Horizon

(1) The cardiologist in question is quite open about the fact that he is speculating - he has done no research on this and is basing his suggestion on exerience that may or may not be relevant. (2) None of this addresses the real issue: what do critics propose cops use instead of tasers? No device which is meant to incapacitate people is ever going to be completely without risk - such a benchmark of absolute sureity is ridiculous and would, incidentally, if applied to other electronic equipment, require the withdrawal from sale of toasters (absolute killers in comparison with tasers). I would not particularly like to be tasered, but I would prefer it a great deal to being billyclubbed or shot. (3) If our cardiologist is correct and there is a small chance that a taser could set off a heart attack, then it makes sense for police cars to carry defibrillators - which the manufacturers themselves say is a good idea.

I get the impression that the real objection to tasers, where it exists, is emotional rather than practical.

"Emotional" means humanitarian, I suppose? Yes, law students are also taught to regard humanitarian arguments as "emotional" (and, by implication, weakly feminine) when they lack a basis in the (majestically equal or otherwise) laws of the current year. It's an approach that is itself morally weak in that it provides an emotionally appealing excuse for failing to consider troubling imperatives. But those imperatives are precisely what distinguish the moral from the merely legal. For example, no moral system other than straight Bentham utlitarianism would condone increasing the risk of killing an innocent suspect in order to protect the greater public more efficiently.

As to "what should police use, then?" I'd say something whose possible effects nobody will be tempted to underrate. It is, for example, well known what harm a stick can and cannot do.

The effect of the "Taser" device on the mental processes of the officers is the primary danger. As you may know, "Taser" is the acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electrical Rifle." As in the Tom Swift high-tech adventure stories of 1950s boyhoods. That tells you a lot right there: the device is an adolescent boy's gee-whiz fantasy gizmo. Sadly, if there's any constant theme in police misconduct stories, it's that bad policing starts when officers are tempted by emotional, novelistic ideas about their jobs. You get the unreasonable, disproportionate behavior from the ones who think of themselves as adventure heroes, or fathers-to-the-neighborhood, or crusaders above the law. Handing out space-age gizmos makes these guys think they're in a comic book. The problem is, the ordinary below-the-law people they can hurt are not consensual participants in the fantasy.

This argument sounds familiar. Give cops (who are, after all, just grown adolescent boys) a cool-looking weapon and they will be plunged into a heroic fantasy which they will be unable to resist acting out.

I say if you really want to stop police brutality, you'd better start getting all that violence off television. And violent video games. Geez, it's no wonder.

"Emotional" means humanitarian, I suppose?

No, it means responding to an instinctive tug of the spinal chord rather than thinking through its implications. I find a course of action (banning tasers as 'inhumane') that would require police officers to use guns more readily an odd form of moral indignation.

It is, for example, well known what harm a stick can and cannot do.

No device that can incapacitate a person should ever be treated lightly, and it seems appropriate to me that taser use should be regulated and its users well trained and subject to outside scrutiny - which is really a more general observation that policemen should be held to public account. I'm sure you have much to say on that score, and perhaps I'd agree with a lot of it too. But none of it detracts from the potential usefulness of the taser and its ability to save rather than take lives. It seems to me that if you're bothered about gee-whiz weapons in the wrong hands then you should be concerning yourself with those rather more dangerous itsems called guns, and I invite you to open up a discussion about that if you choose. Singling out a far less hazardous device for special criticism because of its comparative novelty seems downright strange.

Let me ask you this. Imagine you have a situation in which a paranoid schizophrenic who would normally be harmless but who has stopped taking his medication - a rare problem, but certainly one that happens, as I understand it - has run out into the street carrying a knife. He hasn't hurt anybody yet, but he's clearly unstable, cannot be reasoned with, and poses a public danger. What should the policemen called to the situation do?

Shoot him?
Tackle him with their clubs, putting themselves at considerable risk?
Taser him?
What?

It's not an especially rare problem, sad to say. The first thing to do is talk. Talking is most likely to be tried seriously when there isn't an easier-seeming quick fix available. Force should be a very last resort. It is usually not needed, and it is a great danger for officers to be tempted to use force too early. The recent Saulsbury case here is a classic example of the problem.

The danger of Tasers is, once again, their novelty: people disagree about what the things can do, and they are a temptation to resolve a "problem" by just taking down the troublesome person. By contrast the danger of firearms is, unfortunately, well understood, and so people respect them and impose severe consequences for their too-quick use.

Now, there is the sad fact that people in extreme states of mind react differently to uniforms. The answer to that is for people not in uniform to do the talking. San Francisco approaches the problem by employing a "mobile crisis team" of streetwise psychologists who talk people down & often persuade them to go to the hospital. They have police backup. There are occasional complaints about police being unnecessarily rough once they take people in, but mental health pros who I respect have a lot of regard for the system. The one time I invoked it -- on a suicidal client making a scene in the courthouse -- all ended peacefully enough, and the only force involved was a couple of bailiffs looming strategically.

We did have a famous sad case here of a mentally ill man who was killed by too-quick use of an officer's firearm. I think the problem there was that they didn't call Mobile Crisis.

If the concern is really for officers' safety in such situations, the technological push ought to be for forms of padding, armor, etc. that can protect an officer who finally does have to disarm someone.

The thing is, though, that even unreasonable people usually give up short of the breaking point if given a chance to do so. Most court cases settle, and most wacko-standoffs end quietly.

Force should be a very last resort. It is usually not needed.

Possibly true, but quite irrelevent in the cases in which it is needed. ("Don't worry about it officer, the perp in front of you is statistically unlikely.") Which brings us back, once more, to the question: is it better for policemen to have more options when dealing with people resisting arrest, or less? It strikes me that honest humanitarians should be demanding more non-lethal alternatives to gunfire - and certainly not trying to shore up a visceral distaste for tasers with dodgy scientific claims.

the danger of firearms is, unfortunately, well understood, and so people respect them and impose severe consequences for their too-quick use.

Yes, and the severe consequence for many is that they get shot - by policemen who feel they have no choice. The idea that people will show more self-restraint if they are provided with increasingly lethal weaponry shows an admirable trust in the better facets of human nature, but not I fear one that is very well supported by practical evidence. Certainly if I were facing a jittery police officer in a dark alley I would not have sufficent confidence in his caution to prefer he were holding his sidearm rather than a taser.

The danger of Tasers is, once again, their novelty

OK, so make them less novel: train officers to understand their limitations and their risks. It seems to me that proscribing a potentially valuable tool on the grounds that it not well enough understood at the moment is based on a cyclical argument: you might as well demand that all further R&D in police methodology should be halted because there's going to be an element of dangerous novelty in the initial use of any equipment.

If the concern is really for officers' safety in such situations, the technological push ought to be for forms of padding, armor, etc. that can protect an officer who finally does have to disarm someone.

I don't see why the use of active and passive forms of protection should be mutually exclusive.

Well, making the things less novel through adequate training is something we can emphatically agree on.

But there's no way to train an officer to fire at the right point in a suspect's heart cycle, is there?

But there's no way to train an officer to fire at the right point in a suspect's heart cycle, is there?

No, but still a damn sight less dangerous than firing a lead slug into them at high velocity.

I believe I heard on the radio last night that the SEC is looking into these guys. Apparently it's concerned the safety claims being made for Tasers may not be in the best interests of their shareholders.

Here we go now, finally. Never mind the deaths of innocent suspects, we've finally got something our society finds worth regulating: damage to the wallets of investors.

Never mind the deaths of innocent suspects

Just a general observation: It's bad form when manipulative adjectives are attached to statements of any political type, and the above is no exception. If someone dies in a police altercation after breaking into a stranger's house and attacking its residents (as just happened in Pensacola), they may be legally innocent but they are certainly not morally innocent. This doesn't for a moment excuse any misbehavior on the part of the police, if it took place, but omitting the detail that many of these people were transparently guilty of serious offences and representing them as innocent patsies of a wicked system just undermines the original point.

As Mr. Rumsfeld once said, "Money is stupid," meaning that economic considerations can sometimes act as a natural moral check (okay, so that's not what he meant). Maybe this SEC investigation is just one of those happy moments when the interests of money intersects with those of the public.

It's bad form when manipulative adjectives are attached to statements of any political type,...

That's an awfully broad condemnation. Perhaps we could merely agree that we've each used manipulative language, otherwise known as argument; obviously when I said "innocent suspects" I wasn't referring to the Pensacola case -- in fact, I hadn't even heard of it until your note just now. As you know, my habit in quieter moments is to note that none of us can really hope to be "innocent" -- the best we can do is to be "not guilty" of some specific accusation. But many persons who were at least not clearly guilty of crime have been killed by Tasers. The Saulsbury case is a middling example.

But many persons who were at least not clearly guilty of crime have been killed by Tasers.

Just as a final point, that statement remains, so far as I understand it, sheer assertion. I don't in fact believe that there's been a single recorded case in which it's been definitely shown that a taser killed anyone. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if a taser has caused a death; and I imagine if they continue to be used in large numbers, then other people will die from their use too, just as people die every year from the use of all sorts of normally harmless electronic equipment. The point is that whatever this small total is, it is surely far outnumbered by the total of people whose lives have been potentially or actually saved because at a moment of potential violence the police had the option of using a non-lethal rather than a lethal weapon. That this point has never once been mentioned or even vaguely alluded to in any of the shock-horror newspaper articles I've read about tasers says a lot about the priorities and prejudices of journalism, sadly.

Have a look at this Amnesty International report before you go comparing Tasers to toasters or claiming that protection is their primary function.

Have a look at this Amnesty International report before you go comparing Tasers to toasters or claiming that protection is their primary function.

I wouldn't dream of comparing a taser to a toaster: given the latter's track record, the allusion would be monstrously unfair to the taser.

What the Amnesty International says is that tasers are open to abusive use by the unscrupulous or vindictive, that they believe such abuse has been taking place, and that they feel that the current regulations in use by American police forces are inadequate. The first point I accept readily, and the second and third I am happy to concede are possible, although I don't know enough about the particulars to say for sure. It's difficult to imagine a weapon designed to temporarily incapacitate someone that wouldn't be open to abusive use, at least if it was of any use at all. But aren't we simply back to all those points about effective training and external review and all those other things I said upthread a long, long time ago? I apologise to those who must be now thoroughly bored by the whole flap, but I say again: every criticism that is aired about tasers could be aired about guns, except about you'd have to multiply the effect about 1,000 times. Yet somehow 'humanitarians' (we inhumanitarians not giving a crap about people, you understand - simplifying our lives enormously) appear to be more worked up about a device that's designed not to kill you than about one that is.

Even Amnesty's conclusions peter out a bit at the end: "The organization concedes that there may be limited circumstances under which tasers might be considered an alternative to deadly force, [but] there is evidence to suggest that measures such as stricter controls and training on the use of force and firearms can be more effective in reducing unnecessary deaths or injuries ... Amnesty International is reiterating its call on federal, state and local authorities and law enforcement agencies to suspend all transfers and use of electro-shock weapons, pending an urgent rigorous, independent and impartial inquiry into their use and effects. Where US law enforcement agencies refuse to suspend tasers, the organization is recommending that their use of tasers is strictly limited to situations where the alternative under international standards would be deadly force, with detailed reporting and monitoring procedures." One can reasonably agree or disagree about some of these points, but at least they're willing to admit that there are conceivable circumstances in which taser use could save lives, which is more than I've been able to get out of you in a week of dodging that particular, erm, bullet.

Those of you out there who are wondering just what kind of retainer I am getting from the taser people will be surprised to discover that I have nothing particularly to gain from the success or failure of this device, other that is than from a little greater security when out in public. Given that my services have been provided without compensation for some time now I think I am going to take this opportunity to retire from the taser-protection business, but this discussion has given me a few things to say about what I call Consequence-Free Moralizing (CFM) which I may come back to at some point. However, my next post, whenever that appears, is more likely to be about John Buchan, so please bear with me.

I think you're presuming you'll never have one of those things aimed at you personally -- it'll only be for deranged or criminal persons who might otherwise pose a danger to law-abiding civilians such as yourself.

The unfortunate fact, however, is that false accusations do happen to law-abiding civilians. If something can happen unfairly to anyone, I tend to presume it's capable of happening unfairly to me.

I think you're presuming you'll never have one of those things aimed at you personally -- it'll only be for deranged or criminal persons who might otherwise pose a danger to law-abiding civilians such as yourself.

For goodness' sake, didn't I address this in this very thread just a few lines up? To reiterate: no, I doubt in all honesty that I'll ever have one of those things aimed at me personally. I'm not a habitual criminal, I don't engage in acts of public disorder, and I live a fairly dull bourgeois life. However, one never knows, does one? And should the event ever happen, I hope to God that the policeman does have a taser rather than a gun in his hand. I imagine that it's a very unpleasant experience being tasered, but I expect I could live with it, and the danger does not seem appreciable enough to warrant panic. Guns I feel a little more strongly about, perhaps due to living in an area in which they are aimed at people rather like myself, with a propensity to cause decidely non-temporary effects such as, well, instant bloody death. Yes, I care more about my own life than I do about the lives of deranged persons or criminals, though that doesn't mean that I think their lives are inconsequential. That's precisely why I think tasers are a good idea - massive self-interest.

Feel free to make more presumptions about my smug middle-class awfulness in the usual place, though I may not be able to respond immediately.

I wouldn't dream of calling you those names. You just can't resist having the last word in an argument, that's all.

You just can't resist having the last word in an argument, that's all.

Depends, as far as Horizon is concerned, on the argument. If it's a thread I started then I will always concede the last word to someone else if they wish, on the grounds that these are supposed to be comments and they're commenting on what I said (threads that have become derailed from their starting point don't count, however). In fact, as a general rule I'm much less inclined to comment at all on my own postings unless the thread demands it. The postings of others I regard as fair game.

If this is the end, then congratulations for conducting this discussion at a college sophomore level (a notch or two above the Wall Street Journal) with a Flesch score of 55.92 - a little low in the comprehension department but I think most of us understood you.

I'm beginning to think the safest course around here is always to give Bobby the last word. Except that now I haven't. So, Bobby, ya got anything else to say heere?

I'm sorry to report that after a brilliant, evocative, and often emotionally stirring prosecution of the case against tasers, your last comment, according to the Fogometer, registers at the TV Guide reading level.

The people who agree with the taser gun make me sick. I don't care what situation the cops in this thing has to go, its just insane its like torture. But then again none of you have been tazed so youl wouldent know. If the cop is being thretened with a firearm he should use his, if the police man is being attacked he should follow his training and restrain the person with his HANDS. Is it just me or are cops getting lazy now days? If a person is running from a police officer that gives him no right to shoot the person in the back with those taser guns. I have seen my share of police brutality and even though this doesint actully hurt the person its still wrong, where are we in china? No where in the usa, which is supposbly called the "free country".