Video: A 4-County Grant Is Shocking One Local Sheriff’s Department

NOXUBEE COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – 4-County Electric Power spends all of its time teaching its workers how not to get shocked on the job.

Now, it wants some area deputies to be able to do just that.

A grant from the 4-County Electric Power Association Foundation will be used to buy tasers for the Noxubee County Sheriff’s Department.

The almost $5,000 dollar grant helped buy seven of them, making it the first time for the department to ever have this type of equipment.

They’re small and handy, but don’t let that fool you. With a click, 50,000 volts of power can bring the biggest suspect to their knees.

“If you’ve got to pull that taser, you’ll say you’re going to be tased if you don’t cooperate, and then it all depends on what they do. Then, at that point you would use it. It is not the first thing you do, it is more or less going to be the last option, close to the last option that you tase them, if they don’t want to cooperate with you,” says Sheriff Terry Grassaree.

Before a taser lands in a deputy’s hands, they must be trained and know all of the policies and guidelines.

“You have to get tased in order to know what it feels it like, so if you tase a person, and then you get on the witness stand, they might want to know, ‘well, do you know the affect of it before you render this person with it?’ And then you say, ‘yeah, I’ve been tased myself.”

“Once an individual gets tased, those muscles have a tendency to contract and then they will collapse or something, and then we will be able to apprehend that individual, as well as you know, make him become compliant,” says Chief Deputy Eddie Franklin.

Grassaree says the department wouldn’t have been able to get the much needed $900 dollars a pop devices, without the grant from 4-County.

“We only have like six, seven guys. Some sheriff’s department have 47 guys, but still one of those officers are still at one time going to end up by himself, that’s just the luck of the draw, you know, the unluckiness of the draw, so when that happens, that’s when you taser, that’s like your send buddy.”

With officer involved shootings drawing scrutiny nationwide, tasers are the bridge between officer safety and lethal force.

“The taser is suppose to limit some of the gun pulling, and you can use that taser when you don’t have to use lethal force, because the only time lethal force comes, that’s the very last option, in other words, you’re in fear of your life when you pull your weapon,” says Grassaree.

Tasers were handed out on Monday and are ready for deputies to start using them.