California tasers its college boys for refusing to show their student IDs. Florida tasers its college boys for being rude to politicians. But they've got nothing on Georgia, where prepubescent girls are tasered for swearing.

Last Wednesday, an off-duty police officer out in a Georgia neighborhood on Halloween overheard a 14-year-old girl using foul language while talking to her friends. Noting that there were younger children trick-or-treating nearby, the officer asked that the girl watch her language, at which point she started cursing at him. He threatened to charge her with disorderly conduct if she continued, and she began to walk away.

According to a Nov. 3 report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Gwinnett County officer then ordered her to stop and "touched her arm." She responded by trying to punch him, and he recruited the help of another officer to restrain her. But she continued to resist even after being handcuffed, and the off-duty officer decided to threaten her with a Taser to calm her down. When she kept punching the back of his patrol car, he tasered her.

Apparently, washing out a foul mouth with soap just isn't punishment enough anymore.

It has been just a month and a half since the nation argued about whether it was appropriate for campus police at the University of Florida to taser a student for being obnoxious, and now this officer has offered us yet another case study. When did using a Taser against a 14-year-old girl with a bad attitude become acceptable?

Illana Spellman, the spokeswoman for the Gwinnett County Police Department, said that the officer felt that he had been "forced" to taser the girl because she was "extremely combative." Because neither The Atlanta Journal-Constitution nor the police department reported how large this snotty 14-year-old was, I can't help but picture my 14-year-old sister. Sure, she's taller than me, but I'm fairly certain that I could hold my own in a fight with her. And yet here is a grown man who contends that even with the help of another officer and a pair of handcuffs, he felt threatened by a 14-year-old girl.

I use the term "threatened" because I support the use of Tasers for one purpose: to prevent harm to law enforcement officials. If a police officer feels that he or she is in legitimate danger from an individual who is violently resisting arrest, then I fully support that officer's right to protection. However, that rationale has been abused so many times that I almost can't defend it anymore. If you can't protect yourself from an unarmed, handcuffed child without a Taser, then you shouldn't be a police officer. After all, what will such a cop need to handle someone his own size? A SWAT team?

It's really a shame that there aren't laws against being a pain in the ass, but a police officer's job is the enforcement of real laws. The most justifiable response in this situation was the officer's first instinct: to ask the girl to be mindful of those around her. However, his choice to use excessive force when she was already restrained destroyed his chances of reasonably defending his actions.

It all boils down to the fact that he didn't want some punk to get away with talking back to him, so he transformed from an off-duty cop acting as a concerned citizen to a police officer with a Taser and a superiority complex. He made that transition the moment he refused to just let her walk away when all she had done was curse in public.

With the increasing media attention to the frequency of incidents like these, we can't ignore this problem any longer. Using force on an individual who poses no legitimate risk is police brutality whether the officer uses a club that causes a visible bruise or a Taser that causes an invisible shock to the central nervous system. We can no longer let the flawed argument that Tasers are safe to protect officers who use excessive force, especially against those who pose little threat - like a 14-year-old girl, who by the officer's own report couldn't even land an accurate punch against him before being cuffed.

The girl was charged with disorderly conduct and the obstruction of a law enforcement officer while the officer got away without even having a complaint filed against him.

If this girl wants a really scary costume for next Halloween, maybe she should dress up as a cop with a Taser.

Emmarie Huetteman is an associate editorial page editor. She can be at huetteme@umich.edu.