05/21/08 - Greenwich Police Departments Repeated Use Of A Taser On A High School Student Has Struck A Nerve - Concerned Parents Want To See The Video

Let Us See The Video !!!!

People Are Continuing To Talk About The Taser Incident As They Wait For Greenwich High School And The Greenwich Police Department To Release The Surveillance Videos.

Born In Greenwich says:

Blue wall of silence. If you resist then you are shot or taserd? Makes sense.

Greenwich Police Officers have a very very difficult time with authority, more so the the taxpayers.

Just read all their internal issues over the last few years.

Please don't use my name says

What they did was show a school full of kids how much violence three cops can inflict on one unarmed kid in a school when they act out of proportion to the situation and without the necessary self control we expect of people we allow to walk around our schools with dangerous weapons.

I'm sure these kids feel perfectly safe now - NOT!

Some cops think a badge gives them the authority to act with impunity. If you don't think there are bad cops out there, many of them, then you are not paying very much attention to the frequent news stories that report it. Unfortunately, you can't just assume a cop is right, they often aren't.

Let's see a quick release of the tape of the incident to see how much resistence this one kid was putting up against three cops.

No lame excuses or coverups, just show us what happened.

ANON says:

Tough Sh*t kids....do as you're told by the police and this won't happen. If you knew anything about use of force procedure that is taught at the police academy, you'd know that you are taught to use a taser before empty handle struggle.

STUDY AFTER STUDY shows the taser causes less injuries to cops AND suspects. It also reduces the cost to taxpayers when a cop goes out on comp for an injury and his/her slot needs to be filled with ovetime.

Taxpayer says:

Wait until a police officers kid is taserd or a politician, then there may be changs.

See how a officer handles his kid getting taserd.

How in the world did they survive before the tasers?

Huh says:

There were three cops and they couldn't deal with ONE teenager without using weapons? Let's go to the videotape on this one.

School "resource" officer? Resource for what? Sounds more like a Rambo wannabe.

If they decide to sue, then fine.

Just look at all the cops with their "hypertension disability" claims.

What's good for the goose..

Jenny says:

The police use these tasers a little too quickly. Its intention was to be used instead of a gun - so ask yourself, should the police have SHOT this kid? Over water balloons? The answer would be NO. He shouldn't have been shot, he shouldn't have been tasered.

frank says:

Unfortunantly, this is what happens everyday in the innner-city. While I do feel bad for the high school student as well as his classmates that witnessed such criminal behavior by the "POLICE", maybe someone will start listening to what minorities have been saying for years. Although this student (by the mothers last name) seems to be a minority, cops are getting out of hand every regardless of your ethnicity. They get away with murder let alone just hurting someone with un-necessary force. I look at police as a legal gang due to their behavior which is no different than a criminal.

the judge says:

He got off easy,. in my day he would gotten billy clubbed.

james beardsley says:

this is shocking

Possible Overkill says:

Water balloons were a prank from a prior day.

Tasered over shouting and kicking a chair? What a lame response. Where were the school administrators? And where were this kid's friends to suggest he calm himself down? Pretty much a waste of taxpayer money, judicial time.

And instead of suspending the student for a week why not have him instead go to class, learn and then help clean up the cafeteria for the week??

Or would that infringe on some unionized worker??

Silly CYA culture...

Asbestos Head says:

This also could be the Spanish version of "Don't tase me bro"

outsider says:

The BRAT got what he deserved.
Shock the parents also!!!!!!

Guess Who from Fairfield says:

What a load of crap from the chief - water ballon throwing, a criminal offense, really?

SO your saying when my 9 year old has her summer friends over and the play with water ballons, she is committing a crime.

LIAR, LIAR, big fatty PANTS on fire, Chief.

Excessive force!

Sue the school. Sue the cops, Sue the Chief for being a stupid bastard.

That should be a crime.

BS says:

If a parent tasers their kid, the probably would get arrested. Lets see what happens when a officers son or daughter gets taserd. How have the tasers the taxpayers paid for helped the taxpayers?

Connecticut Sam says:

Arrest the cop. He is a bully.

MIKE says:

Thats right, believe everything you read in the paper, you'll always get the whole story.

Greenwich student says:

it's not alright that he goes and say bye to friends where he needed to walk by them anyways to leave the school. 3 cops and 2 more security guards didn't take him down? but the need to taser him was in no doubt at all. He should've listened instead of arguing no doubt, but to take it as far as MORE than 3 tasers, no way, the paper might say 3, but i know for a fact its more.

think about it says:

It's a kid, for goodness' sake! He is still in high school! And he didn't kill anybody. And no, it is not a crime to come back to school after one's been suspended. It is a violation of school rules, but not a felony offense. But just because this kid wanted to come back to school (think about that- he wasn't out robbing stores; he wanted to be in school), he wound up being shocked three times with a taser, handcuffed, arrested, prosecuted, and held for $50,000 in bail. His mother, who says she can't afford an attorney, probably had to go to a bailbondsman for the bail, and pay 10% of that amount up front- that means that her son's throwing a water balloon has cost her $5,000.

That is why sane communities in middle class neighborhoods don't station police officers in their schools. They let trained educators and psychologists and coaches deal with adolescents. Adolescents get unruly, get upset, deal with situations inappropriately and emotionally. Yet in responsible communities schools understand that you have to deal with young people differently. And they realize that, yes, you don't respond to adolescent bahavior and immaturity with brutal force, and you don't treat every upset kid as a criminal.

It's time to get the police out of our schools, and demand that our schools deal resonsibly with our children, and not just take the easy and convenient route of dumping them into the criminal justice system.

Tina says:

I just keep thinking what if it was my child.

Heads should roll with this policy and police action.

This one is going to cost the Town of Greenwich. It should and humiliation for this should be nationwide.

Release the video.

Let's see this one go up on Youtube and let the civilian population gather together to say. You just do not do this.

Angie says:

A school full of teachers, psychologists and guidance counselors, and a student is tasered for pulling a prank on SERIOR PRANK DAY!!!

Super Nanny could have handled it in 30 seconds.

Where were the educational professionals? Get the police OUT OF GREENWICH HIGH SCHOOL!

Samantha says:

there were students in the greenwich high school that protested by wearing t-shirts that said "Don't Taze Me!" on them with victor londono's name and the date that he was zapped

Robert Harmon says:

From what has been said in the previous article and in this article it seems that the real reason for this event is the fact that a student must be picked up by a parent when suspended,

This scenario does not call for any violence, after all he was leaving the premises which is what was originally asked of him.

STUDENT says:

Greenwich cops have nothing better to do than go around looking for kids that do stupid stuff like throwing water balloons to arrest them, they love arresting people, because thats how they keep their job, it was not necessary to shock a kid just for kicking chairs, that cop should get a job in the bronx or somewhere in New York where the real crimes happen because there's no crime in greenwich so anything they find wrong they're going to make such a big deal out of it because they have nothing better to do.

Jack says:

Would a white kid from backcountry have gotten tased? Probably not. This is was an insane over reaction by the officer.

country dad says:

High school is still part of a kid's formative years.

GHS has highly qualified and big-budgeted non-academic support system for kids who need help: school psychiatrists, psychologists, guidance counselors, mentor teachers, peer counselling by other students, etc. Anger management for an 18 year kid is not rocket science for this team to work on.

For the police to get involved in this manner is a big failure of this team and the Greenwich police. Greenwich police is a big and also highly budgeted force. And because the town has a low crime rate, they sometimes look into the male teenage population to justify their existence.

Parents of teenagers in this town must be vigilant that this population group does not get targeted unnecessarily.

Joan says:

One major reason for putting a police officer in GHS to begin with was the displacement of officers from the call center by civilians. Insiders know that the former police chief teamed up with the school superintendent Larry Leverett to help the police keep their staffing numbers up by putting an officer in the school.

There's not justification for having police prowling the halls looking for teenagers to arrest in a school that ranked among the safest in the entire state before the cops were introduced. If this could happen to this kid, it could happen to any of our kids.

Alisa says:

I feel as if people are forgetting that he threw some balloons.

Kids have let mice loose in Greenwich High School and people were stepping on them. Many of the were killed. I remember one year kids were going around stabbing random people with needles.

No action was taken with the other pranks.

This is a good kid.

I am a girl that attended Greenwich High school.

Its easy to listen to what the police say and judge victor but anyone who knows him knows this is messed up.

Yes he reacted in a way that he "shouldn't have".

He stopped to say goodbye to his friends. I could write pages on how I feel about this issue but I wont waste your time,

TDM says:

If this incident happened 20 years ago that kid would had got the whooping that he deserved, and if he had decent parents, they would have given him the same treatment when he got home. The liberal yuppies who are going to complain about this are the ones who allow children to behave this way. Kids no longer are accountable for their actions and it disgusts me. As for the parents, it sounds like they are just looking for a reason to sue the town so they can go to Foxwoods for a week with my tax dollars.

The GPD should be commended for their actions and that little brat should sit in a jail cell for a couple weeks to learn respect for authorities.

elmo says:

The student was wrong but, should kicking a desk necessitate a Tasering?

Incident should have been handled by the principal and a gym teacher, if needed.

But what about the police officer's training?

Is he (or she) that physically unfit or that poorly trained in basic physical restraint techniques that he could not handle one high school student?

A properly trained officer should have been able to have an unarmed student down, pinned, handcuffed if necessary and sitting in a desk chair within seconds.

Amy Karshian says:

I think this is outrageous Greenwich High School is a role model school for the region and we shouldn't have police officers tasing students in a low risk school just a bad example of why resource officers can take their powers as a police officer too far especially in Greenwich.

Glen says:

Consider a couple of facts.

First, corporal punishment has been illegal in America's public schools for a lot longer than twenty years. No school official is permitted to punch, slap, spank or otherwise assault a student. And the reasons for that come from long experience in the abuse of kids by school officials.

Indeed, teachers sometimes are suspended or put on probation for making comments that are considered particularly mean or abusive.

Yet for some bizarre reason, Greenwich High School thinks it's OK for a police officer in the school to put a taser directly onto a kid's body and delivers painful electric shocks to his chest, his stomach, and his leg.

That is brutality, plain and simple. No other member of the teaching staff or the administration or, for that matter, the security guard, would be permitted to do that. So it seems that the school is rolling the clock back to the old days of abuse, skirting the law by permitting police officers to administer the "whoopin'". That's wrong.

Jon says:

Look at the double-talk from the police department: the article stated that the student's behavior only became "criminal" when he kicked a chair and refused to put his hands behind his back....Huh?

Is it a violation of the law to "kick a chair"?

No one was injured, and not even the chair appears to have sustained damage.

Then the kid refused to put his hands behind his back- clearly to be arrested. Yet the police department's double-speak suggested that it was only after he refused to let himself be arrested that his behavior became- well- illegal and made him subject to arrest....Huh?

Only because he refused to be arrested did he become subject to arrest? The Greenwich Police Department has a lot to answer for.

What's not being reported says:

Greenwich is the 5th safest town of its size in all of America. It's crime rate since 1992 has fallen by well over 50%. It's rate of violent crime is negligible. And the rate of out of school suspensions and expulsions place it among the safest in the state of Connecticut, far better than the average for its socio-economic grouping.

Yet last year the police arrested 54 students on campus alone, a figure equivalent to 2% of the entire student body. Over the first two months of the year, students were arrested at a rate of three a month. If that held up, there would have been 27 more students arrested up to this point. That is far in excess of the experience at similar schools in the state.

If the police officer gets away with tasering this kid, you can bet that he'll use it more in the future.

Steve says:

It is shameful that the school board and the administration have enabled this sort of ugly assault on a kid by putting police officers on permanent duty in the school.

Tom Gogola, in an editorial in Fairfield County Weekly, hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

"What kind of police force can't constrain one high-school kid? And what kind of school administration is so out of touch and afraid of its students that it lets armed police officers deal with its disciplinary problems?.

"There are very few valid reasons why a student should ever be Tasered- or even be threatened with a Taser- at a high school (or any school for that matter). We're hoping that the Londonos sue, sue, sue!- and that the money comes out of the security staff budget, or the $250,000 yearly salary paid to schools superintendent Betty Sternberg.

That'll be a real shocker."

There was no excuse for what the police officer did. None.

Sal says:

The point is that he is an adolescent male throwing water balloons.

Of course he got incensed that teachers and administrators felt that they needed the police to intervene rather than doing it themselves. Think about what it feels like to be handled from the get-go as a criminal for mere childish behaviour. Take that feeling of violation and put it in an 18-year-old male's head.

Of course he got angry. A teacher or administrator he knew should have then diffused the situation. We cannot continue to use a heavy-hand in what really are mild situations.

It ties up our justice system and carries serious financial and social costs.

Karen says

Let me ask you a question:

if your child was talking during class and turning around and not paying attention and the teacher slugged your child in the mouth "to teach him/her a lesson", would that be acceptable to you? We outlawed corporal punishment, remember? You can't beat children in the school for any reason. But somehow it's alright to put a taser to a kid's chest and administer electric shocks? Why? Because it's a cop? Would you be OK with your child's being beaten for not paying attention, as long as the beating were administered by a police officer?

We outlawed corporal punishment for very good reasons. And we should keep the cops out of our schools for very similar reasons.

This kid's family will very likely sue the town, and they will probably win. Let's keep in mind that this comes not long after another kid was suspended for sexual harassment for purportedly saying something about a girl's chest. And last year 54 students were arrested at GHS alone. This is a school that has put virtually every inch of the school under surveillance with a system of surveillance cameras.

Doesn't anyone see how bizarre and out of control the security mentality is becoming there? Is that sort of rabid mindset really what we need for our kids?

Something is very wrong.

GHS Mother says:

Here's a little snippet from the newest article about this tasering incident:

"I don't have the money to hire a lawyer," Gonzales [the mother] said."

Please see:

05/20/08 - Former Greenwich School Administrator And Others Speak Out About Greenwich Police Use Of A Taser On A Greenwich High School Student

05/19/08 - Even More Comments About Greenwich High School Taser Incident (updated #3)

05/18/08 - Comments About Greenwich Student Getting Tased Three Times In The Greenwich Cafeteria (Update #6)

05/19/08 - Reader Submited Comments About Weapon Being Fired At Greenwich High School - What Was the Crime? (Enhanced With Video) Updated

And:

3 Greenwich Cops Give 140 Pound Boy 50,000 Volts And A $50,000 Bail For not Going To A School Office Over Water Ballon Incident: (Updated)

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