To Ka-Zap or Not to Ka-Zap
Couple of days ago I got to reading about this being proposed for deployment to police in the UK. Basically Taser have developed an electro shock shotgun cartridge which can be loaded and fired either from a standard 12-gauge shotgun, or from a specially modified Taser shotgun, which is a 12-gauge modified not to fire more-lethal rounds. In case, as the blurb goes, an end user might make a mistake in a high stress situation, to prevent for example the following sentence ever being used "Sorry guv, I only meant to disable the hoodie wearing yobbo by giving him nice non-lethal dose of electricity, but in the heat of the moment I seem to have painted his brains all over class 2b who were out on their school trip at the time.
Less lethal ammunition all sounds well and good, especially when as the good folks at Taser are keen to point out, the only alternative from that range (30m) is a live round. I'm no expert, but I know enough to know that from long range a shotgun round produces an area effect, as the shot from the cartridge spreads out from the barrel. I have my doubts on the pin-point accuracy of flinging a lighter than usual round [1] from a weapon that is by design inaccurate, when you consider then that this weapon is designed to be used when the target is outside the range of wired Tasers, that would place the target at or moving towards the outside edge of said firearm's effective range (assuming most yobbos and hoodies would choose to be running away from the police officer with the yellow shotgun).
Ultimately then, there is no telling where such a round might impact, and I'm pretty sure getting something like this to the eye, ear, temple or throat would spell no end of bad news. We all know the damage that "rubber bullets" can do if they hit a sensitive part of the body, I would imagine that the impact of a barbed round and the subsequent delivery of an electric shock can only result in fatalities and serious permanent injuries.
But this particular piece of, *ahem* technology aside, there is a much wider and greater question to be asked about the ethical nature of electro-shock weapons. Is it ever ok to ka-zap someone with a high voltage weapon ? I'm not so sure that it is. I can understand why it is better for police to have electro-shock devices rather than guns, and I understand that we live in a world where sometimes, you have to hurt or kill someone to stop them hurting or killing someone else. I get it.
But when you introduce a non-lethal weapon, you don't just replace a portion of your "use of lethal force" statistic with "use of non-lethal force" you also have a number of incidents with would have been resolved without the assistance of a weapon being resolved with so called less-lethal devices.
Taser International helpfully provide some reports on their website prepared by various police departments outlining the impact of Taser deployment, usually in glowing terms, but let's have a look at the numbers.
In Green Bay Wisconsin, a city of 100,353 people (according to a 2006 census), where in the 152 years since the establishment of the Green Bay Police Department only one officer has been killed in the line of duty (Patrolman George Antone-Motquin was run over by a drunk driver in 1951), so not exactly a huge population, and not a place where police are often killed on duty. In fact, in 2005, there were a total of 495 violent crimes reported (5 Murders, 58 Rapes, 72 Robberies and 360 Assaults) stats from hellogreenbay.com, quite low compared to other US cities, for example two years after these results, in 2007, after subsequent years of falling crime statistics across the US, New York had 614 violent crimes per 100,000 of population, Los Angeles reported 718 in the same year and St. Louis, a fairly small city of 348,197 people, reported 2198 violent crimes per 100,000 people that year. Green Bay then, is a relatively quiet place, with not much serious crime, therefore, the statistics for Taser usage in Green Bay should give a good picture of how often and in what circumstances these weapons are used by your average cop on the street.
The GBPD made 41 Tasers available to officers, their report says that 2 Tasers are in use by a SWAT team, but it does not make clear whether or not these 2 are additional to the 41, or if use of these 2 devices are included in the reported statistics. Nevertheless, in the 18 months from June 2004 to December 2005, there were 86 reports of these weapons being used, the youngest suspect involved was a seven year old child who was running amok and had threatened to bite his mother was "distracted by a test arch" while another officer arrested him, in another case a sixteen year old male was subdued with the aid of the Taser having threatened the police officers with a long 2X4 board. The eldest person to be subjected to a tasering by police was a 74 year old obese man, who having been stopped for drunk driving, had adopted a "pre-attack" stance.
Call me old fashioned but I'd be happier if police could safely and competently contain impudent children, floorboard wielding adolescents, and fat old drunks without resorting to weaponry.
So, a total of 86 incidents, 3 of which were related to use against violent or dangerous dogs, leaving 83 people subjected to a tasering, which doesn't seem to be that many when viewed in isolation, but ultimately what these numbers reveal is that over an 18 month period 1 out of every 1209 members of the population of Green Bay was tasered by a member of the Police Department, it also suggests that in a relatively law abiding environment, every Taser deployed to a the police force was used on a person 2.02 times in an 18 month period even though officers were not required to carry the device, but rather had it offered to them as an optional piece of extra equipment.
It's also worth noting that 9 times a taser was used to prevent a suicide. I'll give you a second to let that sink in. I'm sure there are cases where someone perhaps out of their mind on drugs or otherwise emotionally disturbed makes an attempt on their own life which is tragic and of course any means to prevent such is justified, but a Taser ? Really ? 9 Times in 18 Months ?
Ah yes, but that's the United States where police all carry a side arm anyway, so resorting to Taser rather than pistol is much better is it not ? Well it is, better be shocked and probably not die, than be shot and probably die.
But, if we're talking about 0.8% of the population getting stunned by police each year, that's probably OK, if everyone getting shocked is healthy and in good physical condition, but as we all know, they aren't. 32.1% of all Americans over 20 suffer from hypertension or are on medication to treat hypertension and in 2007 37% of adults reported having two or more of the six risk factors for heart disease and stroke stats from cdc.gov, which suggests that of the 83 people in Green Bay who were stunned din the 18 month period, 30.71 of them were likely to be at risk of heart disease, given that they were likely to be agitated and stressed already, I'm pretty sure the extra pressure put on the system by an electric shock cannot be good.
Rounding off the numbers to 20 people at risk per year shocked for every 100,000 of population means that if that statistic was expanded across the US, then 60,000 people with a real danger of heart disease would be subjected to the additional stress of a jolt of 50,000 volts. That is to say nothing of the number of people with increased heart rates due to drug use, and those who might have over exerted themselves in an attempt to flee police. Or people who are just unlucky as in the case of Ryan Wilson, who died after being tasered by police in Arizona, death was as a result of an unusually small artery in the heart, in that case the coroner did not rule on whether or not the shock of running a half mile from police, or being shocked by a pursuing officer caused death alternet.org.
But say you, surely the point is that those people would otherwise be shot, and killed by police, not so, in the UK, the Metropolitan Police have used Tasers 700 times since 2004 from the guardian, in the same period 9 people were shot and killed by the same force, so, if Tasers reduce fatal shootings, then there should be a significantly higher number of shootings in the years prior to 2004, no, unsurprisingly not, in fact in the 14 years between 1990 and 2004 just 10 people were shot and killed by the Metdata from Inquest.
Pretty clear, Tasers don't reduce the incidents of live fire police shootings, they do kill people (admittedly not many people, but one is still too many), but worst of all, they are used by police in situations that might better be resolved without using a weapon. So increasing the ease and range from which police can deploy a Taser, is to my way of thinking an unmitigated bad idea.
All of that without mentioning a single in-custody brutality incident, and yes, those do happen, people have been sodomized by electro shock weapons and other such horrible stories, but that is in itself not necessarily relevant to my argument above, basically if Taser's weren't available the sort of scumbag that abuses prisoners in custody would use something else.
[1](Taser XREP has a total round weight of 25gtaser.com, Standard 12 Gauge Round seems to range from approx 35g - 40glg-outdoors.com.
Less lethal ammunition all sounds well and good, especially when as the good folks at Taser are keen to point out, the only alternative from that range (30m) is a live round. I'm no expert, but I know enough to know that from long range a shotgun round produces an area effect, as the shot from the cartridge spreads out from the barrel. I have my doubts on the pin-point accuracy of flinging a lighter than usual round [1] from a weapon that is by design inaccurate, when you consider then that this weapon is designed to be used when the target is outside the range of wired Tasers, that would place the target at or moving towards the outside edge of said firearm's effective range (assuming most yobbos and hoodies would choose to be running away from the police officer with the yellow shotgun).
Ultimately then, there is no telling where such a round might impact, and I'm pretty sure getting something like this to the eye, ear, temple or throat would spell no end of bad news. We all know the damage that "rubber bullets" can do if they hit a sensitive part of the body, I would imagine that the impact of a barbed round and the subsequent delivery of an electric shock can only result in fatalities and serious permanent injuries.
But this particular piece of, *ahem* technology aside, there is a much wider and greater question to be asked about the ethical nature of electro-shock weapons. Is it ever ok to ka-zap someone with a high voltage weapon ? I'm not so sure that it is. I can understand why it is better for police to have electro-shock devices rather than guns, and I understand that we live in a world where sometimes, you have to hurt or kill someone to stop them hurting or killing someone else. I get it.
But when you introduce a non-lethal weapon, you don't just replace a portion of your "use of lethal force" statistic with "use of non-lethal force" you also have a number of incidents with would have been resolved without the assistance of a weapon being resolved with so called less-lethal devices.
Taser International helpfully provide some reports on their website prepared by various police departments outlining the impact of Taser deployment, usually in glowing terms, but let's have a look at the numbers.
In Green Bay Wisconsin, a city of 100,353 people (according to a 2006 census), where in the 152 years since the establishment of the Green Bay Police Department only one officer has been killed in the line of duty (Patrolman George Antone-Motquin was run over by a drunk driver in 1951), so not exactly a huge population, and not a place where police are often killed on duty. In fact, in 2005, there were a total of 495 violent crimes reported (5 Murders, 58 Rapes, 72 Robberies and 360 Assaults) stats from hellogreenbay.com, quite low compared to other US cities, for example two years after these results, in 2007, after subsequent years of falling crime statistics across the US, New York had 614 violent crimes per 100,000 of population, Los Angeles reported 718 in the same year and St. Louis, a fairly small city of 348,197 people, reported 2198 violent crimes per 100,000 people that year. Green Bay then, is a relatively quiet place, with not much serious crime, therefore, the statistics for Taser usage in Green Bay should give a good picture of how often and in what circumstances these weapons are used by your average cop on the street.
The GBPD made 41 Tasers available to officers, their report says that 2 Tasers are in use by a SWAT team, but it does not make clear whether or not these 2 are additional to the 41, or if use of these 2 devices are included in the reported statistics. Nevertheless, in the 18 months from June 2004 to December 2005, there were 86 reports of these weapons being used, the youngest suspect involved was a seven year old child who was running amok and had threatened to bite his mother was "distracted by a test arch" while another officer arrested him, in another case a sixteen year old male was subdued with the aid of the Taser having threatened the police officers with a long 2X4 board. The eldest person to be subjected to a tasering by police was a 74 year old obese man, who having been stopped for drunk driving, had adopted a "pre-attack" stance.
Call me old fashioned but I'd be happier if police could safely and competently contain impudent children, floorboard wielding adolescents, and fat old drunks without resorting to weaponry.
So, a total of 86 incidents, 3 of which were related to use against violent or dangerous dogs, leaving 83 people subjected to a tasering, which doesn't seem to be that many when viewed in isolation, but ultimately what these numbers reveal is that over an 18 month period 1 out of every 1209 members of the population of Green Bay was tasered by a member of the Police Department, it also suggests that in a relatively law abiding environment, every Taser deployed to a the police force was used on a person 2.02 times in an 18 month period even though officers were not required to carry the device, but rather had it offered to them as an optional piece of extra equipment.
It's also worth noting that 9 times a taser was used to prevent a suicide. I'll give you a second to let that sink in. I'm sure there are cases where someone perhaps out of their mind on drugs or otherwise emotionally disturbed makes an attempt on their own life which is tragic and of course any means to prevent such is justified, but a Taser ? Really ? 9 Times in 18 Months ?
Ah yes, but that's the United States where police all carry a side arm anyway, so resorting to Taser rather than pistol is much better is it not ? Well it is, better be shocked and probably not die, than be shot and probably die.
But, if we're talking about 0.8% of the population getting stunned by police each year, that's probably OK, if everyone getting shocked is healthy and in good physical condition, but as we all know, they aren't. 32.1% of all Americans over 20 suffer from hypertension or are on medication to treat hypertension and in 2007 37% of adults reported having two or more of the six risk factors for heart disease and stroke stats from cdc.gov, which suggests that of the 83 people in Green Bay who were stunned din the 18 month period, 30.71 of them were likely to be at risk of heart disease, given that they were likely to be agitated and stressed already, I'm pretty sure the extra pressure put on the system by an electric shock cannot be good.
Rounding off the numbers to 20 people at risk per year shocked for every 100,000 of population means that if that statistic was expanded across the US, then 60,000 people with a real danger of heart disease would be subjected to the additional stress of a jolt of 50,000 volts. That is to say nothing of the number of people with increased heart rates due to drug use, and those who might have over exerted themselves in an attempt to flee police. Or people who are just unlucky as in the case of Ryan Wilson, who died after being tasered by police in Arizona, death was as a result of an unusually small artery in the heart, in that case the coroner did not rule on whether or not the shock of running a half mile from police, or being shocked by a pursuing officer caused death alternet.org.
But say you, surely the point is that those people would otherwise be shot, and killed by police, not so, in the UK, the Metropolitan Police have used Tasers 700 times since 2004 from the guardian, in the same period 9 people were shot and killed by the same force, so, if Tasers reduce fatal shootings, then there should be a significantly higher number of shootings in the years prior to 2004, no, unsurprisingly not, in fact in the 14 years between 1990 and 2004 just 10 people were shot and killed by the Metdata from Inquest.
Pretty clear, Tasers don't reduce the incidents of live fire police shootings, they do kill people (admittedly not many people, but one is still too many), but worst of all, they are used by police in situations that might better be resolved without using a weapon. So increasing the ease and range from which police can deploy a Taser, is to my way of thinking an unmitigated bad idea.
All of that without mentioning a single in-custody brutality incident, and yes, those do happen, people have been sodomized by electro shock weapons and other such horrible stories, but that is in itself not necessarily relevant to my argument above, basically if Taser's weren't available the sort of scumbag that abuses prisoners in custody would use something else.
[1](Taser XREP has a total round weight of 25gtaser.com, Standard 12 Gauge Round seems to range from approx 35g - 40glg-outdoors.com.