Home Sec: Tasers could become standard police kit

What's better...

Being beaten to death or being electrocuted to death? Enquiring minds want to know.

They also want to know whether I should've used "inquiring".

Good god no...

That's it, i'm wearing a chainmail vest under my clothes.

Taser needs an audit trail

"Even so, many argue that Tasering is easier and more attractive to malevolent police officers than administering an unjustified beating, pressure-point hold, kick to the groin, etc, and thus that the weapon encourages brutality and torture."

It's being used IN PLACE OF SPEAKING, if you watch a few of the Taser videos, the officers are using it instead of arguing with the person. It's used to end the verbal argument, in some cases it's used even before a discussion has begun.

An electric STFU that sometimes kills people.

The claim, that it's used instead of bullets, is silly, since nobody would fire a bullet to end a conversation, neither would they baton the guy, and they're being issued to unarmed officers, who could never use it in place of a gun they don't have.

The claim that it's used to prevent alternate harm also doesn't fit with the non-violent nature of some of these videos. There's one where the officer is angry that his order isn't complied with so he tasers the man for arguing with the officer.

Same way you'd cattle prod a stubborn bull. The guy was not doing harm to anyone, he was simply arguing his rights (and he was right to).

What's needed is an audit trail, batons leave bruises, Tasers need to take a digital record of every use, how many times and what charge was fired.

You need to be aware of any officer whose taser happy. You need to have a record of any officer that gives multiple jolts to the same guy.

There should be a compensation available for people who are unjustly tasered, and a law that tasering is only used to prevent further violence, so arguing with an officer should not itself result in a tasering.

They also need to be safer, they're supposed to be non lethal, but they're not. If the officers gun occasionally exploded in his hand, they'd be a product recall. The police would not tolerate occasional deaths of their people from faulty equipment, so how is this any different? A non lethal weapon has caused many deaths, they should quit making excuses for the manufacturers and get it fixed.

Never mind AA...

Never mind Amnesty - this very site reports the UN considers them 'an instrument of torture' : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/26/un_taser_verdict/

Aren't Tasers "One Shot"?

What happens if there are TWO wrong-uns? Especially when the second assumes you've just killed the first?

@Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

I'm sorry but assurances from liars just would not cut it for me. I do not trust the powers that be or the systems in place in this country to be at all honest, straight forward, clear or truthful about anything which would paint them in a poor light.

Just like every other death in custody and death during arrest in this country, if the cover up fails, no one will be to blame and no one will be prosecuted.

expect more death-by-police

yes indeed. now that it's been clearly shown that:

- police abuse these things, and can't wait to 'assert their authority' with them.

- they kill people

- they will be given to un-trained people who may easily 'administer multiple shocks'

- police misusing these or 'accidentally' murdering people will not be held to account.

- police will lie about the circumstances and amount of shocks administered. they've be caught out lying like this.

we can expect more 'death-by-police'. not the first time i've said this.

so crazy

in an already stressed situation you give someone 50kV of electro-torture, the mind/body does not have any innate response for this, unlike a beating/blow. As pack animals we know to submit, curl-up, flee or retaliate. the problem with multiple tazering is because the cops don't want the big guy to "come round" - he is disoriented, spitting mad, highly charged, and with a will to rip them all limb from limb, the cops get scared, and rightly so.

can't you just talk them down guys?

Fair play, the forces of darkness can have their tasers

So long as I am allowed a bren gun to defend myself from the taser toting police. The asinine idea that we should arm our police with anything more lethal than a stick so that they can, for example; stop you demonstating about an issue in our 'democracy', get on a tube train without being white or arrest you as a terrorist for being anywhere in London is a joke.

The police do not need more weapons, they need fewer laws that constitute a police state and make their jobs impossible. In the meantime we who pay for them need effective means of defence against the tools of government repression that the police have become.

Tasers are an alternative to guns, not a baton

The police is here to protect the public, not to stun them to death. Any death which is caused by a Taser is unacceptable.

I fear the day when our police force turns into a US style Taser wielding bullying squad. Tasers are not to stun people to keep quiet for a bit, they should be a last resort and an alternative to the gun. The government should realise this and severely restrict Taser use instead of potentially considering it as standard equipment.

@When will you all wake up and say NO loud and clear?

That would carry more weight if it were not from an anonymous contributor. You can hardly stand up and be counted when hiding.

USA Dave

TASER SAVES LIVES EVERYDAY

Nobody has ever died from being Tasered. Tasers have been deployed over 600,000 times.

Liberal Weenies hate Tasers because they want criminals to have a chance at a fair fight with "da man". Tasers take the fight out of thugs.

@USA Dave

No Dave, its because the police do use unnecessary violence against protesters. If I thought they would be used to defend the lives of police officers then I'd be all for it. But the reality will be they'll zap first to avoid confrontation.

Ongoing Training

Perhaps an extension of the training idea would be a compulsory course before being issued with the devices. This would have to be repeated every year and of course would include the demonstration of the effects on the officer undergoing training. In other words all officers should be "Tasered" themselves on an annual basis just to ensure they are aware of what they are doing to other people. It might be interesting to see if there were any unfortunate deaths with a presumed greater incidence of controlled use during training.

Baton is more painful and worse?

OK, so which would the PC wish to give me in an altercation? A baton or a taser?

What was that? Baton? Why? Are you a masochist, wanting MORE PAIN???

No, a taser means that you don't have to think about how to defuse the situation or risk getting your noggin knocked. Don't bother defusing the situation and zap 'em!

The first officer to use it on me will find me waiting outside his home one night with a few friends to discuss how people ought to be nicer to each other, because the alternative is going to be people being nasty to each other.

Ignorance and bliss

@Ed Pearson: The problem with tasers isn't just the health risk, it is the fact that use of them tends to be seen as more acceptable than use of a nightstick. If a police officer deploys a taser over something quite minor and the victim doesn't die then it's seen as a non-incident, how ever if that same officer beat them sufficiently to break bones with a night stick for something minor it'd be a major incident.

The way I see it, if my actions justify being hit with a night stick I deserve what I get. If my actions didn't require a physical response by the police I would rather they used a nightstick (because they're more likely to get away with using a taser).

@USA Dave: Nice work enforcing the generally negative view Brits have of Americans. I'd hate to see facts get in the way of the rubbish your spouting.

@less-lethal

So you're accepting that these things are lethal. It's a play on words, less lethal is still lethal.

"The UN actually said (paraphrasing) that Portugals laws on torture would not include the use of the Taser as they require 'physical harm' to happen to the subject, which the Taser doesn't cause."

Again, great, so you're accepting that Tasers are weapons of torture, whether they are 'exclusively' weapons of torture is a moot point. A gun isn't a killing weapon if you use it for Olympic target shooting for instance. 'exclusive' is meaningless. As to whether they cause physical harm, you already accepted they can be lethal, is that not harm?

And you're accepting that they don't leave evidence of their torture, again this is exactly the point of making them record details of each discharge.

So lawyer words, but it looks like you're accepting the substance of the problem. It comes down to how to fix it.

I'd prefer, audit trail of times its been fired, a limiter on the discharge cycles, training and clear laws saying when it can be used and when not and training so the officer is clear on when it should be used and when not.

Is that too much to ask?

Counting Taser applications

When you see a video (with audio) of someone being Tasered, listen carefully...

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick

~pause~

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick

Does that count as two applications, or twelve?

Dr. Dung4Brains

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/11/30/taser-conference.html

'Safer than Tylenol' my ass.

The owners of the trademarked brand name Tylenol should sue this moron into the ground for linking their fine product to an instrument of torture.

Pain Compliance Tool

There’s only one way I would trust the British Police to have Tazers – and that’s if every cop is fitted with compulsory audio\video “personal video recoders”, and where deployment of the Tazer (or other firearm) automatically means said A\V is audited by an independent commission and made available to the victim unedited.

In fact, I’d rather see British cops with guns before I see them with Tazers.

Why? They’re much less likely to massively misuse the gun than the Tazer.

I was a Martial Arts instructor for 10 years, and I have trained with quite a few cops in my time. Most are OK, but there are some out there who would be itching to pull that trigger and “give someone a ride on a Tazer”, to quote a US cop from a YouTube video.

As an instructor – I’ve watched pretty much all of the YouTube Tazer videos and thought “if they were my students, what would I tell them”. Simple – most of them have been about losing control of the situation and using the Tazer as a means of pain compliance, not in a defensive or even quasi-defensive mode. Basically, human cattle prods.

No different from giving a wayward beast a jolt to get it to do what you want it to do.

I’m sure there are plenty of instances where someone has had a knife or broken bottle, and a cop has taken him down rather than shoot him. Then again, I’ve trained with plenty of cops who’ve regularly taken down guys with knives – and only with the trusty baton, or even with nothing more than calm word and few ideas of what life behind bars is like.

I’ve seen close up a 5’5” slightly built female cop take down a raving madman of 6’3 who had gotten the better of 2 of her larger male colleagues…with a swift and low sweep of a “tonfa” nightstick to the back of his leg. Arrest made without the young lady even saying a word, and the guy won’t have had so much as a bruise since it was a “sweep” takedown rather than a full on crashing blow.

Here’s the rub. Give the average good cop a Tazer – and he’ll use it sparingly. Give it to the significant minority of “bad” cops and they’ll abuse it. That’s been demonstrated time and time again in the US, and now Canada.

Of course, we won’t see any cops in the UK with PVRs – as apparently that would “contravene their human rights”. Funny how we can have cameras everywhere, except on the guys who can legally get away with pumping dum-dums into the head of a Tube passenger, or into the back of an old guy walking home with a table leg and “sounding a bit Irish”.

***Oh, and before anyone thinks of correcting me saying the Tazer isn’t a firearm – it is classified as such under English\Scots law. Get caught with one as a civve, and legally speaking you’ll do the same time as being caught with a 9mm Glock.

Substitute

"However, in the US where Tasers are in widespread use, there have been cases of death following the use of the weapons, attracting much negative coverage. Thus far, nobody has managed to prove that any given death was attributable to a victim/suspect being Tasered, or that the stunguns are associated with a higher death rate than other methods of restraint."

Substitute the word 'automobile' for the words 'Taser' and 'stungun' and you'd have to change the assertion made in the statement.

Now, for all of the usual El Reg professional whingers, please re-read the last sentence in the first paragraph above. ",,,,nobody has managed to prove any given death was attributable........etc."

As for you lot who are content to do nothing about anything except sit around and make daft statements about police states and fascists, try this: Try enlisting in the police force (let's imagine, for a moment that they waive all physical and psychological minimum requirements), do your training and then go out on the streets. Once you've spent a year dealing with drunks, punks, armed yardies, mad knifers (and their equally mad girl-or-boyfriends), crazed domestics and happy slappers, c'mon back on to El Reg and tell us all how much you don't want anything other than a truncheon to do your job.

@John A. Blackley

It's not the "drunks, punks, armed yardies, mad knifers..., crazed domestics and happy slappers" that we're worried about. Well - not as much anyway...

It's the frustrated Polish immigrant, it's the Grade 6 girl, it's the middle-class motorist with a perfectly-reasonable question, it's the 70-year old man trying to protect someone, it's the comatose diabetic, it's the innocent people that are being TORTURED or KILLED.

These are the sort of people THAT COULD BE YOU OR ME. Thus the Golden Rule (treat others...etc.) mandates that we have to take this human-cattle prod away until such time as 'The Man' learns to control himself (ie. never, they've had 400 years and some of them are obviously still pigs...).

And the fact that Taser International Inc. is in the middle of a huge PR blitz / con-job / cover-up regarding the potentially LETHAL nature of the device is cause for major concern.

The only solution is to take away the toys and sue Taser International Inc into the next galaxy. Sue their quasi-scientific sock-puppets too. Sue the engineering department. Sue them all.

Teach the police proper martial arts. They should be able to wrap up the perp into an Akido ball in 3 seconds. Then they'll be heros again, not minimum wage Taser Operators / thugs.

The lawsuits will eventually stick. There are lawyers better than Taser's.

UK cops...

I know how much so many of you hate them "the met shoot people blah blah blah". Whilst I am not sure about wether they should have TASER's, I do trust them alot more than the US cops. From watching TV (I know that may not be fair but it is all I have to go one) US cops seem to be alot more lax about the value of a life, and have a beleife that "Im following this person so they deserve to die".

This may just be editing, but I am inclined to beleave it baised on the US view of the death penalty and the treatment of people at Gitmo.

I do feel that given the training US cops get with Guns and cars compaird to UK cops, that UK cops will be better trained etc.

Finaly befor I get attacked by people, no I wouldent want to be TASER'ed as a test etc, but I also woulden't want to face down a Police batton charge, but do feel it is a needed tactic.

@Seriously

This is why we have a crime named Causing Death by Dangerous Driving. This is why there are strict controls on nuts in prepared food. This is why we have signs warning of hazardous locations at the beach. All we're asking for is controls on the use of tasers in inappropriate circumstances.

Not fighting the police doesn't work. We can say 100% that the man in a diabetic coma wasn't fighting police, nor was the man stuck up a tree who is now paraplegic after being tasered and falling on his head. Nor was the woman who had a stillbirth 12 hours after being tasered from behind (still not proven caused by the taser if you believe the PR bull)