This week the tasing of a University of Florida student at a speech by John Kerry was a big story. (You can view the incident here and here.) While looking for these I found several other examples of taser use. This video shows the tasing of a UCLA student in a campus computer cluster last November. This video shows a handcuffed woman being tasered while in the holding area of local police force in Ohio.
I don't know about you, but I found these hard to watch. Sure, the UF student was a bit of a snot and had been warned; the UCLA student refused to stand up and also had been warned; and the Ohio woman was uncooperative, but are these sufficient reasons to shock the hell out of someone?
Without question, police should be allowed to use a taser in some situations. Whenever the use of deadly force is justified and a taser would be just as successful as a gun to secure the safety of the officer and the public, the police should be given the option of a taser. Having a taser in this circumstance is pareto superior to not having a taser. That is, nobody is worse off. The tasee avoids getting shot (and likely killed) for something that, in retrospect (if he is alive enough to be reflective), he probably wouldn't decide to do again, given the outcome. Likewise, the police are at minimum, no worse off, but in all likelihood, if there is a psychological cost to killing someone or participating in an accidental shooting, the police actually benefit significantly from having a taser available. Of course, when deadly force is justified and a taser isn't adequate to protect the officer or the public, then fire away.
The report concludes that "the UCLAPD policy stands alone in its legitimization of the Taser as a pain compliance device against passive resistors," and recommends that this be corrected. Among other jurisdictions, taser use is generally limited to violent or actively aggressive suspects. In addition, UCLAPD had the most permissive policy toward tasing handcuffed subjects. This scenario is uncontemplated by many other policies and explicitly prohibited by the vast majority of the rest.
But why not tase passive resistors? Well, because passive resistors are an inconvenience rather than a danger. I know cops have a hard and dangerous job. I'm all for anything that will make the police safer. Tasers, in some situations, can serve such a function. Any time a dangerous subject is dangerous, but not dangerous enough to kill, we make cops a little safer whenever we give them a tool to use like a nightstick or taser.
However, when we allow police to use a nightstick or taser on someone who is not dangerous, only to achieve compliance, like the three cases I linked to above, we're only making a cop's job easier at the expense of pain and risk of death to the subject. Given the cost, I'm OK with cops being inconvenienced.
Also, lets not forget that using more force than you need to can actually be dangerous to the police themselves. The cops in Ohio didn't have much to worry about because they were in their own holding area. The cops at UF had a little more to be worried about. You can hear the students respond negatively once the tasing begins. At UCLA, the students were well behaved, but curious, through the first two tasings. However, during tasings three and four it takes more cops to control the crowd than it would to carry the student out in the first place.
Of course, if you had to pick a crowd based on harmlessness and compliance with authority, a bunch of college kids is about the best you could do. Could you imagine if the UCLA or UF police had done what they did among a bunch of soccer hooligans??
Nevermind, you don't have to imagine. This ends badly.
So, unless someone is an actual danger, lets keep the tasers in their holsters.
BONUS: A quick shout-out to intellectual property. While Taser is the brand name of the products made by Taser International, it has also become a generic term for the species of product itself. Consequently, there is no trademark protection for its use. Taser could have used a good IP attorney to protect their good name. They should give me a call in a year or two. :)
5 comments:
When taser's were brought in they were supposed to decrease gun use. Instead gun use stayed the same and a whole new class of people were added to "taser use." But is it your assertion that a person only rises to the level of tasering if he too would also rise the level of being shot?? Should there be a sub-category of not violent enough to be shot, but violent enough to be tasered. What is the standard???
For a taser policy to be reasonable, it must allow tasers to be used where a gun would be acceptable, and it must prohibit taser use where the subject is not posing a threat to safety.
I don't know where you draw the line between a threat that rises to taser use and a threat that doesn't. The policy excerpts I saw described it in several ways: active resistance, aggravated aggression, violence or threat of violence, etc. Any of these, whatever they mean, are arguably reasonable.
However, using a taser on a passive resistor for "pain compliance" purposes is contrary to the good of the public and in some cases, not in the best interests of the officers either.
I missed this earlier. You make at least one assumption in your argument, one that Marty touches on. Specifically, you assume that tasering is a dangerous action, and liken it to the usage of a gun. I would question whether taser use is even as dangerous as physically restraining a suspect - several commentators in this latest media circus have argued otherwise - i.e., that tasering someone, while very painful, is not even as dangerous as physically restraining someone.
Which then leads to the simple question: which is to be avoided more, certain pain or unlikely risk of injury/death? And, since the answer is almost certainly some sort of comparison (ie x danger is better than y pain), then one asks what ratio you're thinking of: does a 0.1% chance of serious injury (with concomittant chance of extreme pain) with a 100% chance of minor pain outweigh a 100% chance of extreme pain with a 0.01% chance of serious injury?
Bear in mind that any answer that tends towards the former, and eschews the nearly riskfree yet painful circumstance of tasering might prove you to be a wuss. Wuss.
The guidelines reference in the UCLA report as well as TASER's own warnings don't support the position that tasers are less dangerous than restraint. According to the guidelines, tasers are a means to subdue a subject until restraints can be put in place.
The manufacturer itself recommends officers “begin control and restraint procedures as soon as it is reasonably safe… to
minimize the total duration of exertion and stress experienced by the subject… In some circumstances, in susceptible people, it is conceivable that the stress and exertion of extensive, repeated, prolonged, or continuous application(s) of the TASER device may contribute to cumulative exhaustion, stress, and associated medical risk(s).” Municipal guidelines also not that Tasers should not be used on the elderly, children, pregnant women, and those with heart conditions.
If tasing were in fact less dangerous than restraining someone, that would be a pretty good argument for using tasers on passive resistors if you could as long as you could also manage the propensity for abuse (resorting to tasing too early, applying taser too often, etc.). I guess in such a world the UCLA police should have tasered the kid until he walked out under his own power.
At any rate, for the purposes of the argument in the original post, I'm willing to assume there is no actual risk of death, only certainty of pain. I don't think we should allow police to subject someone who is not a threat to pain merely for the officer's convenience. I'm willing to pay officers more or hire more officers before I make them torturers for convenience.
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