Comment by ryanmercer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanmercer | Hacker News Reader

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>Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting

Tasers are routinely used to attempt to deescalate situations.

The problem is though they just aren't terrible effective and often fail. Simply wearing thick clothing can't prevent penetration, distance and wind can prevent them from even making contact, batteries age, etc. An enraged suspect, such as one on drugs or drunk, can also rip them out of their skin or outright not be deterred.

Here's one study that backs up what I've said above

> A total of 2,395 use-of-force reports indicated conflict ended at the first “iteration” (the officers’ first application of force). In the first iteration, TASER’s were deployed 2,113 times. Out of these deployments, 1,459 ended the conflict at the first TASER application (69-percent success rate); chemical agents had a 65-percent success rate; impact weapons had a 45-percent success rate at the first iteration; takedown had a 42-percent success rate; and compliance holds had a 16-percent success rate.

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=2460...

69% on the first attempt, when the officer's life is potentially in risk (and anyone else at the scene), is a pretty lousy success rate.

You can find more data (just be vigilant as the manufacturers like to muddy the waters with their own claims) if you'd wish to continue looking.

If you think using a taser is a way to "deescalate situations", you have a very different interpretation of what a "deescalation strategy" is meant to accomplish than most.

TBH the problem seems to be that US police is often trained to "deescalate situations" by shutting them down quickly and forcefully rather than actually deescalating, i.e. carefully defusing the situation.

Tasers are violent, less-than-lethal (i.e. potentially fatal) weapons. If they're ineffective at reducing casualties and decreasing the overall use of violent force, they need to be removed.

When you're confronted by someone larger than you, more muscular than you, that's enranged at their partner/coworker/family member and have been violent already and want to make you their next target, let me know how well trying to talk them down works 99 times out of 100.

Less than lethal options exist because in some scenarios the fact of the matter is you have to deploy a less than lethal option, shoot them or get hurt/dead.

While you might be able to talk your best friend down when he's mad that they put lettuce on his sandwich, that doesn't work when you're talking to someone that doesn't have respect for authority and is drunk/high/mad/mentally unwell and wants their way.

- Pepper spray/mace, despite spraying in a stream, are NOT targeted devices. They will immediately spread to the surrounding the environment and while the intended target may take the brunt of it, everyone in the immediate area will feel it to some degree

- Less than lethal rounds, like a rubber bullet, can be considerably more lethal than a taser

- Tasers can miss, fail to seat, and yes can cause death in some circumstances

- Bullets, at best, are going to cause permanent damage and at worst are instantly fatal.

I urge you to see if your local law enforcement has a community outreach program and if they do to actually attempt to talk to some officers about the sort of things they deal with daily and how they personally feel about their various offensive tools.

I come from a law enforcement family, I have many friends in local, state and federal law enforcement roles. The extreme majority of law enforcement officers hope they NEVER have to draw their firearm or even need to deploy a taser or spray someone but the fact of the matter is when police are called to deal with someone that is being disruptive, or actively attempting to harm others, they've already thrown reason out the window and there is a realistic chance they're going to attempt to harm the officer(s).

A taser is a deescalation tool. Simply drawing it can be enough to back some people down although as the study I linked shows You've got roughly a 1 in 3 chance that even sending electricity into someone isn't enough to get them to comply after the first round. That alone should tell you something "shocking 1 out of 3 people causes them to continue to resist" is exactly why law enforcement carry firearms (again, that they hope they never have to draw and certainly never use).

> I come from a law enforcement family, I have many friends in local, state and federal law enforcement roles.

You didn't even have to say that, it was obvious from the lengths you go to in order to excuse the murders and brutality committed by police officers in the US.

You can talk about "but what if a polar bear attacks you" all day but that won't ever excuse why it is literally every week that new video evidence of US police officers brutalising or murdering people comes out and barely any of the officers involved ever are seriously punished for it.

If this violence was inevitable because of the gun ownership, you would see similar events in Canada or Switzerland. If this violence was necessary to protect officers from civilians, you would see vastly more stories about injured or killed police officers in the UK.

That you think your scenario of the muscular angry brute looking for "targets" is even remotely plausible should tell you something. Suspects are suspects, perps are perps, not enemy soldiers or wild animals.

Police officers in other countries are trained to deal with these situations without shooting unarmed people. How little do you think about your friends and family that you think they're incapable of learning how to do that?

Instead your peers get dehumanising pseudo-intellectualism like this: https://www.policeone.com/police-products/training-products/...

Yes, all cops.

You've crossed into personal attack. That's not ok here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully.

When our backgrounds are distant from each other, we need to connect across those distances, not become aggressive. There are two options: conversation or war. Here we want conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we had to ask you about this another time recently too. Would you please review the guidelines and use this site in the intended spirit? It's not always easy, but it's work everyone here needs to put in, if we are to prevent the commons from burning.

It's fine. I'm not going to engage you in an argument about whether policing tone is productive if you don't police content (or the effective politics you produce by what content you do police) but I'm mostly just annoyed that the HN blocklist extension stopped working for some reason.

HN seriously needs a way to hide (mute/block) specific users' comments rather than just relying on moderators or mob voting/flagging to decide what's "appropriate".

I don't know what you mean by the HN blocklist extension, but it doesn't sound like a feature we have. Are you using a third-party extension?

> the effective politics you produce by what content you do police

People tend to overinterpret that. Politically, HN is pluralistic (all major positions are represented, as you'd expect in any large population sample), but it turns out that pluralism is experienced by each side as bias in favor of the other side.

This is mostly an artifact of HN being a non-siloed community site. Nearly every other place where people encounter political views on the internet has already been pre-filtered (by subreddits, follow lists, friend lists, etc.) That's what everyone's used to, so when they walk into a place that doesn't work that way, they quickly encounter a much higher frequency of opposing if not offensive viewpoints. This is painful; it feels a bit like getting smacked in the face. Because this painful experience doesn't come with any explanation, people reach for the handiest and in a way most comforting explanation—not, "oh, this is about what you'd expect from a statistical distribution", but rather "this place is a (SJW|alt-right) cesspool". Even if the distribution were more in your favor, you'd still feel this way, because we're so primed to notice the things we dislike and to weight them more strongly.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(I know you said you didn't want to engage about this, but it comes up so often that every now and then I feel like writing out my latest take on the topic.)

>it was obvious from the lengths you go to in order to excuse the murders and brutality committed by police officers in the US.

992 people were shot and killed by police in 2018 [1] with 686,665 sworn officers [2] in the country. For a little comparison to killings by civilians - Chicago alone had 530 murders that year [3].

In 2018, there were an estimated 1,206,836 violent crimes [2].

106 law enforcement officers were killed in line-of-duty incidents in 2018. Of these, 55 officers died as a result of felonious acts [4]

So 'the lengths I go' are simply basing my opinion in facts and not emotion.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...

[2] https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...

[3] https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/12/30/18314619/chicago-s-2...

[4] https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...

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