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Tasers are the latest trend for the fashion-conscious bobby-on-the-beat, hailed as a safe, 21st century alternative to bashing people over the noggin with a truncheon. Home Office figures published this week show that their use by the police doubled in just two years, with the weapons drawn almost 8,000 times and discharged on a quarter of those occasions. The trend doesn’t hold everywhere – Thames Valley Police were quick to point out that they bucked the trend, with use actually falling in a similar period – but with so many would-be crims getting zapped, the question has to be asked: Just how safe are tasers?
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Invented by Jack Cover, who previously worked on the Apollo programme, tasers work by firing two small electrode darts into the unlucky target and passing a high-voltage low-amperage current through them. In theory, this disrupts the brain’s ability to control the body’s muscles without causing a great deal of pain. The subject ends up on the floor, and stays there, fizzing around, until the current is stopped.
Tasers seem like the perfect police weapon – a safe, painless and mildly comical way to incapacitate a criminal at a decent range – but in reality, there have been some cock-ups. In Chorley, for example, a PC fired his taser at a dangerous villain wielding a Samurai sword, but discovered later that he’d actually disabled a blind man carrying a white stick. And then there’s the infamous “Don’t tase me bro!” incident at the University of Florida, which… well, you’ve seen it. It’s not hard to see why the public are wary of tasers.
Deaths have occurred too, with high-profile incidents on both sides of the Atlantic in recent months. Tuesday will see the funeral of Jordan Begley, a factory worker in Manchester who died at the age of just 23. The exact circumstances of his death are being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, and a post-mortem failed to establish the cause of death. What we do know is that Begley was tasered, and that he died two hours later after paramedics failed to revive him.
In Florida, the death of 18-year-old Israel Hernandez in Miami has led to a huge debate over the appropriate use of tasers by the police. An award-winning artist, Hernandez was caught by an officer spraying graffiti on an abandoned McDonald’s. The slim, unarmed teenager was chased by several officers for ten minutes before being cornered, pushed against a wall and tasered. “They were all clapping and doing high-fives all over his body,” a friend and witness claims. A couple of minutes later he went into a seizure, and died. The question that must be answered is this: the boy was unarmed, had committed only a minor crime, was running away and posed very little threat to anyone, so why on earth was it necessary to incapacitate him with a potentially deadly taser? Unsurprisingly his family have launched a lawsuit against Miami Beach Police.
These aren’t isolated incidents. Figures released by Amnesty International this year suggest that 540 people in the US have died after being struck by police tasers since 2001, with tasers being listed as a “cause or contributory” factor in 60 of those cases.
Those figures sound a lot, but then any sort of police intervention will carry some risk, and over 12 years in a country of nearly 300 million people it’s not surprising that some deaths would be associated with pretty much any law enforcement method upwards of a stern talking to. To get a clearer picture, we need to look at the research. But then we hit a snag.
There have been quite a few studies into taser use, and if you take them as a whole they appear to show that they’re safe when used properly. In 2011, cardiologists at the University of California, San Franciso investigated 50 of these studies. They discovered that 23 of them were either directly funded by TASER International, or written by authors who had some association with the company that manufactures the world’s most common form of taser. Ninety-six percent of those studies concluded that tasers “were either ‘unlikely harmful’ or ‘not harmful’”. In the studies not linked to TASER, that figure dropped to 55 percent. More striking that that, 70 percent of the TASER-linked studies concluded that the weapons were not harmful, vs. only 26 percent of the independent studies. The evidence still leaned toward tasers being safe, but it was nowhere near as certain as it appeared.
A year later, the American Heart Association waded into the fray, publishing a study by Douglas Zipes that looked in more detail at eight cases where the use of a taser resulted in a loss of consciousness. They concluded that a jolt from a taser could lead to “cardiac electrical capture”, meaning that the heart could directly respond to the electrical impulse from the taser, potentially triggering a cardiac arrest.
Of course, tasers can save lives too. Back in Miami, officers used one to stop a drunken man walking in front of a truck. In New Zealand, police used the device to end a siege in which a man had barricaded himself in his home with an arsenal of knives and machetes, avoiding the use of firearms and saving the man from a self-inflicted stomach wound in the process. The police need to be able to use force when appropriate, and tasers are better than a lot of the alternatives.
But as with pepper spray, the balance of risks is complex and may shift as usage becomes more common. In the UK we seem to be wandering into a situation where tasers are common on our streets, and inevitably the more police have them, the more often they’ll be used – often in situations where they’re not appropriate. Across the Atlantic, some US forces are calling for every officer to be issued with one, which risks them becoming the default option for any confrontation. Even more disturbing is their popularity among civilians. In the last few years “Taser Parties” have sprung up around America, marketed at women, which take the Tupperware Party concept and apply it to selling 50,000V stun guns. Just like the gun lobby, taser advocates have learned to exploit the great American tradition of buying weaponry more likely to endanger you and your family than prevent any actual crime.
In trained hands and controlled situations, tasers are probably pretty safe – or at least as safe as any other practical option. The problem, as we’re seeing in the UK and US, is that more and more people are getting ahold of the devices, and the weapons are being used in a wider range of circumstances. It’s one thing to take down an armed threat, another to electrocute a unarmed kid who’s running away from you. Very few people would argue that tasers should be banned, but how many police officers really need them, and in what circumstances should they be used? These are questions that should be looked at very carefully before the Home Office floods our streets with them.
Follow Martin on Twitter: @mjrobbins
Martin Robbins is a writer and talker who blogs about weird and wonderful things for the Guardian and New Statesman. Here Be Dragons is a column that explores denial, conflict and mystery at the wild fringes of science and human understanding. Find him on Twitter @mjrobbins, or email tips and feedback to martin@mjrobbins.net.
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