If you like your police issues nice and simple, the controversial stun gun known as the Taser is not a weapon to be played around with.
Known oxymoronically as “less lethal” in law-enforcement circles, the Taser is at best a great alternative to guns, tear gas, billy clubs, and other police weaponry. At worst, it’s a hybrid of a gun and a toy with which bad cops can abuse, torment, or—on occasion—accidentally kill unsuspecting suspects.
Tasers do make for great YouTube video, especially when the tasee is a 72-year-old great-grandmother at a traffic stop (last year in Texas); an unruly but unarmed 10-year-old boy, weighing 94 pounds, facing two officers at a day-care center (this March in Indiana); or a college student getting hauled away for too loudly questioning a presidential candidate (the infamous 2007 “Don’t tase me, bro” incident at the University of Florida).
On the other hand, had there been no Taser available, Grandma or the others might have fared even worse on the business end of police fists, feet, or other weaponry. The videos document horrid police abuse with Tasers, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the weapon itself is the real problem.
What the videos don’t show is that if used properly by a police department, the Taser can cut down on the use of force by officers and can render much less deadly whatever force is needed to apprehend suspects.
If the choice is for a cop to abuse a Taser or abuse a gun (or even a billy club), go with the Taser every time.
That seems simple enough, doesn’t it? So let’s say you’re on a weekly political-discussion show on television, and hours before that show, you discover that one of the topics is that St. Louis County has announced it’s providing Tasers to the entire police force.
The one thing you probably shouldn’t do in that situation is respond simplistically, right? You wouldn’t just take a knee-jerk anti-Taser position just because you’d seen some of these videos and read a newspaper piece suggesting that Tasers weren’t working well somewhere else in the country.
Would you?
Well, you might do that if you were me, which brings me to the need to refute and condemn the stridently anti-Taser remarks made a couple of months ago—by me—on Donnybrook. In the immortal words of the great Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella:
“Never mind.”
Here’s what should have been said about the St. Louis County police initiative to equip the entire force with Tasers: Let’s see what happens. It may be a great move or it may be a disaster, depending on the actions of the police.
That’s the trouble with Tasers (from the perspective of a food-fight journalist): They simply defy oversimplification. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of whether Tasers are an asset or a liability, because everything depends upon how they are deployed.
Tasers are not new to the county, which has had 275 of them in use since 2004. The addition of 312 more Tasers was made possible by federal stimulus funds that were earmarked for the purchase of new police equipment (apparently to give literal meaning to the term “stimulus”).
County Chief of Police Timothy Fitch is bullish on Tasers, citing internal-affairs statistics showing that the use of force by officers has decreased by 37.5 percent in the six years of taserdom, with officers’ injuries down by 36.5 percent and suspects’ injuries down 19.4 percent.
“I think that a big reason for the decreases in use of force is that the public now knows that we have Tasers, and when someone sees that light go on, they’re much more likely to comply with an officer than they might have been in the past,” Fitch says. “And we’ve seen these huge reductions in the numbers with only half of our force using Tasers, so it should even get better now that all of our officers will have them.”
On the other side of the debate, one generally takes numbers of this ilk with a grain of salt. And there are statistics (cited by me onTV) that do tell a different story. A two-year study published by the Houston Chronicle in 2007 found that use of Tasers had not reduced police shootings there and that in 350 of the first 900 Taser uses, the people tased never ended up being charged with a crime at all.
“More than half of the Taser incidents escalated from relatively common police calls, such as traffic stops, disturbance and nuisance complaints, and reports of suspicious people,” the paper reported.
That’s what happens when Tasers turn into toys for cops. It’s why there’s public outcry in Montreal right now for the police to lose the 17 Tasers deployed there, why San Francisco’s police board recently refused its police chief’s request to purchase Tasers, and so on.
The bottom line is this: It all comes down to how Tasers are used.
Upon further review, here in St. Louis County, it appears there is as good a chance as any that Tasers will do more good than harm. In the past six years, there have been no major headlines about their use in the county, and Fitch says the only complaints he’s received about Tasers were from individuals claiming they shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place.
Fitch does appear to be doing all the right things from a policy standpoint with regard to the use of Tasers. On his recommendation, the police board has updated departmental regulations with strict rules allowing Taser use only in cases of “defensive resistance” or worse.
County police are also taking the unusual (if not unique) step of mandating that both an EMS vehicle and a police supervisor be dispatched to the scene whenever a Taser is discharged. Fitch says he is well aware of national controversy over incidents in which suspects have died after being tased.
“We have to call an ambulance in every case that we’ve used a Taser on a suspect, because we don’t know what these individuals have done, as far as drugs or anything else, before we confronted them,” Fitch says. “We think it’s important for professional paramedics to evaluate anyone we have had to use a Taser on.”
Fitch says the department consulted with a wide range of outsiders in formulating the Taser policies, including the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which publishes its own guidelines on the subject. Fitch didn’t specifically consult with Amnesty International, which claims that more than 360 people have died in the U.S. since 2001 after being shocked by police Tasers. But the county regulations even seem pretty much in line with the “minimum standards” recommended by that organization.
“In most cases, the Taser shall be deployed in individual five-second discharges,” the county police policy reads. “However, the device should be used only long enough to gain compliance and should be deactivated once compliance is achieved.”
Isn’t Fitch worried that if the county police have strict and specific policies on Taser use, the department will be an easier target for lawsuits if officers abuse the weapons?
“If we do something illegal, then we deserve to be sued—that’s what the civil courts are there for,” Fitch says, sounding not altogether like any other police chief you’ve heard. “We told our officers, ‘You’ve asked for these [Tasers] for years, and the easiest way to lose them is to misuse them.’”
Fitch says there will be strict accountability on Taser use, complete with regular audits of officers’ police reports on the subject, and he points to the fact that Tasers are equipped with computer chips as one of the strongest points of protection that the general public has.
“Our internal affairs people have software from Taser International that allows them to download data from within each Taser into their program, which only they have,” says Fitch. “They can see every single time that Taser was activated, and for how long it was discharged. And we’re taking it a step further by auditing the reports of our officers against that data.”
Certainly no other police weapon has computer-based accountability built into it—possibly the best argument on behalf of Tasers—but once again, that’s only as good as a police department’s willingness to follow through on its policies.
Only time will tell if good policy translates into good police work or whether the temptation for officers to use Tasers when not truly necessary—or to use them too vigorously—will result in something akin to those bad YouTube moments.
“Shame on us if we don’t use the Tasers properly,” says Fitch.
And shame on the rest of us if we think there’s anything cut-and-dried about the issue of Tasers.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
