Slashdot Mirror
Tasers Implicated In Far More Deaths Than We Previously Thought (fastcompany.com)
tedlistens writes: Independent studies have showed that when deployed correctly -- according to "guidelines" manufacturer Axon offers to police -- Tasers reduce injuries among both officers and the people they subdue. But amid a lack of official data about their use and effects, a new report by Reuters found 1,005 incidents in the U.S. in which people died after police stunned them with the electrical weapons, most since the early 2000s. The Taser was ruled to be a cause or contributing factor in 153 of those deaths -- far more than the 24 cases the company has counted. Reuters found that 9 in 10 of those who died were unarmed and one in four suffered from mental illness or neurological disorders; In 9 of every 10 incidents reviewed, the deceased was unarmed; More than 100 of the fatal encounters began with a 911 call for help during a medical emergency. Earlier this year, Axon rebranded, dropping the name Taser International to underscore its focus on body cameras and digital evidence, which is meant in part to add new transparency to fatal police encounters.
In other news, in the hands of Law Enforcement, tasers produced far fewer deaths than firearms!
On a more serious note, I am a little disturbed by the occasional video that comes out showing cops tasing someone over-and-over-and-over-and-over-and-over-and-over-and-over-and-over-and-over-and-over, and low and behold, it turns out not to be good for the person being tased.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This is much less than I had previously thought. This is making me change my negative opinion of tasers.
And that is just when a taser was used, only 153 times the taser was blamed.
This is nothing. Tasers should be used more often.
Pumping 300kV into a human (or any other living thing) can't be healty, so what did you expect??
It's advertised as non-lethal and on an ordinary healthy adult, this is true. People in high stress situations or with a questionable medical status (high on whatever) are not "typical". But it still considered safe. Officers should be trained differently. If you pull the trigger, expect the target to die. It's too late to retrain now because everyone thinks a Tazer is harmless.
Using a taser on someone who is unarmed? Is that really necessary? I'm certain there are some instances where it's a legitimate option but I feel like it's far more likely that tasers are considered by police to be non-lethal weapons when in fact they are merely less-lethal weapons. The "don't tase me, bro" incident is a perfect example of this abuse of force.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Who doesn't love Pain compliance?
Maybe with info collected by body cameras, we can get an idea of what percentage of overall taser use is outside the manufacturers guidelines. Then they can advertise something like "even when used inappropriately, our product doesn't kill the people it's used on 97% of the time."
"The 1,005 deaths identified by Reuters total 44 percent more than the 700 reported by Amnesty International at the end of 2016"
The armed ones get shot with real guns.
You don't bring a Taser to a gun fight and expect to win.
But amid a lack of official data about their use and effects, a new report by Reuters found 1,005 incidents in the U.S. in which people died after police stunned them with the electrical weapons, most since the early 2000s.
The summary mentions Axon and their product, but then the above statement uses the generic term "electrical weapons." The actual article from Reuters is not any more clear, as it too mixes the generic term "stun gun" and Taser in a way that makes it difficult to tell when they refer specifically to the brand-name product and when they refer to the entire class of product regardless of brand.
Are the 1,005 reported deaths the result of all documented electrical weapon deployments, or just Axon's? Also, what was the total number of incidents? An absolute number (as opposed to a ratio or percentage) without any reference point is not especially meaningful. Also, for comparison can we get the number of incidents in which people died after police shot them with a firearm? We would also need to the total number of incidents in which police used firearms so be able to calculate a ratio and make a comparison.
Note, I am not actually looking for those numbers, as I am relatively certain that they could be found without much trouble.
The point is that this sounds like a hit-piece. Sort of like when some groups decry the 30,000 birds killed by wind turbines while ignoring the millions of birds that probably die from pollution related to fossil fuel electrical generation and its attendant activities. That is to say, looking at the numbers in isolation they seem bad, but then you need context to determine if they are better or worse than they would otherwise be. It just seems like we should an organization like Reuters to be more rigorous, as opposed to what they published which seems to push an agenda..
Using a taser on someone who is unarmed? Is that really necessary?
Apparently talking and patience are too much to expect of police officers. I find it hard to believe that many people are initiating physical assaults on cops, it seems like these are cases where a cop decides that just talking things out isn't cutting it, and they need to cuff the drunken frat boy staggering around at 2 am RIGHT NOW.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
What this report is essentially saying is that police forces are comprised of poorly trained officers.
But it should have been obvious already that there is a problem. There have been plenty of incidents where police killed someone unnecessarily. Enough incidents to strongly suggest there is a real problem with police themselves.
While Americans in general have a total disdain towards the lives of their fellow human beings, police should be held to a higher moral standard.
I'm a bit concerned about tasers. On the plus side I'm, well, let's just say I'm of a certain ancestry that seldom has to worry about tasers. But I'm guessing if you ran that much electricity through me I wouldn't be getting back up again.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
After a splashy headline implying a "mounting toll" of death by taser, they strangely enough don't bother to break out the statistics where the taser was actually ruled the cause of death:
In 153 of those cases, or more than a fifth, the Taser was cited as a cause or contributing factor in the death, typically as one of several elements triggering the fatality.
I think we can safely predict the article would have separated out and trumpeted the actual numbers of deaths where the taser was actually ruled the cause had there been very many -- or maybe even any.
It's important to point out that the company has aggressively challenged any medical examiner who determines that a Taser killed someone or contributed to their death, in many cases suing to have the official cause of death changed. Therefore I am skeptical of the 153 figure.
Alternatively, being subdued by 30 rounds of 9mm leads to a 99.999% fatality rate. I would say the Taser is an improvement.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
than all of Great Britain. Maybe it is time to teach American cops a different way of dealing with civilians.
Political correctness will allow police to murder people legally until science is recognized as relevant and religion is recognized as irrelevant.
The SOP for Taser-indicated mortality is to attribute clinical death to a proximal cause rather than the ultimate cause (the taser). For example, hospitals, under immense pressure from police, will say that a tasered victim who had a heart attack died from the underlying heart disease rather than from the taser.
They get away with this because most hospitals receive millions in government money that suddenly becomes threatened if the hospital bites the hand that feeds it.
I want to see how many of the victims were old, how many of different races, how many women and children
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I am absolutely stunned that a story like this exists. Officers conducting their duties should show some resistance to the current trend of this alternate form of force. Stories like these electrify the nation and enlighten us to serve as an outlet for moral outrage!
Someone having a mental crisis that calls for emergency help gets electrocuted to death by the cops that show up to help him.
That's what the summary suggested is happening, anyway.
Police can do no wrong. Stop trying to blame then liberals. They are magical beings imbued with the special power of good. They keep us a nation of laws and even if they break the law they are above it because of the power of good.
Tasers should only be used as an alternative to using a gun. That means if the cop did not have justification to kill the person, he did not have justification to use a taser. Every time a cop uses a taser, the same review process for using a firearm should happen. Unfortunately, that isn't happening. Cops use tasers to torture people into compliance, often as a way to force people to follow unlawful orders. Reviews seldom happen unless someone dies. And even then, it's the standard rubber stamping "we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong," bullshit. Lots of police departments have dropped tasers because they were paying out so much money for lawsuits because of too many cops abusing their authority.
This isn't a taser problem. It's a blue line problem. Every cop who witnesses another cop breaking the law and does not report it is guilty of being an accessory. In every instance where a bad cop finally gets charged, the ten cops who witnessed the act and didn't report it should be charged as well.
The first damn step to a fix is to take away immunity. Why is a city (thus the taxpayers) paying out millions in lawsuits when the cop clearly violated the law and written procedures? If the city tries to cover it up, yes, they should pay part. But if the city does a proper investigation then disavows a bad cop, the taxpayers should not be on the hook. Take the criminal cop's pension.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Here in Oz the NSW police tazered a Brazillian after he was handcuffed. He died, the family made a fuss and unlike the US the coppers did get into a little bit of trouble.
Don't they carry a big stick any mroe?
When a police officer says HAULT, or, STOP RESISTING...DO THAT and you won't get tased. Better to fight it out IN COURT, than have your head bashed in by multiple police officers, no matter how no guilty you think you are. It's called COMMON SENSE. But, today, everything thinks that you should get your own way, do your own thing, to hell with morals, respect and other values shot to hell thanks to the stupidity of the (un)education system in the USA.