I'm certain that tasers have saved many more lives than they have cost simply because they have as much stopping power as a gun, and sometimes you really need that much stopping power.
We need to treat them as dangerous, because they are dangerous. But they have a place in the law enforcement toolkit and it's a very important one.
Officers are always +1 on the force level. If you are combative, they use mace/taser, if you have a knife they use a gun, etc.
The only exception to this is when an officer has backup on scene and they can coordinate enough to allow one or more to provide lethal cover (guns) while the others try to employ less lethal tactics (taser, mace, beanbag shotgun, etc). This way, if those less lethal items dont work (and they dont 30% of the time) they are not scrambling for their gun while a pissed off suspect is charging with a knife.
What people don't realize is that before tasers the method of making someone comply (when fighting handcuffs being put on) was batons or actual punches. Yes tasers may cause health issues in 0.001% of uses but batons and punches would cause many more.
Also, a lot of officers don't even carry mace anymore as it generally sucks for everyone when its employed. They are going to get it on them via wind or handling the suspect and it impacts their ability to function.
It might not seem obvious, but I suspect that people tend to be a lot more careful with direct application of force that they can feel (if you have ever punched or hit someone else hard, you know what I mean). Tasers make it much more... impersonal? I dunno what the right word is, but it seems like it's much easier to kill with a Taser while remaining cool, than to do the same with a baton.
This is simply not true and weakens your argument quite a bit.
The article listed states 276 related reports of death after taser use since 2000. I'd imagine tasers are used a few hundred times per day across the US, if not more.
Use of Tasers varies pretty widely from department to department -- according to [1] the Richmond County SD reports about 0.053 uses per officer-month, Miami-Dade PD about 0.0074 uses per officer-month, and Seattle PD about 0.056 uses per officer-month.
Extrapolating the RCSD value across the US, with over 800k officers total [2], it comes out to about 43k uses per month. Given the ~200 months over which this data was gathered, that's 9.2M uses, which makes the 276 fatalities only 0.003% of all incidents (as a best-guess).
Obviously that in no way implies Taser's behavior was ethical; but it's actually a surprisingly low fatality rate for a weapon still considered somewhat lethal.
I think Police should carry stun guns, but they need to be treated like the potentially deadly weapons that they are.
Then again, many members of the police have a hard time chasing a suspect by foot and are nowhere near in condition for even basic martial arts.
Fun story: my massage therapist witnessed someone running away from a morbidely obese policeman and asked him if he needed help. Policeman agreed so he chased him accross a small parking lot. The policeman took his car to meet them a few hundred feet away and was still winded from his earlier attempt at running.
Well say goodbye to women serving as patrol officers. Also, elbows, knees, and fists are lethal weapons, just ask Eric Garner.
So do a lot of other methods.
> At least before they shoot someone they think twice
doesn't hold in practice. Fight or flight translates to shoot or run, few police have the discipline to think twice and exercise caution despite personal risk.
Tasers were adopted because they are a safer option for both the public and police - situations like this play out with both weapons, but the taser is less likely to be fatal.
I think a more effective change is adjustable tasers, with a lower default power level. For most situations, the sheer shock of being electrocuted is enough of an immobilizer - the police don't need to start with enough power to paralyze a PCP fiend...
Then shouldn't police departments improve their hiring and training practices until this is the case? These are people who are sanctioned to use violence in defense of society. They are widely considered heroes for putting their own lives on the line. It's not too much to ask that they are held to the highest standards of discipline.
To me, this incident highlights a design flaw in tasers - too strong and too inflexible. Years of evidence already highlighted the training failures in some regions.
All the examples in that sentence of “non-lethal” weapons are, really, merely less-lethal (than firearms); non-lethal is a factually-inaccurate label used for misleading propaganda purposes.