Shocking developments

Updated Tasers. You've heard of them. They shoot out darts connected to wires. When they strike someone, they deliver a five-second, 50,000 volt blast of low-current electricity, disabling the victim for up to 30 seconds. They are vital in police work as they provide an alternative to firearms - and because the risk of harm from an electric shock comes from the current, not the voltage, they are safe, indeed harmless. They save countless lives every year.

Or so the manufacturer tells us.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, the assurances of harmlessness is still under question. Back on April 29, the Florida Sentinel (quoted here) reported that

[e]arlier this month, Alfredo Diaz of Orange County became the 44th person nationwide to die after he was shot with a Taser stun gun by law officers. ...

Mark Silverstein, the Colorado ACLU's legal director, asked police to limit their use of the stun guns because of safety questions.

Silverstein said there's plenty of proof that Tasers are associated with a growing number of in-custody deaths, may be lethal to people with certain medical conditions, and may contribute to a death, even if the death is not immediate. ...

Silverstein said agencies have been purchasing these weapons based on the word of the manufacturer that they are safe.

"They have relied on the assurances of the manufacturer, who obviously has a vested interest in selling as many devices as possible," he said Tuesday.

More damaging was this, from the Toronto Sun for July 19:

Medical examiners have found Taser electric stun guns may have played a role in at least five deaths, contradicting manufacturer's claim that the weapons never killed or injured anyone, a Phoenix newspaper reported yesterday. Examiners in three cases involving suspects who died in police custody cited Tasers as a cause or a contributing factor in the deaths, The Arizona Republic reported. In two other cases, Tasers could not be ruled out as a cause of death.

Taser International ... created a report detailing 42 cases of people who died after being shot by a Taser. The company claims the guns were cleared every time.

The company, however, didn't have the autopsy reports at the time and relied on media accounts and anecdotal information from police for most of its analysis, the Republic found. The newspaper reported that Taser's report omitted details that contradict claims.

And just yesterday, the London Free Press (Vancouver, Canada) reported that

Amnesty International said proof has mounted at an alarming rate over the past year the weapon should be banned until more tests are done.

"Most of the testing that's been done by Taser International has been on police officers or people in the military, people in good health," said Hilary Homes, a campaigner for Amnesty International in Ottawa.

"When using it on someone in a weakened state, especially someone with heart problems, this is where we start to be concerned."

In intense police situations, she said, it's often hard to assess people who might be threatening to the public or themselves. Drug use and medical conditions may or may not be obvious. ...

About 50 people have died after being shot with Tasers in North America, most in the U.S. It is not approved for use in Britain and only recently have some Canadian police forces started issuing them to officers.

But what actually got me thinking about this again (my original post was on March 7) was not so much the safety issue per se as this, which I came across by chance on a website called Prison Planet. It's from the Arizona Daily Star for May 25:

A veteran South Tucson police sergeant is under investigation for firing his stun gun to subdue a handcuffed 9-year-old girl.

At the request of Chief Sixto Molina, the Pima County Sheriff's Department is trying to determine if the sergeant committed a crime when he sent a jolt through the child's body. ...

The sergeant was one of at least two officers who responded to a call from the Arizona Children's Home, a school for special needs children, on South Eighth Avenue, he said. ...

Molina said one officer initially responded to the call from the school. That officer requested assistance from another officer and specifically asked that the second officer bring a Taser.

He said the girl was handcuffed at the time the weapon was used.

Now, I don't care how disturbed she may have been, are you telling me that two grown men could not subdue a handcuffed 9-year-old girl without use of a weapon? The Taser wasn't necessary, it wasn't for the officers' safety, it wasn't in lieu of a gun - it was a convenience.

Episodes like that are starting to come up with distressing regularity.

May 13, the Indiana Daily Student, an "auxiliary enterprise" of IU Bloomington:

A Monroe County jailer has been charged with two counts of felony battery in the case of a Bedford man who died while being booked into jail.

At a hearing Wednesday at the Monroe County Justice Building, Judge Marc Kellams said he found probable cause for the arrest of jailer David Shaw, who used a Taser gun to repeatedly shock James Borden last November. ...

[Borden], who was under house arrest for operating while intoxicated, had been seen wandering near a local convenience store Nov. 5, where employees called police to report his unusual behavior. ...

The next day, Borden was evaluated by EMS personnel, who determined he needed medical treatment, but instead, police arrested Borden and escorted him to the Monroe County Jail.

Upon his arrival at the jail, Borden was shocked at least half a dozen times by Shaw, who said Borden was being "uncooperative."

CBS News has a followup here.

June 16, KMBC-TV, Kansas City, MO:

A police officer used his Taser gun on a 68-year-old grandmother in her home Tuesday night, KMBC's Donna Pitman reported.

Louise Jones said it happened after she pulled up to her house near 50th and Euclid and saw a police car. She honked, and an officer got out of the vehicle.

"He said he could give me a citation ticket for honking my horn. I said it was an accident. It's not like I laid on the horn; I honked, right in front of my house," Jones said.

Jones said the officer went to a call at another home, then returned to her house to give her a ticket for honking.

"He grabbed me and I jerked away from him, and he said, 'You assaulted me,'" Jones recalled.

Police said Jones wouldn't cooperate and hit the officer. That's when the officer pulled his Taser gun and shocked her, Pitman reported.

Jones said the officer shocked her twice in the chest with the weapon.

July 13, WEAR-TV, Pensacola, FL:

The SCLC is probing the July third death of a Pensacola man who was hit with a taser four times while in police custody in Destin.

The common threads through these and other reports are Tasers being used multiple times, frequently on people already in custody. Tasers were promoted, as I said at the top, as an alternative to guns, as a weapon to be used in extreme situations of actual danger either to a member of the police or the public.

But from the very beginning, my concern has been that precisely because they are being promoted as "safe" and "harmless," in fact aggressively promoted as such by the manufacturer, use of them will become routine, that they will not be seen as weapons of protection and necessity but of control and convenience. And clearly, that is happening. An article about the devices in USA Today for July 13 had this:

"From anecdotal stories, we believe police are using it in situations where they're just trying to get compliance from people," says Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch, a watchdog group in Portland.

But it's not even necessary to rely on anecdotes. Note that in the case of Louise Jones, police said it was because she "wouldn't cooperate." What's more,

Police Capt. Rich Lockhart said it is the policy of the Kansas City Police Department "to use the Taser (gun) when someone is being passively resistant, refusing to obey verbal commands."

The Indiana Daily Student article said that in his probable cause finding,

Judge Kellams pointed out while Borden was uncooperative, he never expressed or acted out a threat to himself, an officer, or another person - one of the Correctional Center's own directives for using Tasers.

And in covering the Diaz case, the Florida Sentinel added that

other Central Florida agencies are quick to praise the controversial weapons.

"We used them a couple of times when we first got them, and then the word got out," said Groveland police Chief T.R. Merrill, who says Tasers are a deterrent. "We've got less people running from us now."

That is, the devices are being used exactly in the way opponents feared: as a means of "obtaining compliance" - meaning meek, cooperative, submission.

And the potential for abuse grows with every new wave of fear from the War on Terror^{(c)(tm)(pat.pend.)}, every new acceptance of every new limitation on our liberties, every new acceptance of the "post-9/11" argument, and every new police force that obtains the "safe" weapon.

And it grows with technology: A little over a year ago, in its May, 21, 2003, issue, New Scientist magazine reported on a prototype of the "Plasma-Taser."

In the first image, a spray of dark gas is seen approaching a human-sized target. In the next, taken a fraction of a second later, there is a lightning-like flash of electrical discharge intended to incapacitate the targeted person. ...

The Plasma-Taser will not need any wires because it fires an aerosol spray towards the target, which creates a conductive channel for a shock current, claims [corporate developer] Rheinmetall. The company refused to comment on exactly how the weapon works, but it says the aerosol material is non-toxic. ...

The advantage? A Taser is a single-shot weapon of limited range: the Plasma-Taser can fire repeated shots over greater range. ...

Steve Wright of the Manchester-based Omega Foundation, which monitors non-lethal weapon technology, is concerned about the potential misuse of electric shock weapons. "Such new technologies enable systematic human rights abuses to be more automated, so that one operator can induce pain and paralysis on a mass scale," he says.

I said it in March, I say it again. The movement for nonlethal alternatives in police work is a good one. Tasers should not be regarded as part of that effort.

But then again, maybe we shouldn't worry all that much, as the magic of the marketplace will balance everything out in the end. Sharper Image announced earlier this month that it plans to offer personal Tasers in its catalog.

The guns are legal for use in California by individuals and are already for retail sale at uniform shops where cops, mail carriers, bus drivers and others buy their uniforms and other accessories, [Sgt. Steve] Dixon [of the San Jose Police Department] says.

Be the first one on your block to "harmlessly" drop a neighbor at 50 feet.

Updated to include the link to my March 7 post.