The contentious use of tasers by law enforcement personnel offers a number of potential exploratory avenues for a documentary. In Killing Them Safely, first-time director Nick Berardini elects to focus on the rare but troubling incidences of death that are at least partly attributable to the allegedly nonlethal electrical weapons. Neither the government officials nor the plaintiff's attorneys featured in the film contest that such fatalities are exceptionally uncommon. However, each tragic death examined in Killing seems to let a little more sunlight into the secretive, supercilious cowboy culture of the weapon's exclusive manufacturer, Taser International. Each revelation seems to reflect ever more poorly on the company and its slippery founders, brothers Rick and Tom Smith.
Berardini gives Taser a fair hearing, illustrating the inadequate stopping power of early models, and permitting the company's flacks to gush about the tens of thousands of lives the devices have purportedly saved. (These figures seem to grow more grandiose as the documentary proceeds, though Taser's advocates never cite the basis for such claims.) Individual taster-related incidents—such as the disturbing death of Robert Dziekański at the hands of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—might be truly unpredictable freak occurrences. Yet they raise questions that Taser seems unable to answer definitively or coherently, particularly with respect to the weapon's potential effects on the muscles and the heart.
Beardini mostly sidesteps other controversies regarding the weapons, such as the ethical dubiousness of police using electricity to torture suspects into compliance (or even as a punishment). Aside from the usual talking heads and archival clips, the director makes unsettling use of footage ranging from VHS-era training videos to shocking clips of taser-related deaths captured by dashcams and security systems. The film's methods might be cinematically unremarkable, but the picture it paints is nonetheless fairly compelling.
Killing Them Safely will screen nightly at 7:30 p.m. on December 18-20 at the Webster Film Series in the Winifred Moore Auditorium. Admission is $6 (cash only).
