The police report called the fight this week between two students at West Lake Middle School in Cary a "simple physical assault." Perhaps it was, but there was nothing simple about how the school's resource officer - that's a cop to you and me - stopped it. When he saw the boy and girl fighting, he used a stun gun to stop the one he felt was beating the daylights out of the other.
"The officer attempted to separate the young people involved" but couldn't, Wake County Schools spokesman Michael Evans told me. "He decided to use the Taser, but it didn't do much to slow her down."
Say what?
Reading of an eighth-grader being shocked with a stun gun ranks pretty high on anyone's "What the heck?" meter, but when you realize it was the adolescent girl upon whom the officer used the nonlethal - most of the time, anyway - electric shock weapon, that makes it even more disturbing. It had to be a case of overkill, an overreaction by a small or inexperienced cop, right?
Not according to Cary police and Evans.
"Obviously the officer was heavily engaged in breaking up the fight, and the young lady was not cooperating,"Evans said. The officer, he said, "is a fairly stout man" but he was no match - mano a girlo - to stop the assault without the weapon. The police report stated that the girl's "personal weapons" were "hand, feet, teeth."
"He felt the young man was in danger," Evans said. "There was a chance of a pretty serious threat to the young man's life" because of the disparity in the combatants' size.
Deputy Police Chief Barry Nicholson said no one was arrested, but the police report noted that "the parents of the victim ... are discussing filing charges." Paramedics took the girl to WakeMed.
Only at county schools in Cary and Garner do school resource officers - cops - carry stun guns., Evans said, explaining, "Each agency has its own policy."
I asked Nicholson whether his department, like some others, requires officers equipped with stun guns to be shocked themselves so they know what kind of misery they're dishing out.
"We don't require it," Nicholson said, "but we encourage our officers to do it. Most of them have been tased so they'll know what the person is feeling. We have policies and procedures that talk about when it's proper to employ" stun guns, he said. "An elderly person or a young person normally wouldn't be ... but the size and stature of the people involved play into it."
Being a cop is a tough enough job under the best of circumstances, like, say, when you don't have some newspaper columnist second-guessing you. It's unlikely that the cop - oops, school resource officer - set out for work that day with the desire to use a stun gun on an eighth-grader.
Me, I feel sorry for the officer who had to make that awful decision. I also feel sorry for the kid who was getting whomped by the reportedly uncontrollable girl.
Mainly though, I feel sorry for any young'un who - if police and school reports are true - had that much rage inside her.
