Is it the Taser or the mindset?
A few decades ago, Canada did away with the death penalty. The reasons vary from “inhumane for a modern society” to “what if we put an innocent person to death?”. Why then, with that backdrop, are we arming police forces, campus cops and hospital security staff with Tasers?
If the setting requires life-threatening / protective action, sidearms are mandatory. That’s why police and armoured car officers are issued them (sensibly, border guards will soon have them as well). If shots are fired, the officer will need to demonstrate why he/she needed to use what was known to be life-threatening force in that specific situation. If it was negligent use, an officer might lose their job or even go to jail.
As for the “humane” Taser, it seems to be doing more high profile accidental killing of late than I’ve heard about involving police handguns for many years. As the Taser is billed as a non-life threatening tool, officers invariably don’t have the same post-event critical review that would follow an accidential death resulting from using their sidearm.
The news report out of Vancouver’s International Airport that an agitated man died after being subdued with a Taser brings to mind the distraught mother who died in a poilce cell at the Phoenix Airport three weeks ago (See post “Airports can be deadly“, September 30-07). What is it about airports that have turned them into such dangerous places?
This is from a recent Canaccord’s Morning Coffee research department note:
TASER International (TASR : NASDAQ : US$17.56), Net Change: -0.29, % Change: -1.62%, Volume: 1,817,618
Even Shatner could switch his phaser to “stun” from “kill”. Canadian police are still trying to work out why a distressed passenger with an “eastern European language” died in the airport after being blasted by a stun-gun twice. Gee whiz, care to guess what killed him? Hit: it wasn’t our famous B.C. crisp air that did it. The man was likely Polish, as there was a flight from that country within an hour of incident (don’t ask Vancouver’s famously ignorant customs officers to recognize a language.
They ask the stupidest questions of any airport on earth. “Did you go for business or vacation?” Ah, like it says on the card, vacation. “Why did you go on vacation?” Ah, because I don’t spend by holidays playing Playstation in my parents’ basement like you do. “Did you stay at a resort when you were in Mexico City or Havana?” Ah, there are no resorts in Mexico City or Havana, etc). How is this for an ingenious statement from the head of the RCMP: “Based on our review of the B.C. coroner’s service and past cases where individuals have died following the use of a Taser, what we’ve seen is they are usually due to a pre-existing medical condition or the use or abuse of legal or illegal drugs [ed. note: since you can’t slander a dead person, why not suggest the guy might have been stoned before the Taser jolted him to death?]. The Tasers have not contributed to the actual death.”
It’s a bit like claiming that a heat wave isn’t responsible for killing old people as they have pre-existing conditions that were the culprit. To prove it, most old people don’t die in such conditions, right? Nonsense. Long-term, is there a risk that Tasers will either be banned or some other, more ethical, retraining approach will replace it? Yes.”
Is it just me or does the propensity for deaths at airports not seem to be a post September 11th phenom? As for the Taser (TASR:NASDAQ), why do our police forces need them? For decades, if not centuries, police and peace officers seemed to do just fine with a billy club, a nightstick or a baton. What changed with the advent of the stun gun that made other non-lethal methods of subduing a subject suddenly less useful than they’d been for generations?
I’m all for technology advancements, but if this thing was a piece of medical equipment, rather than a tool for a jury free-instant execution of suspected wrong-doers, it would have been banned by the FDA (or similar) long ago. Unfortunately, public sentiment appears to be such that anyone being Tasered by someone in uniform is immediately assumed to have done something to have deserved that particular use of force. Should they die from the experience, no one marches in the streets. “Unfortunate”, is all newsreaders might say on the nightly news.
If it had been a summary execution by the hangman, public outcry would end it after the first instance. Despite a pattern of bad outcomes, and dozens of bizarre deaths later, and North American security and police personnel are turning to Tasers in ever larger numbers.
There are certainly defenders of the tool, both medical and in uniform. The key argument being that using a Taser is less likely to cause serious injury than a sidearm, which might be the only other alternative in certain situations. A 2005 B.C. Police-authored Report on Taser suitability puts this theory squarely on the table. My favourite line was this, however:
“Phoenix Police Department, one of the first major American agencies to equip all of its line officers with TASERs, now prohibits training exposures.”
If officers don’t want to train with a Taser, why are they weilding it on obnoxious university students at a John Kerry speech? Time for an extended pause, just like Canada did with the death penalty. Or for judicial direction in the context of a civil lawsuit: if an unintended death is the result of a Taser bolt, and it was administered in a situation where an officers’ life was not at risk, that death will be treated in the same fashion as negligent use of a sidearm causing innocent death. Whether it is a Taser or a Glock, if you use it in a fashion that results in an unintended death, and your life or the life of another citizen wasn’t at risk (or you didn’t at least believe that it was), the charge is Manslaughter.
Why is there a difference how the death comes about? If it isn’t a flaw in the technology (which is why more forces order Tasers by the day), then it must be negligent use that causes the death. If you didn’t mean to kill the Polish tourist at the airport, and the Taser is safe, you can’t blame the Taser when a confused airline passenger drops dead after a bolt. Pre-existing medical condition or not. Drunk or not.
And if the device wasn’t used outside the recommended parameters, why did he (and dozens of others like him) die if the device is non-lethal?
These events are not acts of God.
MRM
MRM,
The Taser skips the judge and jury and goes straight to the punishment (apperently, sometimes of the capital variety). The student at the John Kerry speech (see YouTube) had multiple cops on him and they still found the need to stun him? The guy was not a big guy and was not being violent (though resistant). If any self-respecting cop (let alone a pod of them) couldn’t restrain him with their own might, might they best reconsider their career path? As for allowing prison guards to carry the device, have we all forgotten that famous Stanford study where volunteers were arbitrarily appointed the role of either prisoner or guard? These guys make cops look like bunch of PhD.
p.s. MRM, please fire me an email.
You should do your research before speaking of things you know nothing about. This is the most uneducated and misrepresenting article ive read in months. You should be stripped of your right to publish anything. TASERs ARE non-lethal and most if not all the medical examiners have ruled out TASER as the cause of death in these cases where criminals have died after being subdued with one. Recently as well the review board had determined that all of the incidents you have mentioned were justified in using the TASER and in some cases worse forms of subduing the subject.In short do a little more leg work and think a little more before you publish false “facts” and uneducated opinions.
Thx for the perspective KB. I welcome the difference of opinion, and linked to a police report supporting Taser use as I don’t fancy myself as an expert of matters of electric shocks and heart failures.
But by referring to these dead people as “criminals”, before they’ve had the benefit of appearing before a judge and jury, I think you hit the nail on the head vis-a-vis my concern that the public’s mindset is as much the issue as the Taser.
Not many people seems to mind that the Taser is often removing the chance for an individual to appear before a court to answer for the alleged crime that led to the original encounter with the law enforcement offical.
MRM
Mr. McQueen:
The unfortunate truth in our business (yes, i’m a police officer) is that people die. Persons have died while in custody long before the rapid growth of Taser use. The problem with today is that since there are Tasers now being used to subdue comabative subjects, and IF that person later dies in-custody, the Taser is the first thing to be blamed, primarily due to its popularity or “press appeal”. In years past when someone died in custody we (the law enforcement community) tried to find out why. we came up with “positional asphyxiation” for a while, and then “drug induced phycosis” is the latest and most accurate.
Our agency and many, many others still subject officers to the Taser as part of the training, and NOT ONE officer in the world has died because of this……why? because we are not under the influence or overdosing on illegal drugs at the time. That is the reason people are dying when taken into custody using a Taser, NOT because of the Taser. In your article you, like many others, are looking for the answers to in-custody deaths, and the Taser seems to be the choice of late. It’s drugs that are doing it! A compbative person under the inlfuence of drugs is seemingly immune to control holds and baton strikes, etc., but the Taser is able to subdue them because it is not based primarily on pain comliance. Then they die when subdued and restrained because their body cannot handle the drugs they are under the influence of without moving and thrashing about….in short, they crash!
I very much appreciate the insight. You are a professional and have expertise in this area, and your views and perspective are compelling.
As for drugs being 100% responsible for Taser deaths, I’m from Missouri. The man who was killed with a Taser less than 2 minutes after encountering the officers at the Vancouver Airport had, according to preliminary autopsy report, no drugs or alcohol in his bloodstream.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071026.wtaser26/BNStory/National/home
MRM
The very sad truth about this and other cases of in-custody deaths is that is very highly probable that the person would have died anyway. When these people reach that frenzied and out of control state (physically and mentally) they have to be subdued, and the police are the ones called in to do so. Without the use of a Taser to control the person, we have to resort to physical strength and lots of officers to restrain the person. I have personally witnessed in my career several people in a state of “excited delirium” and we have had to physically restrain them. I have witnessed the medical emergency that occurs when they suddenly stop breathing after being restrained. There were no Tasers involved in these incidents. The point I’m making and reiterating is that it just seems that the Taser is the focus of blame due to its popularity now, not because it really is the cause. I have read the studies done by Taser International, as well as the independent studies by other groups. I have also seen for myself the effectiveness and impact of the Taser, and the marked decrease in injuries to suspects (and officers) with it’s use instead of nightsticks, clubs, ASPs, control holds, less-lethal projectiles, etc. In my professional and personal opinion, the Taser is a great tool, and once again, NOT the reason these people die.
Constable
The Polish tourist at the Vancouver Airport wasn’t on drugs, according to the autopsy. He died after a Taser bolt.
Billy clubs bruise, but they didn’t kill.
If it isn’t the Taser that killed the man in Vancouver, what did? Operator error? A weak heart? Bad lungs?
MRM