Did Court Deal Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police?

[Rajiv]

Did Court Deal Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police?

In what is being heralded as a landmark decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently declared that police officers could be held liable for using a Taser without proper cause. And in making their determination, the court also set new legal parameters on how law enforcement is to use Tasers, stating, "The objective facts must indicate that the suspect poses an immediate threat to the officer or a member of the public." The federal finding substantially changes the landscape of Taser usage, and may signal the end of Tasers for law enforcement agencies who are now more vulnerable to civil and criminal action then ever before.

The decision, which has already caused law enforcement agencies to re-evaluate their Taser policies, stems from a case involving a Coronado police officer, Brian McPherson, who tased unarmed 21-year-old Carl Bryan during a traffic stop for a seatbelt infraction in Southern California. After being pulled over, Bryan was standing outside of his vehicle, wearing only boxer shorts and tennis shoes. He was 20 to 25 feet from the officer, and when tased, fell face first to the ground, fractured four teeth, and had to get the Taser prongs removed with a scalpel. Bryan went on to sue the Coronado Police Department, and the federal appellate court was making a determination if McPherson had immunity to the lawsuit as an officer. The court ruled in favor of Bryan.

And while any regulation on Taser use is a move forward from the status quo, which repeatedly has left civilians tased for innocuous circumstances, and the decision acknowledges some of the inherent dangers of the weapon, it falls short in a most critical way. The instruction is based on a false premise that Tasers “fall into the category of non-lethal force” as stated in Judge Wardlaw’s written opinion. By denying the lethality of Tasers, the court mistakenly treats Tasers as an intermediary weapon, like a baton, when it should be treated as a deadly weapon, like a firearm.

According to Amnesty International, there have been more than 350 deaths due to Tasers.
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[c1ue]

Re: Did Court Deal Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police?

I especially like this part:

In a Houston Chronicle study of Taser use by the Houston Police Department in a two-year span, officers deployed the weapon more than 1,000 times, but in 95 percent of those cases the subject was unarmed. The study also found that more than 50 percent of the Taser incidents escalated from relatively common police calls, such as traffic stops, disturbance and nuisance complaints. In more than a third of the incidents, no crime was charged or prosecuted.

[Ghent12]

Re: Did Court Deal Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police?

I'm actually somewhat surprised how inept police departments seem to be in their training in the use of tasers. Tasers are not deadly weapons, and any legal opinion that says so is one that simply has no creativity or refuses to use critical thinking faculties. Tasers are an intermediate weapon. They are among the choices one has, which also include mace, fists, batons and others, before finally resorting to deadly force. Yet before they are even employed, the police officer still has many levels of escalaction to choose from, among them being hard controls and soft controls of persons. Asking or physically forcing people to do things are infinitely better than employing a weapon if the situation is able be resolved in that manner. This is how most arrests occur, yet still too many police go for the intermediate weapon.

Meanwhile, the entire point of police presence should be to de-escalate situations. All too often, the opposite occurs. A threat should be met with an appropriate level of force, and never exceeded. These are the very, very basic principles of security, and the incompetence of police in employing these principles is very dismaying.