Perhaps you have seen the incident at UCLA where a student refused to present ID or leave the university library. The Iranian-American student, who was belligerent but not violent, was tased repeatedly while on the ground. Crucially, this was all caught on camera and is on YouTube.
TeenagePundit portrays the event in no uncertain terms:
¨… a group of armed assailants, refusing to identify themselves to bystanders, repeatedly inflicted violent and painful attacks on an unarmed library patron who had neither used nor threatened violence.¨
The incident made me curious about tasers (technical name: electroshock guns). An eye-opening, extensive article about tasers from Amnesty International makes me wish I had thought about this issue more before tasers were introduced here in New Zealand in September. Tasers are very effective non-lethal weapons, but their very effectiveness makes them all too easy to abuse. Tasers don´t kill people directly, but can cause serious injuries or kill indirectly. Examples from the Amnesty International report:
- A man was permanently paralysed after being tased and falling from a tree he had climbed to escape police.
- A taser may have caused a miscarriage in a pregnant woman who was tased (in the back, without warning or provocation) after calling the cops on her abusive husband.
- A taser may have ignited a gas explosion which killed a man when a police officer tried to restrain the mentally disturbed man who had previously filled the house with gas.
Surfing Youtube turns up some informative and eye-opening videos. There are some training videos which show police officers being taken down by half-second shocks. This is misleading since the default shock setting of the X26 is five seconds. Reporters and male volunteers are shocked and then laugh about it. There are several good examples of the tasers being used correctly in prison, in an Alaskan shooting, and on an energetic drunk man who manages to pull out the barbs . Then there is a borderline case with an African-American woman who was shouting and slow to cooperate but never violent. She is tased once while standing. I´ve already mentioned the shouting-but-non-violent student who was tased several times while on the ground.
Amnesty International sums up the problems with the US approach to tasers:
- In some US police jurisdictions, offical procedures allow for tasers to be used to ´gain compliance´ (obedience) from subjects who are not actively resisting arrest.
- Being tased involves intense pain and temporary bodily dysfunction from a 50,000 volt jolt of electricity. Repeated use of 5 second shocks on an unresisting suspect is essentially torture.
- It is not acceptable for police to torture or threaten to torture nonaggressive suspects of minor crimes.
In New Zealand, police guidelines state that tasers can only be used to prevent serious criminal offences or prevent criminals escaping when less forceful means are impossible. So far, it looks like tasers are being used correctly by the NZ police. A taser is like any other tool: in the right hands, it is an effective, nonlethal weapon. Used poorly, it becomes a cattle prod or a torture device.
