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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/10/19/taser-chinedu-okobi-less-lethal/">https://theintercept.com/2018/10/19/taser-chinedu-okobi-less-lethal/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">My Morehouse Brother Chinedu Okobi Died
After Being Electrocuted by Police. Tasers Are Not “Less
Lethal” Weapons.</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Shaun King - <span
class="PostByline-date"><span>October 19 2018</span></span></div>
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<p><u>Every single day,</u> families suffering from
police violence find themselves in the fog of
unspeakable setbacks. Some have lost their fathers or
sons, their mothers or daughters, their brothers or
sisters, their neighbors or friends. I am sometimes
enlisted to help them. Before I was a journalist, I
was a pastor, and it was often my job to guide
families through grief and loss. But it’s a unique
crisis to have the life of your loved one taken by the
state. Who do you call? 911? Who leads the
investigation? Who brings you justice? The answers for
these families are altogether different than in other
murder cases.</p>
<p>When I got the call that Chinedu Okobi had been <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/16/san-francisco-sheriff-taser-chinedu-okobi-death-police">killed
by police</a> from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s
Office in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was
different. This was my Morehouse brother. You’d almost
have to have lived at 830 Westview Drive, on that red
clay hill in Georgia called Morehouse College, to
truly understand how that bond is formed. We are
close. We have each other’s back. Comparing Morehouse
to a regular Greek fraternity is not good enough. It’s
a brotherhood in the truest sense: It’s a family.</p>
<p>I was Chinedu’s student government president. He and
I lived in the same dorm. He was close friends with
many of my close friends. His sister Ebele, a revered
executive at Facebook, is close with many of my
closest friends at the company.</p>
<p>When I got a call from her this past Saturday to
discuss Chinedu Okobi’s death, I had to fight hard to
hold back tears. I was surprised at my own fragile
state. My dear brother, Jason, just passed away a few
weeks ago. While his death had absolutely nothing to
do with police violence, for the first time I
understood the unique pain of losing a brother who was
supposed to have his whole life ahead of him.</p>
<p>Chinedu Okobi should be alive right now. At the very
most, he should be in a hospital receiving mental
health treatment. By now, he likely would’ve been
released back to the care of his family. Local police
have not responded to my repeated requests for more
information about Chinedu’s death, but this much we
know: While he was technically unarmed, meaning that
he had no gun or knife or illegal weapon on his body,
he was armed in a very American way. He was a big
Black man, a dark-skinned Nigerian who was 6 feet, 3
inches tall and weighed 330 pounds. In the eyes of
American police, that might as well be armed. This
nation has long since weaponized blackness.</p>
<p>This country has also weaponized mental illness.
Chinedu lived with mental illness. He received
treatment, took medications, and worked hard to
balance his life the best he could. I never knew it.
What I do know is that in this country, when someone
is having a mental health crisis, <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2017/08/06/chicago-police-mental-health-swat-raids-militarized/">police
are called</a> — which is like bringing in a
bulldozer to fix a leaky faucet. It’s a stupid system.</p>
<p>Chinedu needed to go to the hospital. He needed
medical treatment. Instead, he was surrounded by
officers who appear to have repeatedly used a Taser on
him until he died. Let me phrase that another way:
Chinedu was still shot, but by guns that electrocute
people to death instead of tearing apart their flesh
and organs with bullets. In the name of being safer
than guns, hundreds of thousands of police officers
have now been armed with Tasers, but they aren’t safe
— not at all.</p>
<p>Chinedu’s black life didn’t matter. Those cops would
not have treated their own family that way. If Chinedu
was their son or father or brother, those men would’ve
found another way to deal with his crisis.</p>
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<p><u>Since 2000, American</u> police have <a
href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-axon-taser-toll/reuters-finds-1005-deaths-in-u-s-involving-tasers-largest-accounting-to-date-idUSKCN1B21AH">killed
at least 1,000 people with Tasers</a>. They are
horrible. The primary company that makes them, Taser,
has changed its name to Axon — just like Corrections
Corporation of America, the notorious private prison
company, changed its name to CoreCivic. It’s an
attempt to escape their baggage, but it’s the same old
shit.</p>
<p>And Axon has gotten a complete pass for what the
company makes. The company deflects from the fact that
they make machines that send uncontrollable
electricity into people’s bodies. The problem, of
course, is that the human body simply was not built to
take these surges of electricity. Axon advertises
these weapons as “less lethal,” but the comparison to
guns and other weapons would be cold comfort for the
more than 1,000 people who have died from the electric
shocks.</p>
<p>Worse yet, the “less lethal” moniker has meant that
many cities and states don’t have robust regulations
for how law enforcement is supposed to use these
weapons. So the <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2015/12/01/a-new-documentary-challenges-tasers-corporate-mythology/">mythical
“less lethal” marketing</a> is working — for the
company, not for victims of the weapons.</p>
<p>That such dangerous shocks would be administered to
people with mental illnesses is especially upsetting.
Every single day in this country, hundreds of
thousands of nurses treat adults and children who are
living with mental illness. Those patients are
regularly in crisis, and nurses consistently face them
down without ever having to electrocute them into
submission. If five police officers were unable to do
the same thing with Chinedu without killing him, the
problem is not Chinedu — it’s the police officers.
It’s the consistent impatience with black people in
distress that is shown by law enforcement.</p>
<p>The United States, particularly the United States
government, seems to have long ago given up on
completely reimagining how to solve its most complex
problems. This much, though, should be obvious:
Electrocuting people into submission is a horrible
idea, no matter how supposedly “less lethal” the
weapon is.</p>
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