Old enough to stab, old enough to be tasered

The Herald reports:

NZ Police Association president Chris Cahill has backed the officers involved in an incident which led to a 10-year-old boy being tasered in Rotorua last week after allegedly attempting to stab an officer, claiming alternative “touchy-feely stuff puts people at risk”.

“When officers are encountered with this situation they have to go through a full risk assessment… If you’ve got someone with a knife and they’re running around and they’re clearly panicking, you’re gonna have to take some action,” he told Newstalk ZB this afternoon. …

“He’s waving it around at the police. They’re asking him to put it down, and talking to him, they’re not touching him, they’re just talking to him. But he’s swinging the knife around them, trying to stab them and kick them and all that.

“They were instructing him to put the knife down, put the knife down, he wasn’t listening he was still trying to go for them.”

I’m not concerned that the Police tasered someone who was trying to stab them.

I’m concerned that a 10 year old boy was trying to stab police officers. Unless there is a serious intervention with him, he is going to end up in a ver bad place.