It sickens me how avoidable this was, because stupid or not, he was just a kid.

What came to mind first, when viewing the video, was that this kid likely watched too many Youtube videos on "how to effectively win a police stop". He did it wrong. Whether he was a sovereign or not, I don't know, but that's a whole other kind of crazy. What I do know is that he did not apply the law to his situation - this wasn't a DWI or Border stop - this was a violation, which is a whole other game where, yeah... you sorta do need to comply.

I want to be sympathetic to this boy, but it's really hard to assign blame to the officer in the last moments of the encounter. Having said that, I don't agree with the level of escalation on the part of the officer (although he was quite reasonable during the majority of the stop). That's not an indictment more than a general observation of the flippant use of tasers in these situations. They seem to be used as punishment for insubordination, more than for the intended subduing effect. Clearly, the boy was face down, and while he was argumentative and certainly resisting being cuffed, it did not appear that he was a deadly threat. It just seems to me that there is too much precedence for these situations. We should have learned more by now. I just wish he had left him on the ground at gunpoint until he had back-up.

There are often negative effects when you hurt/frighten someone with a level of pain such that a taser will cause. It's like hauling off and decking the 6ft 9in bully - you better get it right the first time. Otherwise the reaction is often not calculated. This is to say that even a reasonable person would do whatever was necessary to end the assault/pain. I don't know this boy, but it isn't my impression that, in a reasonable mind, he would have attacked the officer. I think it's more likely that he blindly reacted to the taser, which left the officer with no options. Lose/lose.