Alvin Carter never saw it coming.
According to Madison.com
Carter, a 67-year-old black man from Hartford, Conn., came to town two years ago to track down his runaway son. The teen had hooked up with some bad influences on the city's south side, and Carter caught up with him in the rough-and-tumble Allied Drive neighborhood. As he tried to restrain his inebriated son, he yelled for someone to call the cops, who promptly showed up, found the two struggling on the street and shot Carter in the back with a Taser.
"I felt this thud in my back and I thought I'd been shot because my whole body went limp," he recalls.
Carter says the cops, without identifying themselves as police officers, approached him from behind. One of them yelled, "Get off him. Get off him now." Carter says he had no idea who was yelling at him.
"Instead of them saying this is the Madison police, or coming around front where I could see them, they just Tasered me in the back," he says.
Carter is one of 65 people in Madison who were shot with a Taser in 2007, and one of more than 300 who have gotten the 50,000-volt jolt since the Madison Police Department began using the revolutionary stun guns in 2003. Every Madison officer on the street is trained to use them -- and many of them do. Since the devices took their place in the pantheon of tools cops place on their duty belts, someone in the Madison community has been "Tased," on average, about once a week. More HERE
For further information visit the blog Tasered While Black
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