Tag: tasers

From a reader: “So, following the memo to pick your targets carefully when employing the Taser, Taser invents a device to fire wildly into a crowd.”

The 9th U.S. Court of Appeals (never known for its pro-police views) to be precise.

This perhaps landmark decision has been called, “The clearest and most complete statements yet from an appellate court about the limits of Taser use.”

From the story by Hudson Sangree and Kim Minugh in the Sacramento Bee.

In the summer of 2005, Carl Bryan, 21, was pulled over for a seat-belt violation and did not follow an officer’s order to stay in the car.
…
During his second traffic stop in Coronado, he got out of the car. He was “agitated … yelling gibberish and hitting his thighs, clad only in his boxer shorts and tennis shoes” but did not threaten the officer verbally or physically, the judges wrote.

That’s when Coronado Police Officer Brian McPherson, who was standing about 20 feet away watching Bryan’s “bizarre tantrum,” fired his Taser, the court said.

Without a word of warning, he hit Bryan in the arm with two metal darts, delivering a 1,200-volt jolt.

Temporarily paralyzed and in intense pain, Bryan fell face-first on the pavement. The fall shattered four of his front teeth and left him with facial abrasions and swelling. Later, a doctor had to use a scalpel to remove one of the darts.
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McPherson could have waited for backup or tried to talk the man down, the judges said. If Bryan was mentally ill, as the officer contended, then there was even more reason to use “less intrusive means,” the judges said.

“Officer McPherson’s desire to quickly and decisively end an unusual and tense situation is understandable,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the court. “His chosen method for doing so violated Bryan’s constitutional right to be free from excessive force.”

The court decision is here.

I think it’s a very good decision, but I wish they had done so without hanging the officer out to dry. McPherson could end up in jail and lose his home. That’s not right.

The court wrote:

If an officer’s use of force was “premised on a reasonable belief that such force was lawful,” the officer will be granted immunity from suit, notwithstanding the fact excessive force was deployed.
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A reasonable officer in these circumstances would have known that it was unreasonable to deploy intermediate force.
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Where an officer’s conduct so clearly offends an individual’s constitutional rights, we do not need to find closely analogous case law to show that a right is clearly established.
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No reasonable officer confronting a situation where the need for force is at its lowest—where the target is a nonviolent, stationary misdemeanant twenty feet away—would have concluded that deploying intermediate force without warning was justified. We thus hold that Officer McPherson’s use of significant force in these circumstances does not constitute a “reasonable mistake” of either fact or law. … Officer McPherson is therefore not entitled to qualified immunity for his use of the Taser X26 against Bryan.

Ouch.

How can the court say that “no reasonable officer” would conclude that force was justified? I’m reasonable (and against such Taser use) and I think what he did, prior to this decision, was legal! Given all the tasering incidents going on, it seems pretty obvious that many if not most officers would do exactly what McPherson did. Using a Taser in compliance situations has become standard operating procedure. That’s what needs to change. This is a problem of policy and training, not one sadistic cop!

Despite my strong opposition to the taser as a compliance tool (I much prefer old-fashioned force), this is a tricky case becausethe guy was handcuffed. He got squirrelly and started fighting.

[Hey, once I was rolling on the ground with a handcuffed man. What could I do? He already had his hands tied behind his back and I still couldn’t get him back under control.]

If you strike a handcuffed man, you’re begging for a lawsuit and assumptions of police brutality. That’s why departments love tasers. It makes it seem more legit. But if they just hit the guy, he’s still be alive. Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.

As a reader pointed out: “She was just too big and tough, I guess.”

My point (again) isn’t that cops violated their rules. It’s that the rules are wrong!

Update November 19: The officerinvolved has been suspended for seven days (with pay, mind you). This is an example of the worst functionings in a police department.

If policy is policy, why punish the officer who executes the policy? Because the brass is trying to cover theirs by putting his out to dry. In this case they banged the officer not for using the taser but for not having a video camera attached when he did. Now I’m no taser expert, but that seems like a B.S. reason if I’ve ever heard one. But if they want to get you, they can.

According to one study, which claims to be the only somewhat large-scale study, the risk of serious injury from a Taser is 0.25% Now mind you the sample size (1,201) isn’t that large so there were only three cases of serious injury which makes the 0.25% figure a bit dodgy. But still. Let’s assume that is the case. That means one in every 400 people of Taser is seriously injured.

Is that an acceptable risk?

And of course the study only looks at the near term effects. There was an interesting comment to this post:

Several years ago, my department received Tasers. During the training, we were given the option of receiving a Taser blow to the chest, a drive stun to the back of the leg, or none at all. Within the months that followed the training, among those officers who opted for the prongs to the chest, two died of heart attacks. They were 35 and 38 years old. As many as ten (aged late 20’s to late 30’s) sought emergency treatment for chest pain and heart palpitations.

Remember, the real reason police department brass likes the Taser is that they’re seen to lower expenses related to line-of-duty injuries (since the Taser is an alternative to going hands-on). If lawsuits start eating away at P.D. money, they’ll drop them in a flash.

The maker of Taser stun guns is advising police officers to avoid shooting suspects in the chest with the 50,000-volt weapon, saying that it could pose an extremely low risk of an “adverse cardiac event.”

The advisory, issued in an Oct. 12 training bulletin, is the first time that Taser International has suggested there is any risk of a cardiac arrest related to the discharge of its stun gun.

Robert Anglen reports in the Arizona Republican.

PERF says Tasers increase officer safety.

Of note:

Not all of the people who have died after being subjected to a CED activation were chemically dependent or had heart disease or mental illness; “some were normal healthy adults.”

Rogueregime sent me this link to Electronic Village documenting 36 taser-related deaths in 2009. That’s far more than I suspected.

I repeat my position: the taser is an excellent less-lethal weapon, an alternative to lethal force. The taser is not acceptable as a “less-than lethal” weapon because it, well, kills.

RougueRegime sent me a link to this story in which a legless man in a wheelchair was tasered.

This tasering could very easily have been “by the books.” And that’s what bothers me. The man didn’t comply. He got tased. The taser should be banned as a compliance device (except perhaps in situations where an officer is alone and backup is unavailable). And maybe it takes an unarmed legless man to make this point.

This man, who may or may not have hit his wife (Let’s assume he did. Since cops went to arrest him, it’s a fair assumption that his wife had obvious signs of injury).

There is no reason an unarmed legless man should ever be tasered.

Ever.

Arresting and searching a man in a wheelchair is not something any officer looks forward to. There was once a drug dealer who used roll around Wolfe St. in a wheelchair. Cops generally refused to go near him, for fear of a harassment complaint from a handicapped black man. They don’t teach wheelchair arrests or search-incident-to-wheelchair arrests in the police academy.

So here’s a domestic violence situation where, thanks to ineffectual mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence, and officer is required to arrest a legless man in a wheelchair.

What would I do? Key up my radio and get my sergeant. And then I would ask him what to do and how to do it. It’s called passing the buck. For the patrol officer, it’s about the only good thing to come out of the police chain-of-command structure.

And if worst came to worst, instead of tasering him, couldn’t you just wheel guy away?