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UN Says Tasers Are a Form of Torture
The use of Tasers "causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture," the UN's Committee Against Torture said. "In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events." Three men — all in their early 20s — died from after tasering in the United States this week, days after a Polish man died at Vancouver airport after being tasered by Canadian police. There have been 17 deaths in Canada following the use of Tasers since they were approved for use, and 275 deaths in the US. "According to Amnesty International, coroners have listed the Taser jolt as a contributing factor in more than 30 of those deaths."
Wtf is Excited Delirium? The Taser company and police department seem to be always quick to blame any deaths associated with tasers on this supposed condition, while APA nor any other medical body recognizes this as any type of medical condition.
Weapon involved? Tasers are good in this case. Unfortunately, tasers are not used in that manner exclusively. They are also used to "calm people down", saving the cop from having to communicate with the individual. This is unacceptable. Pulling your arm away from a cop who is trying to grab you is not immediate justification to tase (see "don't tase me, bro!") since it might very well be considered a natural reaction. And "don't let a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch" has been considered. When 80 year old, wheelchair-bound schizophrenic women are being tased (and subsequently, end up dead) because the cops are too scared to handle the situation as they were trained, then tasers are obviously too much responsibility for them to handle.
>There is some truth to this sentiment, which is why police officers in most districts are required to be both
>tasered and pepper-sprayed during training - so that they realise just how effective a tool they are.
The trouble is - the officer gets a single jolt from the taser. When they actually *use* the damn thing the administer continuous or repeated shocks. I've been watching this situation develop for quite some time and wondered when it was going to come to a head. Maybe the time is now.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
How do they figure 275 people being killed by tasers, when only 30 have been reported as such by the coroners? Where does this figure come from?
Yes but a person who is tasered is often a lot more likely to come to harm than a person who would never have been shot. The cops who tasered Mr. Gaubert while he was incapacitated by a diabetic coma, would be in jail if they had just shot him. Ditto for the officer who tasered the 87 year old woman in a wheelchair who yelled at her.
Abuse would likely also happen if officers just had firearms as well. I don't personally think that that would be a better situation. At least with tazers, mace and pepper spray the likelihood of having somebody to apologize to is far higher than with a firearm.Sometimes that is true and sometimes it isn't. You assume the alternative to tasering someone is to pull a gun on them. In truth, the alternative is often just to stand back and talk to them, or simply walk away from them.
It is quite another to actually have to deal with both sides of the story and try to reconcile them in a way that suits the public interest rather than inflaming tensions between different groups of people.I know quite a few cops. My brother used to be one and a friend of mine sells tasers as part of his law enforcement equipment business. I have heard the stories of punishing some "punk kid" or "nigger" or "hippy" and shutting their smart mouth up with a taser. Those same cops would never have fired their weapon in the same situation because they'd be held accountable, probably for murder.
I'm not arguing tasers don't have their uses and should not be used, but hopefully this classification by the UN will get police departments to look seriously at their rules for using them and start to help curb their overuse and use in inappropriate situations, as well as provide support for private lawsuits that will help do the same thing.
In Hollywood they play muzac over your feed, in Florida you get tasered and arrested for inciting a riot.
You can't take the sky from me...
As someone who used to work in law enforcement (San Diego 1993-1997) I think I may be able to shed a little light on the subject. You see, in the academy you're taught a concept called "escalation of force" (some instructors may also call it "the force ladder"). What this means is that there exists different levels of force, starting with Vocal (basically shouting "Police! Stop what you are doing, NOW!") and ending with deadly force (your firearm). Between those extremes you have varying and increasing levels of force (baton/PR-24/Asp; pepper spay or mace; etc). Usually you want to step into a situation using a level of force sufficient enough to stop whatever situation you're facing, and in many (but not all) cases this usually means going one level above the force being used against you or the person you're protecting (I know what some of you are going to say about that but remember - it's not the officer's job to have a fair fight, it's his job to STOP the fight in its tracks). One of the issues is that not all agencies arm their officers with all the less-than-lethal options available to them. This can be a real problem because, for example, you can easily have an encounter where you come in using the lowest level of force but the situation escalates (thereby requiring the officer to also increase the level of force he's using). You can already see where this is headed - the fewer less-than-lethal alternatives an officer has at his disposal, the more quickly he ends up pointing a gun at someone. If anything, someone should tell the UN that actually BANNING tasers would be inhumane. Also, as some other posters have already pointed out, it's not that tasers themselves are that bad; the real problem is that now we have officers badly misusing tasers. I believe if academies did more to emphasize APPROPIATE usage of tasers (much like they do with firearms) then their usage wouldn't be so controversial.
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To clarify: the glass wall that did not directly separate him from his mother at any time, and which, at the time of his frustrated outburst, did not separate him from her at all, since she had gone home several hours earlier after being told repeatedly by airport staff that her son was not in the airport.
Also, the man had already passed through customs; in fact, he was waiting on the far side of the door between the arrival area (where his mother had told him to wait) and the main part of the airport (where his mother waited for him).
I'm not trying to say that his tasering was a good (or even reasonable) course of action, but people seem to be screaming bloody murder because the police just waltzed on into the airport, looked for the first foreigner they could find, and tased him at the first excuse; in reality, he had been waiting there for eight hours because his mother told him to wait in the wrong place and airport staff were too lazy/incompetent to find him. By the time the police arrived and enacted their screwup, everyone else had done theirs already; if they hadn't, he'd still be alive.
Some of them got along just fine before tasers were popularized, without any lethal force capability, to satisfy unfounded British fears that cops would be too aggressive if they were given lethal firearms.
Tasers are a less lethal weapon, and there is no doubt in my mind that they have saved more lives than they have ended. They have had a net positive effect.
But if they're used to torture people into compliance, or if they're used in gun mode so often that even mere vocal resistance to arrest or refusal to move, is answered with tasering, the fact that they've saved lives doesn't matter - they have caused the police in jurisdictions where tasers are used liberally to become an overtly oppressive force. And when this is allowed, it feeds on itself (power corrupts) until it produces scandal and we enact countermeasures. We've had several scandals, but countermeasures havn't even kept up with the spread of this weapon. Thus, we need more measures to keep taser use in check, without simply removing such a useful tool from the force. Tasers HAVE been proven deadly according to multiple coroner reports, been suspected COD in many others, and in others illnesses have been invented to pretend that they weren't the COD.
Drive Stun mode involves causing extreme, but not instantaneously disabling pain, in order to make a person submit to the officer's authority. In order to use it (as a melee weapon), the officer has to have passed within fist/knife/(possibly teeth) striking distance and be able to get an angle on uncovered or thinly covered skin. This typically happens after officers have the risk that the subject poses (barring hepatitic vampires) completely mitigated, but before the subject is acting as an obedient prisoner. I am saying that we NEED to restrict taser use to incidences where the subject still poses a risk, because anything else can be construed as torture - which our ethics system has traditionally claimed to be vehemently opposed to.
You do not stun a man with a knife or a gun, you either shoot him or you tase him until he drops his weapon or he dies. This is a fully defensible practice. But the chance that a man in a wifebeater who's being arrested for public drunkenness has hepatitis or AIDS is not reason enough to tase him or stun him half a dozen times if he isn't being the perfect prisoner, but doesn't threaten injury. Neither is it reason enough to hold him down and beat him with clubs until he submits to being cuffed. We train our (volunteer) police corps in physical combat because the application of force to limbs and body may be needed to get an unruly prisoner in shackles. A 'safe pain mace' (stungun) should not replace that, and a 'loss of muscle control gun'(taser) should only be used in extreme circumstances.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
You're overstating the "benefits" of being native, being a Status Indian myself, I should know.
Natives certainly do pay taxes. You can avoid paying income tax provided your job is on a reserve. Unfortunately, most reserves have been placed in far-flung areas where the land had low productivity, any windfalls were mere oversight. On my own reservation, there's two gas stations and the Band Office for work, almost all the people work in the nearest town and pay taxes just like everyone else.
I hear about us not paying taxes all too often, so it's not common knowledge, but should be. I'd probably deal with a little less racism if it were so.
To offer another, similar example: police in England tasered a man in a diabetic coma because they thought he was a security threat and he wasn't responding to them. They shocked him because he wasn't responding - he was unconscious - how could that possibly be use of the taser in order protect the officers?
Tasers have their proper use and proper place. Calling them torture is alarmist and absurd. They don't really hurt. I've been shot by my own Taser (in training), and while I would call it very unpleasant, I would not call it painful. It's like being sat on by a very heavy person and having all the air forcefully expelled out of your lungs. The itching afterwards is also very unpleasant.
First, a Taser is not a non-lethal weapon. It's a less-lethal weapon, and should be treated as such. It cannot kill a normal person under normal circumstances, but people under the extreme influence of drugs (a state of excited delerium) can have their status exacerbated into one known as "aggravated delerium", which is almost 100% fatal.
Using Tasers for "acting suspicious" is also absurd. They are designed and should be used as a weapon to stop imminent violence or flight. I have used mine three times in the line of duty.
The first was a fighting suspect who had jabbed another officer in the stomach, and only had one handcuff on and was about to break loose. In this case, the wires broke and I had to chase him four blocks.
The second was a 6'4" tall, very well built person, who had already broken my hold when I tried a non-violent handcuffing technique and took a swing at me. He promptly surrendered afterwards.
The third bit me, kicked another officer, and broke the nose of my sergeant, a 24-year-veteran who has seen more street fights in real life than I've seen in movies. We tried everything before the use of the Taser, because of fears that the Taser could react with the drugs in his system. The only reason I used the Taser in this case is because if I had not, I would have had to shoot him. He successfully fought of six officers at once and was *attacking*, not trying to escape.
If misused, the Taser can be torture. Properly used, it is a life-saver.
Pepper spray, on the other hand, *is* torture. I flatly refuse to use it for any reason. It hurts like hell for hours, continues to burn for days, and lacks the stopping power of a less-lethal weapons like punching, using a baton weapon, or using a Taser.
He had travelled on a long 12 hour flight from Europe (Poland) to the west coast of North America. He had then spent another 10 hours waiting in the baggage collection lounge for his family (who had instructed him to wait by the doors with his luggage). Altogether, he had been without decent sleep or a solid meal for 20+ hours. Anyone who has taken such a journey will probably agree that you can become irritable, annoyed and confused by simple things.
Why was he allowed to spend 10 hours in the baggage collection zone in the first place? Didn't anyone from the airport notice someone hanging around, and ask them if they had a problem (missing bags, wrong carousel, damaged suitcase, etc...).
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