We tased a lady today...

You're trained to understand that you can and will be attacked by every kind of person. There is no safe adversary. Believing and understanding that are separate things all together.

We tased a lady today. Not because she was being an asshole and wanted to fight but because she was past the point of arguing or coercing. She was completely gone. Any sense she had of the world around her had been lost with the medicines she had been hording instead of taking.
We received a call you receive a hundred times a day. Someone had heard something suspicious and was too afraid to check it themselves. A woman was screaming uncontrollably and seemed to be arguing with someone.
The woman herself called 911 while my partner and I were enroute to her apartment. She stated she didn't want to hurt someone. She pleaded for help. Then someone started swearing and growling into the phone. The calltaker on the phone with her advised us she wasn't sure if there were possibly two people in the apartment.
When we arrived outside the nondescript apartments, I could hear someone yelling. We entered the building and stood outside the door listening to a woman talking rapidly and uncontrollably. Something crashed. Something small. And then the chattering began again.
I gave my partner a wide-eyed look and told him to grab his gloves. He shrugged nonchalantly and said his gloves were in the car. No big deal.
"Go get your gloves. Now."
I shouted through the door as he ran back out to the car. I shouted for the woman to talk to me. To tell me she was okay and to open the door so we could help her. Her voice grew closer as if she were standing right on the otherside, whispering into the wood. "Help me. Oh please, help me. There's poison in here. There's poison everywhere. Help me. Help me."
I calmly told her we were here to help and that if she opened the door I could take her somewhere safe. The response was a low growl from the otherside. "Get the fuck away from the door" she screamed.
My partner was back and we stared at eachother and then back at the door. The growling was eery. Like a sound dubbed into a movie. It was low and feral and didn't seem to belong to the woman pleading politely for help.
"We're going to have to boot it if she doesn't open it soon."
"I know," he said. "Advise the Sgt."
I got on the radio and asked permission of the Sgt to kick in her door and advised that we would need more officers.
Another crash from inside. Still relatively small.
My partner was speaking through the door now, attempting to coax her out. She responded in the same way, alternately pleading for help then swearing and growling.
Another car was on the way. Two minutes out they advised.
Another crash. Larger this time. A shelf or piece of furniture.
"We're going to have to do it," I said to him.
He nodded and stepped back, preparing to kick in the door.
I asked the other officers how close they were. A minute out. "Clear," I said into my radio. "We're booting the door."
I nodded to my partner and prepared myself for confronting possibly two female parties that were clearly in need of help.
The slow chimes of my radio signaled that the radio air had been cleared in case we needed to convey any vital information to other units without being cutoff by random radio chatter. I nodded at my partner and he put his entire weight into kicking the door. It was sudden and powerful and I was fully impressed by my somewhat soft older partner. He wasn't in the greatest shape but get that adrenaline pumping and he was something to be reckoned with.
The door broke apart after 3 or 4 kicks. My partner shoved his way inside and I followed pushing small bits of furniture and random clutter out of the way.
In her panic, she had destroyed her apartment. There were knickknacks, kitchenware and clothing everywhere.
We could here her in the back of the apartment, talking rapidly to herself. We made our way to the rear, scanning for still a possible second party but quickly found her naked in what I assumed was her bedroom.
She was an older, short, stout woman with dark thin hair and dark eyes. She was alternately asking for help then threatening and screaming at us.
Being the female officer, I slowly walked towards her explaining that we were here to help. She understood and thanked me for several seconds then told me to back the fuck off. She needed to be cuffed. She would throw her hands in the air and dance in circles then fist them and square off like a boxer. For our safety, she needed to be restrained.
My partner shouted over her screams that the taser was ready. I shouted back that we should just wrestle her to the ground and not jump to the taser already.
The room was scattered with miscellaneous items but the mattress was completely empty of sheets and anything hard. I pointed toward the bed as she screamed in my now numb ear, "We'll just take her down."
He nodded and tucked the taser away when she suddenly picked something glass up and threw it into a wall. Whatever it was exploded and pieces slid into various crevices of the room.
The taser was out again.
"Just wait," I said.
He looked at me then back at her as she shouted something I couldn't make out (my ears were both numb at this point). His jaw tightened and he raised the taser.
She picked up a lamp and I took a step back, knowing she was slowly killing our non-taser options. "...fight to the death!" She screamed at me. I stared back at her thinking I'd heard wrong and as if in answer to the thought she shouted again, "I'll fight you to the death! I'll make you kill me!"
The fight went out of me and without turning to my partner I said sadly, "Do it."
She raised the lamp towards us and was tased.
The crackling popping noises of the taser were deafening in the sudden silence of the room. The adrenaline had narrowed my vision to just her. I didn't see the rest of the room or where the lamp that she had lifted like a javelin had fallen. I saw the taser prongs hit their target and the woman crumbled.
She slid down the wall, trembling from the electricity. When she was on the ground I quickly rolled and cuffed her. She thanked me for a solid minute as I squatted on her back.
Our backup finally arrived. They were late. We had kicked the door and dealt with our lady in about a minute and fifteen seconds.
She wiggled and twitched under me as we called for a medic and assigned tasks to the officers who'd arrived. She screamed and swore at random intervals and I took long calming breaths to slow my heartbeat and cool the adrenaline.
I felt her weight shift under me and as I began to shift with her, her left hand suddenly popped out of the cuff. I write "popped" because the amount of force she must of put on her wrist to pull out of that cuff must have been the equivalent of the force put on a cork until it erupts from the bottle, sometimes in broken pieces. I believe she broke her wrist to fight out of those cuffs. Her panic was so great that she would have gnawed that wrist off had it been closer to her mouth.
The fight was on again but this time our backup jumped in to help out.
It took three of us to control her long enough for the medics to arrive and strap her down to a cot. Even then she swore and fought the bonds the entire way to the hospital.
At the hospital she broke our of the restraints three times and each time my partner and I had to wrestle her back down to keep her from hurting the staff.
The night never seemed to end.
But in the end we got her the help she needed. And I have no doubt that in the state she was in, with the amount of panic she was experiencing, if someoneelse had stumbled onto her or if she had wandered out of her apartment, someone would have died.
Most days the job makes you feel useless. Usually arriving too late to actually help someone. Or it makes you feel like an overpaid referee just sorting out the problems of other people's lives. But some days you get to help people. Some days you save a life.

Yes, tasers hurt like a bitch. They make you feel like someone is killing you. But that taser in my partner's hand saved the life of a woman who was beyond reason. And it probably saved the life of whoever she thought she was fighting.