Zap!

This past Wednesday, a grand jury in Miami-Dade County, Florida, released a report on the treatment of mentally ill people by the criminal justice system which included advocacy and praise of the use of tasers in "crisis situations," saying "We believe Tasers save lives." This came just one day before the Miami-Dade Police Department released

proposed revisions to its policy on the use of electronically charged Tasers, which has been under scrutiny following reports the stun gun had been used on young children,

even children as young as six. The review came after a county commissioner proposed banning the use of tasers on children.

The policy requires officers to gauge factors such as age, size, weight and the subject's "ability to physically challenge the officer or do harm to himself or others."

Under the revised policy, officers cannot use Tasers as a "tool of coercion, to intimidate an individual into compliance with simple requests or directives by an officer."

Since I regard tasers as cruel and unsafe, as may be gathered by previous posts on the matter, I think this is all to the good in that it does put limits on their use, even if those limits are more apparent than real. ("I thought he had a gun," the all-purpose police defense against lethal force, can now be downgraded to "I felt threatened" in the case of tasers.)

But there's a more general issue. I wholeheartedly endorse the quest for alternatives to guns, I have for years, but there is an inherent question which I've raised before but which has not been adequately addressed, including by me: Once we label a weapon - and tasers are weapons, make no mistake about that - "non-lethal" and hand it to police with the assurance that it's "safe," are we thereby unintentionally encouraging its use? That is, are we, in addition to hopefully having it used in cases where lethal force would otherwise have been used, sadly having it used in cases where no force would otherwise have been used, where patience or persuasion would have been employed?

It's not an easy question to answer, but the fact that Miami-Dade's proposed new regulations found it necessary to ban the use of tasers to "intimidate ... into compliance" proves that it's not an idle one.

The department began issuing Tasers on a limitted basis in June. According to the department, county officers had deployed the stun guns against 18 minors out of a total of 253 people as of December.

So tasers were used against 253 individuals in six months. Now, I don't have the figures, I don't know what they would reveal, but I wonder how many times in the preceding six months - or the same six months of the preceding year, if you prefer - that the same police force found it necessary to use firearms and in how many of those cases there was a fatality. That might give us something more than anecdotes about tasers "saving lives" and tell us a little more about if they and other "non-lethal" weapons really are being used in lieu of lethal force or if they have become just another "tool of coercion."