Detailed study of fatalities and litigation involving police use of stun guns
reuters.com
reuters.com
* The instances of their use as a substitute for lethal force are vanishingly rare. So much so that it's hard to find a case by googling. They're always and only used in a lower stage of the use-of-force continuum than as a substitute for a firearm.
* They're often used completely inappropriately, with no self-defense component at all (ie, used as a way to torture people into complying).
* They're sometimes used purely as a torture device against people who are restrained, already subdued, or even already unconscious.
* They cause a lot of lasting injuries and some fatalities.
It's been an interesting experiment, but it's time to end it. Let's just remove them from the police arsenal (like we have mostly done with nunchaku, which were a less-lethal fad in the 80s and 90s).
I'm of the mind that police force needs to be more black and white, just as the law needs to be more black and white. If there is serious cause to use lethal force, the police need to use (and be trained with) dependable firearms. If there's not, then I don't really want them using weapons at all.
Let's treat failure to comply with lawful requests as a civil matter. You can continue non-compliance as long as you want, but you'll be liable for all the costs incurred by your doing so. Let's not torture or injure people on this basis.
This middle-ground / gray area in the use-of-force continuum creates a strange mindset for everyone involved. Are the police simply dispassionately enforcing discrete laws? Or are they forcing their own will or an unwritten will of the state?
Like any technology, stun guns can be misused, and oftentimes are. It's important to recognize this problem and address it, through raising awareness, improving training, etc. If you simply take stun guns away, the police will simply shoot people with real guns more.
Private security, club bouncers, bodyguards, all seem to be trained and conditioned for physical advantage, but I've seen a lot of out of shape officers, at least in the US.
I wonder if we're leaning on force equalizers too much, or if it's just something that's happened organically.
Should it? A totally different question. Does it? Incontrovertible.
But then how do we reconcile the fact that, at least in common law societies, it is not the case de jurie? If the laws surrounding this are different from the reality, haven't we lost our claim to be a society of laws and not of men?
If that's not enough, give him a bat or a knife as well.
It also ignores cases where private security has to deal with violent drunks (not an outlier at all) without tasers.
And this is how poor police performance in the US continues to get a pass.
Would you share with us how you'd prefer the police to handle that situation?
https://www.westyorkshire.police.uk/sites/default/files/file... actually provides a worked example, including the paperwork you need to fill out after whacking someone in the head.
The police have to handle the situation with realistically no backstop and don't have the luxury of calling it quits when the problem moves over some arbitrary line on a map.
Granted, he was not 215 lb, but it's still close to what your describing and nobody got shot. Just raw physical force and handcuffs from several well trained cops.
PS: He also just got probation, but that's the rich, white, clean record advantage in action.
That's probably the reason he wasn't shot dead by the police.
The things I'd tell them in response to your hypothetical:
* If somebody is attacking somebody with a deadly weapon, you don't use a stun-gun, and neither to do the police. You use a 9mm.
* In the unarmed scenario, you need two trained police officers. Two people, well-trained and with good teamwork, can usually restrain even a huge, out-of-control person.
If they can't, I advocate adding more peacekeepers (police officers or other trained citizens), not more weapons.
Additionally, the scenario you describe is fairly rare. I prefer adding what might seem like logistical inconveniences to very rare scenarios if it means adding clarity and peace to much more common ones.
(side note: a very senior practitioner in my lineage was kicked out of the association in large part because, as a police officer, he was found to have acted brutally and unethically - his name is not even mentioned at my dojo. That might give you a sense of the commitment to good purpose that at least some martial arts schools have regarding training agents of the state.)
This simply is not true. There are plenty of videos out there showing one out of control person fighting off more than two cops. I used to work in a busy hospital ER on a military base, and the military police would frequently bring in drunks they arrested. On a regular basis, it would take four military police plus me and maybe another medic (if they were available) to properly restrain people. Some would fight so fiercely that they were at great risk of harming themselves, and controlling this was often the biggest part of the problem. You can't just sit on them, you have to subdue them properly. If someone is threatening your life you can choose to use deadly force in self-defense, but if not then you have to restrain them, and this takes a lot of work. Put two 'well trained' cops against one determined drunk or druggie, and you get three injured people. This is not a trivial problem.
Can you show me a video where two people (police or otherwise) show good sense and martial arts training and are still unable to restrain someone?
One of the most common things I see in these videos (and I've seen it in person, even with cops I respect) is stepping the wrong way through an armbar. Standing armbar is, without a doubt, the #1 go-to technique for police and bouncers who are trying to restrain someone without using a weapon.
If I see a video of stepping forward through an armbar instead of back, I instantly know that our system has failed that police officer in terms of understanding how their body works vis a vis restraining someone.
It's totally true that, occasionally, a single person can make themselves impossible to restrain even by two people. Even more rarely, the person in question can continue to harm other people or property.
In that scenario, as I said, I think it's better for society to commit more people to the situation rather than (what I think is the lazy and destructive inclination to) add less lethal weapons.
The real problem here is that, in the US, there is no real reason for the police not to use lethal force once the situation has got even slightly violent; and once they've killed the only witness, they can retroactively claim the situation was more violent than it actually was.
Comparable UK Taser stats: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/16/timeline-of-ta...
Not strictly relevant but since I dug it up: use of force policy, or how the UK police manage to handle 99.9% of situations without carrying firearms https://www.westyorkshire.police.uk/sites/default/files/file...
Also interesting to note that even private citizens who are armed and are using it in self defense, are instructed to shoot to kill only. Obviously they are first told that it should only happen if their or others lives are in danger, but once the firearm comes up basically just empty the magazine as fast possible without hesitation.
The logic is a bit like above. Shooting to wound, brandishing the weapon to scare, threatening, all those things end up "not working out" legally as well as killing the person as quickly as possible.
Basically hesitating or wounding or scaring all can be later reinterpreted in court as "your life wasn't really in danger if you hesitated and just shot to maim, so you shouldn't have even pulled the deadly weapon out to begin with". Also I can see that even the perpetrator (say the burglar) might be justified in suing the owner if the owner pull the weapon out and wounds him. The burglar might even be justified in pulling his/her own weapon and shooting back because now the situation is threatening their lives. So to avoid that mess, just empty the magazine.
In the US, there's the "Clean Hands" doctrine that excludes a legal defense of self defense from anyone who was committing a crime at the time. The hypothetical burgler would just be adding charges.
I'm kind of reminded of the stories of Chinese road traffic accidents where the advice is to make sure the victim is dead - reverse over him if necessary - rather than any other outcome.
UK law very definitely requires you to stop shooting immediately once the danger is past - see R v Clegg.
US law as well. If an assailant is obviously incapacitated or surrendering, it's illegal to keep shooting them.
That doesn't really conflict with what the grandparent post says: self defense firearms instructors typically teach students to fire multiple shots at the torso of an assailant, often to continue firing until the assailant stops being an obvious threat. It's risky to shoot someone who's attacking you and stop to see whether it worked.
As an example of the reasoning for this kind of instruction, here's an account of a gunfight between a police officer and a murder suspect. The suspect continued shooting after taking several bullets to the chest and tried to drive away after being shot a total of 22 times.
http://lawofficer.com/archive/officer-down-the-peter-soulis-...
By instructors. As in those who advise or train people to use firearms.
Here are just two examples I found:
http://www.secondcalldefense.org/brandishing-and-warning-sho...
Here is a reddit post discussion someone being surprised by this advice:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CCW/comments/3e5jn6/my_cwp_instruct...
> UK law very definitely requires you to stop shooting immediately once the danger is past - see R v Clegg.
Pretty sure so does the US law. It comes to how determination of "danger is past" happens. There are two aspects there I can think of : 1) This idea that acting too calculating and methodical, shooting one round in the leg, waiting, seeing them crawl and reach for their firearm, shooting another round, etc might not play well in court as the jury might look at it and say "hmm, he had time sit around and think and observe, why didn't he run to save his life at that point" it becomes dubious that this was self defense it starts to look like attempted murder there. While something like "life was in danger, reacted quickly, shot all the rounds, etc". Not saying one way is right or wrong it is just juries I think are inclined to acquit in the later case. 2) There is probably the same perverse idea as the Chinese drivers backing up and making sure they really crush that victim well enough for them to die, because then a dead person they can't sue in a civil court.
That's not because of the legal ramifications, though. Shooting to wound is very very difficult especially in a crisis. The limbs are much smaller targets than the torso and move much more rapidly and unpredictably. Additionally, they are trained to keep firing because even lethal gunshots tend not to be immediately incapacitating. Due to the effects of adrenaline, people can continue fighting even after being shot in the torso a half dozen times.
In short, guns are terrible non-lethal weapons.
This is the bullshit cliff notes watered down for stupid people who can't think for themselves.
You escalate use of force until the threat is stopped. If someone comes at you with a shovel and backs down when you draw your gun you do not just shoot him because "that's what you do". If you do not need to fire your weapon to stop the threat then you should not fire your weapon. You should not draw a gun if you are not prepared to use it. If you shoot someone in the kneecap you'd better be damn good at convincing the court that it was because you have cop-quality marksmanship.
Obviously once a gun comes out you should call the cops to CYA but you are not obligated to shoot someone just because you've drawn a gun.
What is that exactly? Good or bad?
Handgun training and competence varies tremendously between different cities and departments. Overall, I think most departments gotten drastically better over the last twenty years.
Handgun skills decline quickly without use. For a long time most American police departments only required officers to qualify once a year, and the test was easy.
Your average civilian handgun shooting enthusiast who shoots once or twice a month is probably better than your average police officer at hitting targets, simply because or the range time difference.
An oft quoted number that I can't source says that the average officer fires six shots per hit.
However, your average police officer should be able to handle stress better, should be used to fighting back at people trying to hurt them, and should be able to work with other officers as a team.
It's pretty terrible considering that "downrange" for where cops operate is usually not stuff you want to hit with bullets. There was a certain incident several years back in a suburb of Boston that illustrated this very well.
The mag dumping behavior and complete disregard for what's behind the target annoys me much more than the accuracy shortcomings.
153 in 34 years is 4.5 per year. Even the higher figure (where a subject might have been both Tased and shot) represents under 30 per year.
I'm fairly sure that less-lethal weapons/tactics like stun guns have saved more lives than they've cost. I don't mean to diminish the suffering of families who are in the 153 or 1005, but the numbers tell me that this is a good addition to police spectrum of force rather than a bad one.
In the United States we have a sort of trench warfare between 'citizens' and 'la policia'. No one wins.
Many people hate the police because they're routinely harmed - financially and otherwise - for not hurting anyone. Police officers justify hurting people with "I don't make the rules, I just enforce them." I think this is the origin of the term 'cop out' [1].
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/copping%20out
I remember a fellow who I picked up at a police substation around 2am. ~7 hours before he'd pulled into the convenience store, on his way home from the bar... His car had automatic headlights, it was twilight, and the car didn't think it dark enough to turn the headlights on yet. The police officer was right behind him. He blew a .04 (half Arizona's legal limit of 0.08). The police officer decided to arrest him under the state's Zero-Tolerance laws... My passenger said that he'd complained, "you don't actually have to tow my car", but policy is policy... 7 hours later I took the guy home.
As I recall, this passenger was rather frustrated, but could probably afford to spend a couple thousand dollars getting his car back & on a lawyer to deal with the legal system on his behalf. Most people get stuck with public defenders, who mostly just provide small amounts of lubrication to those who get screwed by the system.
You could say our drone warfare technology is creating that same sort of problem. On one hand they are much cheaper and do not risk a pilot being shot down in some enemy country. On the other hand, that makes it cheap and relatively risk free to drop bombs on people, so why not use them all the time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Florida_Taser_in...
My opinion on that incident is that the police over-reacted.
Police in the US seem to be sorely undertrained in defusing situations, and in fact often are the ones escalating. They certainly (in my experience) do not like to have their authority challenged. They are the professionals - shouldn't the onus be on them to maintain calm?
That said, there are thousands of police/citizen interactions every day that don't end up in the news. Maybe the bad apples have biased my opinion.
Disclosure: white middle-aged middle-class male. I've had maybe a dozen interactions with police, mostly traffic incidents, mostly when I was much younger. I can think of two incidents in particular where the officer became verbally abusive with no obvious provocation on my part, and I had to de-escalate through calm and submission.
The only way to prevent human beings from acting in the default way human beings act is rigorous evidence-based training. No proposition that there must have been something else they could have done is meaningful unless it's backed up by specific, rigorous, evidence-based training for the situation in question.
Absent that, we're asking people to respond to threats unrealistically. We're making them sick and commanding them to be well.
It's as if police never stop to think about the purpose of their jobs. I guess they're like many other people that way...
This. If you're gonna take the guy to the station and have the vehicle towed then why not stick the guy in the cruiser, wait for the truck and conduct your search in the impound lot where you're not clogging up traffic and at risk of getting hit by someone on their phone.
The problem is that there isn't pressure from the top down to be efficient.
This is the operative phrase. There are many cases where someone gets hit by a stun gun and dies, and the medical examiner rules the cause of death as "unknown" or "inconclusive." I remember hearing these claims a decade ago. The whole point being that cops and Taser International didn't want the devices to be associated with the deaths, so they were trying as hard as they could to make sure it was never listed as a cause of death.
BS like: "this guy just happened to have a heart attack at the moment he was hit with the stun gun, but the stun gun in no way contributed to his heart attack."