Crusading, Race-Baiting Cedar Rapids Gazette Reporter: Don't Tase Black Criminals

By Erin Jordan of the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

Cedar Rapids police have used Tasers on black people disproportionately in 2010, causing members of the African-American community to call for better cultural training for officers.

Of the 30 people Tasers where used on through August of this year, nine, or 30 percent, were black — far exceeding the 3.7 percent black people comprise of the Cedar Rapids population. None had weapons.

“I am not surprised the African-Americans are Tasered more often than other folks,” said Dedric Doolin, president of the Cedar Rapids branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “History would support that African-Americans tend to more often get more severe treatment and negative response from officers. Is that appropriate? No.”

You've got to be joking, right? What are the cops supposed to do? "Oh, you're black, so we can't taser you yet until we taser some more white criminals."

There's more:

A Gazette analysis of Cedar Rapids Taser deployments from Jan. 1 through Aug. 30 showed police shocking 30 people who ended up being charged with crimes.

Tasers were used on whites 14 times, or 46.7 percent of the incidents, which is disproportionately low for the 92 percent whites comprise of the city’s population. Cedar Rapids police used a Taser on one Hispanic man, one man whose race was described as “other”, and five people whose gender and race were not noted on police use-of-force reports.

Common charges were interference with official acts, assault on a police officer, disorderly conduct and drunken driving. Reports show four cases in which the offender had a weapon. Weapons listed were a handgun, knife, vehicle and all-terrain vehicle.

Nine other offenders (six white, three black) used their hands as weapons, the reports state.

Circumstances that lead to Taser deployments vary.

Let's let some pro-criminal, race-baiting reporter, driven by an agenda from the usual bunch of racists at NAACP, micromanage the cops in Cedar Rapids.  What a swell idea!  Maybe they can turn the police there into the mamby-pamby, leftist-run joke like the Des Moines Police Department has become, especially after last summer's "Beat Whitey Night" fiasco.

It's sad the media is so gullible and eats up whatever it is that the race hustlers give them.

A few years ago, KWWL-TV succumbed to some nothing rag called Black Communicator which said that Iowa was the 2nd worst state for blacks in the US.  No, Iowa is the 2nd worst state for black criminals in the US.

Iowa's historical attitude towards blacks is pretty damn good.

The race hustlers in Cedar Rapids are just upset they can't get more expensive offices and unlimited trips to places like the Bahamas off the taxpayer's dime anymore.

They also blew it by ginning up fake "discrimination" complaints against apartment complexes in Cedar Rapids a couple years ago.

Erin Jordan throws her "racist cops" tag at North Liberty:

Other police departments also have disproportionate Taser use when it comes to minorities. Of North Liberty’s nine Taser deployments since Jan. 1, 2009, four were on black people. Just 1.5 percent of the city’s 12,400 residents are black.

North Liberty Police Chief Jim Warkentin did not return a call for comment for this story.

Don't talk to the race-baiting media, Chief!  It's a trap!

As for Erin Jordan, here's her bio:

Erin Jordan taught at the Iowa Summer Journalism Workshop held by The University of Iowa in 2009 and at the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio in Iowa City in 2006, 2007 and 2009. Her Saturday sessions with the Young Writer’s Studio involve taking high school writers to the Iowa City Farmer’s Market to interview people and write news stories from their interviews. Jordan was the Iowa City Bureau reporter for the Des Moines Register where she focused on regional and educational stories from 2003 to 2009. She spent 2000 to 2003 at the Cedar Rapids Gazette as an investigative reporter and a police and courts reporter. Jordan’s first experience in reporting was for the Iowa State Daily at Iowa State University from 1994 to 1997. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication from Iowa State University.

Now let's look at some of the comments on this story in the Gazette:

wow. National Enquirer level of journalism. Pathetic.

I wonder how the percentage of blacks/whites who were tasered corresponds to the percentage of blacks/whites who were charged with a crime. It seems to me that that would be a more accurate statistic than comparing it to the population as a whole.

What a stupid story. How many people arrested in general are black? 3 out of 10 seems normal, that must mean 7 out of 10 are Anglo. sounds more unfair to them. If you do not want to be tasered, simply do what is asked of you by the police, do not be an out of control fool or drunk. Why should they have to tackle someone, then you have lawsuits over injuries from that and disabled cops.

I for one could care less what your skin color is, if you resist arrest then you get tasered. Seems like a slow news day for the Gazette.

It appears that the taser was used almost exclusively on males. Does this mean we should be looking into the sexism angle too?

What unbelievable story!! What has happened to journalism? Has it died completely? I guess if your a cop you should check the “statistics” before you try to solve a crime to make sure you are only solving crimes that keep in mind the “race” mix of the population and if not I guess you should ignore this crime until the “population race equation ” is correct !!!

This is a dumb story.  What's the goal here?  To say the cops are racist?  To ban tasers?  To spew more left-wing, pro-criminal bullshit that most people don't believe?  I'm sorry, but I don't believe for a second that Cedar Rapids is the same as Selma, Alabama in the early 1960s.

Where is "reporter" Erin Jordan in researching what kind of sentences the local judges hand down, like how Judge David Baker let a killer driver off with a slap on the wrist and didn't even take away his driving license?  Isn't that more important to look into that sort of stuff than obsessing over whether a few more black criminals were tasered by the cops compared to the overall population?

What the hell is happening with the Cedar Rapids Gazette?  It's becoming as radicalized as the Des Moines Register has become, but then it doesn't help that they're hiring the Register's cast offs.

I wonder if "reporter" Erin Jordan has ever gone around with the cops before and see what they deal with on a daily basis.  I'd be surprised if Erin Jordan knows any cops, much less understands what they go through in their job.  When you see stories like this one, you've got to wonder what the reasoning is behind it.  Either the reporter is a radical leftist nitwit pro-criminal bed-wetter (often the case), or they hate cops because they got a speeding ticket a long time ago and couldn't talk their way out of it, or both.  In any case I wish more subscribers and advertisers would give up on their local paper when this kind of crap is printed.