Video documents
torture of teen in Tennessee jail
By Keisha Gibbs
3 August 2017
A video was released in late last month showing a teenager being
restrained and repeatedly tased while in a Cheatham County, Tennessee jail. The
video can be seen here.
Eighteen-year-old Jordan Norris was arrested in November 2016 on
drugs and weapons charges. He was held in the county jail for several days.
While there, he was put on suicide watch. The night of the incident, he was
allegedly banging his head against the wall and threatening other inmates.
Sheriff’s deputies responded by dragging Norris from his cell and
strapping him into a restraining chair. The video, taken from surveillance cameras in
the jail, clearly shows Norris’s chest, arms, and legs bound to the chair. His
mouth is gagged and a deputy is holding up his head.
Another deputy can be seen repeatedly shocking Norris in the chest
with a Taser. The deputy can be heard saying, “I’ll keep on doing it until I
run out of batteries,” and “stop resisting,” while Norris is flinching in agony
from the Taser.
Norris’s step-father, William Chapman, told local News Channel 5,
“I think he had some sort of breakdown. They said he was feeling suicidal.”
After the teen’s release from jail, Chapman said he had counted more than forty
burns on Norris’s body.
Sheriff Breedlove declined an interview for the report, but said
the deputies followed procedure and used a “dry-stun” to gain compliance. In
other words, as far as the police are concerned, it could have been worse.
Norris has filed a lawsuit against the Cheatham County Sheriff's
office for use of excessive force.
Cheatham County borders Nashville’s Davidson County. While
Nashville and some surrounding counties have recently experienced a population
boom, Cheatham County remains relatively small with a population of
approximately 40,000. According to the United States Census Bureau, the per
capita income in the county is $23,922, with ten percent of the population
living in poverty.
Like most small towns and rural areas across the US, Cheatham
County has seen a rise in opioid addiction and the crimes associated with the
drug trade. A recent report by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation revealed
that between 2013 and 2014 alone the county experienced an 85 percent increase
in drug and narcotics violations.
Sheriff Mike Breedlove was elected in 2014 on a “tough-on-crime”
platform of addressing the drug problem plaguing the county. In February, a
local reporter from television news channel WKRN rode along with a member of
the county’s drug enforcement team, Lt. Shannon Heflin. “Nowadays, it’s safe to
say 99 percent of it [crime] is drug-related,” Heflin told the reporter, who added
that “Lt. Heflin, a 22-year veteran, says just about every crime they see can
be traced back to pain pills and the addiction they fuel.” In March, Detective
Ken Miller told the news station, “Heroin is taking up 80 to 90 percent of our
time. Everything we are dealing with now is related to heroin.”
The abuse of Norris is not an isolated event. All over the United
States, local law enforcement is becoming more and more militarized. Military
grade assault weapons and armor, and armored combat vehicles are becoming a
common sight across small-town America.
Crime and addiction are treated simply as the outcome of the
character flaws of bad people who need to be removed from society instead of as
a broader social phenomenon.
This mindset is apparent on the Cheatham County Sheriff’s Office
Facebook page. Each week, Sheriff Breedlove updates the page with “humorous”
anecdotes from the week’s crime and arrest reports.
The entries are meant to humiliate and degrade those arrested for
crimes and to bias public opinion before the accused are tried in court. One
such entry, nonsensical and racist in regard to a man driving on a revoked
license, reads:
“A FaceBook representative from Saudi Arabia has offered a round
trip ticket for HiNKLE [sic]. They have physicians “on hand” to safely remove
both of his hands and reattach them to an All-State Saudi goodwill driver. All
for the effort to protect other American infidel drivers from HINKLE’S
disregard Sheriffia Law…But, we are America and he’s lucky this is not TEAMSAUDI..”
Breedlove’s entry regarding the arrest of Jordan Norris describes
using a SWAT team to storm the teenager’s house in the middle of the night
while he was sleeping to arrest him:
“JORDAN NORRIS (2nd pic) let it be known he was going to kill any
Deputy who tried to arrest him. He was armed with stolen weapons and on the
fast track to live the Thug Life. The team, armed with a search warrant,
invited themselves into the “House of Norris” on Little Pond Creek with such
dynamic quickness, he became shocked with awe and peed a little bit. Great job
Cheatham SWAT!!”
The language employed to describe the arrest, while absurd, is
also intended to evoke a military raid in a war zone, complete with the “shock
and awe” of the American war machine.
Cheatham County, like many local law enforcement agencies, has
increasingly used excessive force and “shoot first, ask questions later”
tactics. For example, in January, local resident Charles Holland was shot by
deputies. He had emerged from his house with a rifle upon seeing several police
cars outside responding to a traffic stop. A neighbor told WSMV news he heard
five or six gun shots and Holland’s home was riddled with bullets. Holland, a
Nashville firefighter, was taken to a local hospital.
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