NEVER Go to the Police for ‘Help’…

… with a domestic problem, unless your intention is for potentially fatal harm to come to you or the relative with whom you’re having trouble.

A 14-year-old girl from Tucumcari, New Mexico wound up in the hospital with a Taser dart embedded in her skull after her mother, Stacy Akin, took her to the police department because the two of them had been fighting, reports the Portales News-Tribune.

After Akin drove to the police station, the teenager, who suffers from epilepsy, quite sensibly decided that it would be foolish to seek “help” from the police and walked away from the facility. No mention is made of the youngster being under arrest, so there was no reason at all for the police to pursue her as if she were a criminal.

Nonetheless, a call was sent out saying that a girl had “run off” from the station. Police Chief Roger Hatcher responded, tracking the teen down at nearby George Molinas Park. When he called to her, the young lady — perhaps recalling parental advice against accepting rides from creepy strangers — ran away.

Hatcher briefly gave pursuit on foot. But chasing down a fleet-footed teenager is hard. So Hatcher pulled out his Taser and shot the youngster in the head.

“She committed a delinquent act,” sniveled the tax-feeder to the press. “She was running from police across traffic without looking.” If he’d been able to grab and tackle her, Hatcher continued, he would have done so, since there “was a lawful reason to do that.”

Actually, there wasn’t: The girl was not a criminal suspect, she had not been taken into custody, and the only lawful course of action on Hatcher’s part would have been to make sure that the girl wasn’t critically injured by traffic when she ran away from him.

So after waddling after the terrified girl for a few yards, Hatcher ordered her to stop and “then did what I had to do” — meaning that he shot her in the head with a reliably lethal instrument of electro-shock torture.

The assailant, who insists that things could have been “worse” had he not shot the girl in the head, “plans to refer the case to the Juvenile Probation Office … for possible charges,” reports the paper.

If he succeeds in saddling his victim with criminal charges, Mr. Hatcher will surely deserve to be horsewhipped.

Stacy Akin, whose idea it was to seek police intervention, was horrified by the result.

“One of the darts entered her skull,” she observed. A CAT scan disclosed that the implement had actually entered “her brain a little bit, but not much.” Not surprisingly, the girl remains hospitalized at Albuquerque’s University of New Mexico hospital.

Apart from offering a redundant illustration of the eagerness of our “protectors” to use lethal force against the innocent, this episode offers a critical object lesson: Never, never, never, in saecula saeculorum, go to the police for “help.”

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6:52 pm on July 4, 2009