An Australian man – to be precise, a petrol-sniffing Aboriginal man who was already known to police – is in hospital in a critical condition with third-degree burns after petrol on his face and chest was allegedly ignited by a police officer firing his taser.
The facts of the case are under dispute, and regular readers will know my opinion of the police picking on petrol-sniffers and other non-violent drug users. But the case has bought tasers back into the spotlight.
West Australian Police Union president Russell Armstrong on tasers:
“Tasers are very, very safe. They don’t kill people, the only people to have died from Tasers are the ones with medical conditions, heart problems and drug users,”
Armstrong’s statement is misleading at best – I’ve previously written about tasers as a non-lethal device when used properly, but they are still a powerful weapon and have caused many deaths and serious injuries. If you tase a person who is covered with petrol, or high up in a tree, or hanging off a balcony, you’re asking for trouble.
Of course I don’t want to see police whipping tasers out first rather than negotiating, calming people down, and doing their jobs in a professional way. We’ve already seen police use tasers incompetently; an Auckland officer fired his taser five times, hitting himself, and the suspect’s son, without hitting the suspect once. The embarrassing situation was apparently covered up.
But in general, I am not too concerned about the use of tasers by New Zealand police to stun suspects in line with their operational guidelines. Tasers can be used if an offender “poses a threat of physical injury” and their actions “cannot be effected less forcefully”. I’m sure we will see a New Zealand taser death sooner or later, but tasers will save lives if they are used instead of handguns.
In the US, on the other hand, police sometimes seem to pull out their tasers when they are frustrated or angry, and operational guidelines in some areas allow the use of tasers in ‘drive stun’ (read: torture mode) to ‘gain compliance’ from people who are simply refusing to follow orders (to get out of cars, show ID, etc).
We’ve already seen New Zealand police behave in completely thuggish ways, pepper-spraying detainees in locked cells. Currently, operational guidelines mean tasers cannot be used as human cattle prods to torture non-threatening suspects.
We need to be vigilant to ensure that taser use by New Zealand police never crosses that line.
