Lethal

Since 2004, the Houston Police Department alone has used its Tasers 2,500 times. In California, there have been 55 reported deaths from Tasers; in Florida, 52.

CBS investigates the rise of taser use (and deaths) across the country.  It's astounding that taser manufacturers still refuse to acknowledge the lethal nature of the weapons they produce.

Whose Street?

Albuquerque PD always up to no good:

A man who was shocked with a Taser at least six times by Albuquerque police will receive $275,000 in a settlement with the city.

The city settled the lawsuit filed by Andres Arellanes after a review found the two officers involved lied to a grand jury.

The Albuquerque Journal also reported that a federal judge ordered the officers' personnel files be opened because of numerous complaints against them.

The two officers are no longer with the department. They had claimed that Arellanes grabbed a police horse and was combative.

Arellanes claimed the officers demanded that he produce identification and grabbed his wallet, began interrogating him and calling him derogatory names. He says they threw him in the back of a police car and shocked him repeatedly.

Via Kendra.

Aggressive Bed Postures

Not from The Onion:

Police Tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn't breathe, after her grandson called 911 seeking medical assistance, the woman and her grandson claim in Oklahoma City Federal Court. Though the grandson said, "Don't Taze my granny!" an El Reno police officer told another cop to "Taser her!" and wrote in his police report that he did so because the old woman "took a more aggressive posture in her bed," according to the complaint.

Via Kendra, who puts up with my bed postures.

Not good:

A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket.

People zappers

Remember tasers? They continue to get even scarier:

Later this year, Taser will start selling a civilian version of its three-shot people zapper. Unlike the law enforcement model, it will have a range of only 15 feet. Despite that limitation, the increased firepower may lead to some regrettable incidents. It’s anybody’s guess whether armed civilians will abuse their ability to shock people repeatedly, the way that cops do.

From Wired.

See also their Christopher-Hitchens-esque report on getting tazed, which is not graphic (I promise).

Suck on that, Taser Inc.

Good news on the taser front--for once:

A San Jose, California, jury yesterday said Taser had failed to warn police in Salinas, California, that prolonged exposure to electric shock from the device could cause a risk of cardiac arrest. The jury awarded $1 million in compensatory damages and $5.2 million in punitive damages to the estate of Robert Heston, 40, and his parents. The jury cleared the police officers of any liability.

...``I think Taser’s going to have to rethink its litigation strategy and its warning policies,’’ Burton said. The jury awarded $5 million in punitive damages to Heston’s parents and $200,000 in punitives to his estate.

Heston died on Feb. 20, 2005, after his father had called Salinas police because his son was ``acting strangely,’’ and seemed to be on drugs, according to the lawsuit complaint. Salinas police shot Heston multiple times with the stun-gun, continuing to discharge their Tasers into him until he stopped moving, the lawsuit claims.

Heston went into cardiac arrest and died, his family said.

Maybe NYC will rethink it's fire-away taser policy.

Via Pandagon.

Tasers take Manhattan

KDS passes a link from the NYT. What do you do when you realize that your city's cops are shooting too many people? Give them tasers and tell 'em to fire away. Remember, tasers don't kill people (except sometimes).

Police recruits and veteran officers could benefit from more frequent firearms training and a wider use of Taser stun guns, according to a study of the New York Police Department’s shooting habits released on Monday.

The study, by the RAND Corporation, was commissioned in January 2007, about seven weeks after a Queens man, Sean Bell, died in a hail of 50 police bullets. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at the time that questions about the department’s effectiveness and training required an independent review.

RAND researchers raised the phenomenon of “reflexive shooting,” or contagious shooting, in which one officer’s gunshots spur a fusillade of bullets by others in the area.

Though they could not say whether the phenomenon occurred more often than in the past, they recommended that the department add “reflexive shooting scenarios that include a stimulus or the sound of gunfire, to sensitize officers to cues that may not be reliable, and to teach them that such cues may generate unwanted responses.”

Damages

Jared Massey, who was tasered in Utah during a routine traffic stop in September, has been awarded $40,000 in damages, according to the Associated Press. This after the cop car dash camera showed him shocked twice before being told he was under arrest.

The crazies are not going to be happy about this.

Friday links

A few nice links from BoingBoing today:

If the NC drought doesn't entirely prevent me from having a garden this summer, bee colony collapse will. At least we'll get a fine documentary film about it.

A Japanese team aboard the International Space Station is to release a paper airplane into the earth's orbit. That's called comedy.

And, the police are still taseing people. And it still manages to kill them, even though Tasers are not lethal. We swear.

And for dessert, we have electrodes

Tasered on Thanksgiving. Maybe the hastiest use of a taser I have yet seen.

From the Austin American-Statesman:

After an investigation, the department’s Internal Affairs office saw no need for disciplinary action. http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifBut then-Acting Chief Cathy Ellison reviewed it and ordered a three-day suspension for O’Connor, who served it and then returned to duty.

When Art Acevedo, the new chief from California, saw the video, he strongly disapproved of O’Connor’s action but saw in the footage what some would call “a teaching moment.” He released the video, told officers to watch it, and made it clear that any officer who did the same as O’Connor would be in serious trouble. The chief’s warning was appropriate and welcome.

Via Cynical-C.

Taser Happy

More tasers.

An internal police investigation is under way after a formal complaint was filed against a Utah state trooper who was videotaped Tasering a man who refused to sign a speeding ticket.

The officer’s conduct has been called into question after a videotape of the incident was posted on YouTube.

The video, taken from a Utah Highway Patrol dashboard camera, shows Trooper John Gardner using a Taser on Jared Massey during a traffic stop on State Road 40 in Uintah County on Sept. 14.

“We do have an open internal review, or investigation, of the case,” Sgt. Jeff Nigbur, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Public Safety, told FOXNews.com. “We’re trying to expedite that to get that done as quickly as possible. If the trooper acted inappropriately we will definitely, absolutely, take the appropriate measures to resolve that.”

Via Cynical C.

UPDATE: A commentator at Cynical-C provides a link to a truly horrifying discussion of this video by police officers. Yikes.

More tasers

Your daily taser-death story. Via Thomas.

A 20-year-old man died Sunday after being shot with a Taser device during a scuffle with a sheriff's deputy in Maryland, a spokeswoman for the Frederick County Sheriff's Office said.

Amnesty International blames dozens of deaths on police use of stun guns.

Cpl. Jennifer Bailey said deputies responding to a report of a fight in progress arrived at the location in Frederick, Maryland, just before 5 a.m. ET and found four people fighting.

A deputy used a Taser device on one of the men, who fell unconscious, Bailey said.

The man was taken to Frederick Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. His identity was not immediately released, pending the notification of his family.

And here's a link to Amnesty International's page on Taser abuse, including reports from 2004 and 2006, as well as recent Taser-related news. Here's the blurb on the page:

Since June 2001, there have been more than 270 TASER-related deaths in the United States. AI is concerned that TASERs are being used as tools of routine force--rather than as weapons of last resort. Rigorous, independent, impartial study of their use and effects is urgently needed.

Tasers Tasers Tasers

Tasers in the news, via Gerry.

A mentally-ill, 82-year old woman was tasered on Tuesday.
A 40-year-old Polish immigrant was tasered to death on Oct. 26th, 24 seconds after the police arrived.
And a 68-year-old stroke victim was tasered yesterday on suspicion of double parking.

It's getting sillier and sillier.

Taser Sales Up; Police Competence Down

The Lede has a couple of good posts today, one about the findings of the LAPD about their mishandling of a May Day protest last year, and another about everyone's favorite non-leathal weapon, the taser. Of course these postings seems natural right next to each other since it's hard to think about police brutality and incompetence and not think about tasers. According to the Lede, taser sales are going up despite the cries against it of late, especially the very public tasering of a student in Florida. According to the statistic's of the Lede's article, recent studies of tasers have shown that the weapon is as non-lethal as TASER International has avowed all along.

So, here's a question: If we presume for a second that taser are not lethal and do no serious harm to a significant portion of the population, does that justify their use? That is, if science deems tasers humane, does that change our attitude about the reasonableness of their use? It is on the strength of the argument that tasers are humane, after all, that sales are up and tasers are proliferating.

I feel that what is fundamentally at issue with the use of tasers is not the danger they pose to civilians. Yes, very few people die after being tasered; yes, most can get up and walk away (after a few minutes of utter decapacitation and intense pain). The question is whether law makers and communities feel that they help promote more humane means of policing. What the experience of the LA riots last May show is not that tasers injure people, but rather that they are a crutch on which undertrained, poorly supervised, unaccountable, and power-hungry police officers inflict pain upon civilians. It is precisely because tasers are non-lethal weapons that they can be used so widely so flagrantly against civilians. The issue isn't weather or not tasers are dangerous, but rather whether or not we want police to be given such free reign to inflict violence on the population, especially as a shortcut to adequate training.

Here's an idea: give all cops a taser, fine. But tase them first so that they remember what it feels like. That might significantly cut down on the incidence of grievous abuses of weaponry in this country.