Tased, unfazed, praised. New Stanislaus deputy ‘took it like a boss.’

Taser or pepper spray?

Mychelle Enos has been on the receiving end of both, and said she’d endure the former over the latter any day.

In a video from the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department, new deputy after new deputy is shown screaming in pain and being lowered to the ground by colleagues as he takes a five-second “ride” on the Taser. All except Enos, who lets out not a sound, but simply rises on her toes during the electric shock.

In the video, posted on the department’s Facebook page Monday, Enos is the first one shown being Tased — a voluntary step in new deputies’ two-week orientation. But actually, the Hughson resident was the last of the seven in the video to take the prongs to the back.

The 26-year-old, who earned her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Brandman University, watched as her colleagues tensed in pain. When her turn arrived, viewers of the video were hard put to tell she was struck.

“That female deputy is a beast,” Sheila McClarty commented. “Barely a sound ... Not just her silence, she barely flinches.”

Several other comments were along the same line:

“That girl is a savage!”

“That chick took it like a boss.”

“Female pain tolerance ... This is why us girls can handle having babies!”

Seeing her fellow newbies scream, Enos said, made her think the pain would be worse than it actually was. “I told myself, whatever happens is gonna happen. If I don’t scream, I don’t, but if I do, I do.”

She didn’t consciously try to out-tough the guys, she said. “I felt like I was gonna scream, but it never came out.”

The shock locks up your muscles so you can’t move, Enos said. “For me, it made me go to my tiptoes.”

Much as being shot with the Taser hurt, it was worse being pepper sprayed, which is a mandatory part of going through the academy, she said. At least when the shock is over, it’s over, with just a bit of muscle ache for a while.

But the pepper spray, aka OC (oleoresin capsicum) spray? “When you go to wash it off later at home, after you’ve decontaminated at the academy, it reactivates again everywhere it touched,” Enos said.

Sheriff’s Department spokesman Sgt. Tom Letras agreed that the spray is worse than the Taser. The initial contact burns for up to half an hour, he said. That’s why fully understanding the experience by undergoing it is mandatory for academy cadets.

And though new deputies can opt out of being Tased, it’s rare that anyone does, Letras said. For one thing, the importance of experiencing it is explained to them. For another, it’s become sort of a bonding, rite-of-passage thing.

“The reality is you need to know what that does,” Letras said. “When I was Tased, you realize that if someone gets hold of your Taser and shoots you with it, it is going to completely incapacitate you.

“I can tell you all day till I’m blue in the face that it’s going to incapacitate you, but until you’ve felt that and realized what it does, now you can understand why if I were to get in a fight with somebody on the street and they got my Taser and were going to shoot me, I could probably be justified in using lethal force at that point. Because I know the moment they shoot me with that Taser, it’s going to completely incapacitate me and then they can take my gun.”

This story was originally published August 22, 2018 at 3:10 PM.