concern when a Taser is fired five times at a fleeing trespassing suspect who posed no imminent danger to anyone. Isn’t this a textbook example of using excessive and unnecessary force?

The weapon used in the apprehension of Pittard is called the “7” model, and it’s manufactured by the Arizona-based company Axon. Axon says the Taser 7 is superior to the “X26P” model Taser our police department used up until last year.  

“Spiral darts fly straighter and faster,” the company’s website says, “with nearly double the kinetic energy.” The Taser 7’s fishhook-barbed probes contain 50,000 volts with a “pulse cycle” of five seconds. These same probes that entered Dantonio Pittard’s backside send intense debilitating signals through a body’s nervous system. It’s painful and causes muscles to contract. Sometimes it leaves the human target temporarily paralyzed. The probes, according to medical reports, also can cause breathing problems, skin irritation, minor bruises and interrupt the heart’s rhythm. And of course, they leave small puncture wounds.

Last year, the ACC Commission voted to replace the older model Taser weapon with the “new and improved” Taser 7. Commissioners authorized over $180,000 to purchase 231 of the spiffy-looking yellow-barreled 7s.

Perhaps now is the time for the 16-person—with nine citizen voting members—Public Safety Civilian Oversight Board to initiate an inquiry into the ACCPD’s use of Tasers. A formal investigation could seek answers to these questions:  

• How often were ACCPD Taser guns discharged in 2021-–22?   

• Who was tased, who did the tasing, and when and why?  

• How many of the taser victims were Black? White? Teenagers?  

• Where were the probe hits on each person’s body? How many times was each person tased?  

• How often was the tasering effective (and what defines “effectiveness”)?  

• Did any of the persons tased have to be transported to the hospital?  

Section 3-18-3 of the local legislation that authorizes the Public Safety Civilian Oversight Board states that the board “shall have full discretion to select appropriate individual incidents to review and broader issues to study that may be of concern to the community.”  

There needs to be a transparent examination into what happened during Dantonio Pittard’s Apr. 16 arrest. At the very least, Pittard seems to have been the victim of an overzealous police officer who fired his Taser five times in the span of just a few minutes. Furthermore, it should be explained why a middle-aged homeless and mentally challenged individual, caught sleeping in a grocery store, who was already well-known by law enforcement, was pursued at all by the cops on that April evening.

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