[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS : Ottawa police say they welcome the province’s decision to allow police forces to come up with their own rules about which officers can use Tasers. Police chiefs have been advocating for the expanded use of Tasers for years. Tasers have been in use in Ottawa for several years and they are […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS : An editoral in “Canada’s leading paper” calls Ontario’s wish to put tasers in the hands of front-line police officers “spectacularly ill-timed”. The taser would not have been used to control knife-wielding 18-year-old named Sammy Yatim, who was shot and then tasred a month ago. The killing of Sammy Yatim has created […]
[[Summary / Comments: Tasered-then-died … The police tasered Victor Duffy Jr., a mentally ill man, who was off his medications one day last summer. Mr Duffy dad called 911 to report a missing telephone charger. When police arived, he was on the front porch, holding a golf club. He failed to put it down when […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENT. Tom Costello, the attorney representing the family of the victim, remains incredulous that the state trooper who tasered unarmed Macadam Mason, in clear psychiatric distress (following epileptic seizures), and on his own grounds with his girl-friend asking them to keep back is be cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, despite the autopsy of […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Is TASER International the world’s greatest corporation? The Police are told “Yes”. The influential PoliceOne website chief editor argues that CEO Rick Smith is probably finer than Apple’s Steve Jobs. The differences are that Mr Smith is easier to relate to, less secretive and “TASER is laser-focused (pun intended) on protecting life […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: The police adulation of the taser reaches almost orgasmic proportions in this article by the influential editor of the PoliceOne website: How long does the experience last? he asks. “The answer is that the TASER Experience is not about time, it’s about totality. It’s about completeness. It’s about ubergeek terms like “end-to-end […]
[[Summary / Comments: 50-year-old Angela Jones is stopped by the police at a traffic check: She refuses to hand them her purse and is tasered three times, subsequently going into cardiac arrest. She survived. All this can be seern on the police-car mounted video (40 min.) available at this site. Heart surgeon Dr. Kathy Magliato, […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Following two coroner’s reports on deaths following tasering, a leading figure in the Human Rights Law Centre argues for the urgent need for more rigorous police training and more stringent regulatio In the report on Brazilian student Roberto Curti, the coroner likened the police to “schoolboys in Lord of the Flies” and […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Police officer claims he lacked adequate training – but this argument was rejected by the judge. Justin Shekleton, 33, said he fell and struck his head when he was tasered by a deputy, after he shifted his weight while talking with the sheriff’s deputy in September 2008. Chickasaw County has settled a […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: For the past three years, outside consultants, Portland’s city auditor, federal juries and a citizens’ oversight panel have sent the same message to Portland police: rein in officers’ use of the Taser stun gun and limit the cycles of electrical shock that officers can fire. All to no avail: Instead, the chief […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: legal, nonlethal Tasings are bad even if critics focus on deaths …They make for more pain and danger and fear in the world, and it’s all our own fault. The law-and-order crowd love them, of course; Tasers hurt people terribly and invite sadistic abuse. Tasing causes hideous pain, pain that rises to […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENT: 39-year-old Macadam Mason, who died minutes after he was tasered by Senior Trooper David Schaffer, was an epileptic – and told the police before they tasered him. Police were called to the home after Mason made comments about suicide and threatened to hurt others in the process. “He was unarmed, he had […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENT: Thirty-nine year-old Macadam Mason of Waterbury, Vermont, died following the use of a taser, supposedly to prevent an attempted suicide. According to a police spokesperson, a trooper feared “bodily injury” during his confrontation with Mason and fired his Taser once at the unarmed man’s chest. The five-second jolt dropped Mason to the […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENT: This certainly lays claim to abusive use of the taser: A St. George police officer used a stun gun on a naked, disoriented 80-year-old who reportedly threatened police with a metal walking cane. … when one of his officers attempted to take away the woman’s cane, she began swinging it at the […]
[[Summary / Comments: On November 13 2011, unarmed 45-year-old Darrin Hanna died a week after he was tasered multiple times as the Chicago police responded to domestic violence call. The police claim that their stun guns were only used two or three times, an autopsy identified 11 Taser scars on Hanna’s back. The seven police […]
USA – Police website: “Special protocol for ExDS [“Excited Delirium”] response is valuable liability shield [Tasers appropriate in this context]” (2102-04-12) [[SUMMARY / COMMENT. The PoliceOne.com website informs US police officers that “the symptoms and dangers of excited delirium” – mysteriously labelled ExDS, as if this makes it sound more scientific – “now well-publicized and […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENT: Another tasered-then-died victim. Bobby Louis Merrill Jr., 38, of Saginaw died after a stun gun was used on him during an altercation with police folowing a report of “a man running into traffic and jumping onto cars.” The tasers appeared to have no affect on Mr Merrill”, who showed “symptoms of going […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENT : Victim tasered in heart despite health warnings. In October 2010 Police intervened with an agitated 25-year-old Vietnamese student, Thinh Ba Le. Within 40 seconds he had been shot with a stun gun and handcuffed. Minutes later he was dead. The coroner decided the police “acted well” but the role the Taser […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENT : Numerous professional errors were made in the events leading up to the death of Australia’s latest taser victim, 21-yr-old Brazilian Roberto Laudisio Curti: the taser was used against a man running away, without a weapon, was tasered a second time after he was brought to the ground by 5 police officers,a […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Unlike most of the other states in Australia, Tasmania has not provided its police with tasers, despite the Tasmania’s Police Association’s repeated call for the weapons to be approved. “As far as we’re concerned, every other jurisdiction in Australia and the world has them,” Police Association acting president Robbie Dunn said yesterday […]