US man dies in Taser incident

Back to basics

The TASER has been a terrific money-maker for the company that sells it and for it's investors.

It has been a disaster for public safety.

No one to blame here but police department executives and elected officials who "drank the Kool-Aide" and allowed this deadly weapon to come into the hands of rank-and-file law officers.

It was almost 50 years ago that police officers in the U.S. began to get much more sophisticated training in safe and effective techniques for subduing and restraining out-of-control individuals, like various martial arts. Even the use, and form, of the traditional police baton, itself understood to be a deadly weapon, went through an evolution. Disabling sprays of various kinds were tested and ultimately found to be inconsistent in both safety and effectiveness. Those experiences should have caused departments to be more scrupulous when it came to the TASER.

The basic problem is the same as it's always been. Too few officers tasked to control too few actors. Even when seemingly sufficient manpower is on scene, it seems that both communications with the target and a coordinated response by the "team" is lacking (the U. FL. tasering incident is a good example of this).

Again, responsibility for understaffing and inadequate training of patrol teams falls on the shoulders of police executives and elected officials.

deaths per use?

We're told how safe it is, yet deaths keep accruing. Safety is in the stats. How many tasers are fired at and connect forcefully with people every day? What injuries have arisen, from the shock itself, as a result of multiple shocks, as a result of convulsion/reaction that has the victim crashing to the floor or against something that hurts him, e.g, corner of a table. I want real-life stats, not tests done on willing, healthy volunteers standing on comfy foam mats in Taser Intl's lab.

Jackass

Johnny Knoxville from Jackass had various "non lethal" police weapons tried on him. He said the worst was pepper spray.

This is a guy used to taking hits, so pepper spray should be the weapon of choice

hmmm

It's nice to know that you can essentially be murdered by the police for doing nothing wrong! If I ever get tazer'd for no reason, the copper will regret it.

Americans are crazy

Here in the UK we prefer to shoot people at point blank range with dum-dums seven times in the head in crowded underground trains when they do nothing wrong.

Non Lethal?

How did I miss Tasers becoming "less than lethal"? They used to be "no lethal" - typical americanism, like "friendly fire" it's just a nice way to say people are going to die but we didn't mean it, honest...

damn weapons

How about its modified so it cant be reused until after a minute?

At least then if a ''suspect'' needs more than one hit, it needs more than one officer, so there is less chance of someone being tasered several times until dead.

or better still, go back to wooden trucheons, see how brave killer cops are then..

Cops have a hard job to do,but there is no need for weapons like this, we just need more cops to overpower the suspects, not damn kill them!

An axe to grind - Reply

I think the reason we see it coming up here on El Reg is that as it's mostly techie readership we feel a little uneasy (and eventually outraged) when something touted as a "high tech solution" goes so wrong.

@Joe

Personally? Scared shitless. I just think they are not thought of as dangerous and so may end up being used 'routinely'

Also Dan, those are pretty good ideas on making police more accountable.

@Joe

Most definitely the latter - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/7096456.stm

Christ almighty.

Just stick "Taser" into the BBC news website search engine and be staggered at the amount of use it's getting in the UK. We've had a death or two as well.

Training issue

The problem is (and always will be) training.

We had a couple at my kung fu school who were both trained police officers. We were doing locking and seizing drills and my word they were bad at them. They said they had extensive training and presumably they did, as they need to control all the various weirdos out there. It just wasn't very good.

We see the same problem here - people with insufficient training in the proper use and dangers of using a stun gun being let loose on the public. It used to be the case in the UK that only firemarms officers could carry them, so you had a small amount of people that are specifically trained and continually tested using them. If you let everyone have one you don't have the resources to train everyone as well, or to make sure they're all competant. This is the outcome.

The major problem with "non-lethal" weapons is that you are *much* more likely to deploy it, because you think you won't have to deal with all the paperwork that comes with dead bodies. Tasers aren't as non-lethal as they'd like us to believe which is unfortunate and is going to cause more dead people :o(

having never been tazered

I can only relate this to the nearest thing i have experienced. namely those exercise machines that pump electricity into your muscles to get them to contract. same principle, different application.

Being of the technical persuasion, and overweight, i gave one of these things a go. I very quickly realised that if the electricity doesn't go directly into your muscles, ie if you're a bit fat, then its incredibly painful, but remarkably uneffective in contracting muscles. I'm not sure if tazers suffer from the same problem, but i can imagine they might. It'd be interesting to see if the deaths caused by tasers can be related to the location someone is hit and their relative fitness.

usage records

yes, each use of a Taser is tracked. It uses a disposable cartridge system - each cartridge can only be used once, once you've shot someone, you have to load another cartridge to shoot them again. Each cartridge has an individual serial number, and when you fire a cartridge, a large number of small tags, with the serial number of the cartridge that was fired, are spread around the area.

This was mentioned by one of the newspapers covering the Vancouver Airport taser death - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/15/taser_death_video/ .

Limited shots

The problem with limiting a taser to one shot per minute is that once you use it the other perps get up and run away, or worse. More effective would be to put a spring mechanism on it which must be cocked after two shots. You can of course cock it after one if you expect to need a quick response to someone making a try but it still makes it hard to pump rapid shots into people that will kill them.

Fear

CCTV, database, monitoring and Taser, a lot of technologies which avoid the contact, deleguating the police to be a witness, a surveyor, an eye in the sky dropping lightning. Does the police ever want to fulfill its hard task?

This is why...

I started inserting tinfoil into my undershirt!! Ha, take that copper.

Seriously folks, if one wants to circumvent non-lethal devices there are many ways. Such devices really only work on the sheep.

The truly bad criminal element love such gimmicks. It gives them an opportunity to use lethal force against an officer who has distracted himself with less than lethal force.

Any force justified should be lethal force. I don't care that officers have to respond with violence.

The problem is they respond to the most paltry of infractions now with more force than is needed. So rather than use his wits this cop decided to shoot first and ask questions later. All of which is under the guise of "officer safety".

Again if force is justified, any force applied should be treated as lethal from the onset of the altercation. If you don't want to get shot dead, don't break the law. But likewise, if someone gets shot and dies because he was too drunk to unlock his OWN house, and too drunk to respond to an officer*, well that cop clearly has some problems.

*This event happened in the city where I live. Guy came home early one AM from partying. His neighbor reported a prowler. As this guy was trying to get into his own house a cop tasered this fellow "because he was not responding to an order". He eventually was found guilty of obstruction of justice of some such BS.

@ Anno Coward

I've been at parties where we have spared for an hour or two. Not quite fight club style but chops to chin boxing and the like. Were just smart enough to do it in the back yard.

I've noticed that this death and the canadian death both have victims that were tasered while being two slow to comply to police requestes. I know we live in a paranoid world but if someone is deaf in both ears are they can't sign I'm deaf and they can't hear instructions that are voice only.

In fact that could be the bigger link. One person was partially deaf and one was unable to speak english. Perhaps the police should not rely on voice commands.

The problem is the "non-lethal" label

I think the real problem is that the taser has been promoted in the minds of officers as a safe form of restraint, so they're more likely to use the device, even in circumstances when that level of force is not warranted. Witness it's increasing use on children and the elderly.

Mind you, being tasered is an acceptable alternative to being shot, but it is not an acceptable alternative to being wrestled to the ground and handcuffed. It's the use of the technology in inappropriate circumstances, by ill-informed or lazy law enforcement personnel, that's the real problem.

LAPD

During the 60's the LAPD manual said that the choke hold was to be applied until they suspect stops moving. I suspect these cops believe the same thing with a taser .

Sue the manufacturer.

"Non-lethal"

Sue sue sue sue sue and keep suing until they're dead. Settlements in the range of $250M/death are what is required to zap the Taser company into the ground.

In Canada there have been so many Deaths-by-Taser that CBC has had to prepare an interactive map to display the facts. 18 deaths 2003-2007.

Link = http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/map-tasers-canada/

But the Taser is not to blame <smirk>. The deaths are caused by 'Restless Leg Syndrome' or something... Oh sorry, 'Excited Delirium' is the term they're made up to try and explain it away.

Link = http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tasers/excited-delirium.html

Just sue the bastards.

TASER

If a cop produces a TASER, I produce a big ass .45 automatic pistol...I WIN!