[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS : Is tasering appropriate when there is no violence threatenede? Officers tried to stop a man who stole a $300 headphone from a store, he ran through the parking lot toward the rear of the store. A police officer deployed his Taser, hitting him with one probe but he continued on, the […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Man tasered up to 20 times while handcuffed suffers multiple problems: Thomas Jason Smith, 27, shocked by police now shakes constantly, developed a hand twitch, endures back pain and has been having severe panic and anxiety attacks since the Taser incident in September, his mother said Thursday. Video shows he had been […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Criminal charges have resulted from tasering by three Albuquerque police officers. Only one officer is being charged. He charged with the others into an apartment where a suspoected drug-dealer was staying and starts firing his Taser at one of the men in the apartment, hitting him at least three times with the […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: This report rauses the question: Are some police officers more “apt to taser” than others? Two police officers under investigation over the death of Brazilian student Roberto Laudisio Curti had been at the scene of another Taser shooting in the area just hours beforehand, a court has heard. Marcello Jimenez , 27, […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Does “Excited delirium” exist? Coroners Inquiries into two men who died after being shot multiple times by police with a Taser have come down either side of the condition “excited delirium”, which has split the medical community worldwide. Interestingly, the coroner rejected TASER International’s researcher Donald Dawes, who argued that excited delirium […]
[[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: Professor Geoffrey Alpert, a U.S expert on police use of force responds to the damning findings of the New South Wales coroner into the death of Roberto Curti: “It turns out it’s a weapon of convenience as opposed to a weapon that is necessary” – “Rather than try to control someone with […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: When the police ask for extra weaponry in the struggle to defend our civil liberties, it’s time to start worrying. Last June the Police Federation wrote to the prime minister asking for the number of Tasers to be treble. The tasering of an elderly blind man who’d already suffered from two strokes […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: A series of four carefully-researched articles in the Poughkeepsie Journal based on data – 467 Taser use reports from 19 local police agencies – obtained through the Freedom of Information Law shows systematic taser abuse by police officers: (1) Blacks are targeted much more often than their numbers in communities would predict; […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS : An edited surveillance video of a police officer firing a Taser at a 14-year-old girl has been released as part of evidence for a federal lawsuit filed against the officer and the city of Allentown. She gets into a struggle with the police officer who than tasers her. She is later […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS : An intrepid North Carolina columnist finds his call to ban police use of tasers “is a lonely one”. He is accused of using inappropriate statistics; told that to avoid tasering “don’t live a high risk life style”; he himself didn’t do the homework on the taser. TASER Inc.’s communications director joined […]
[[SUMMARY /COMMENTS: UK police are turning increasingly to the tase: The use of Tasers by police has increased by an average of 130%. In 40 of the 43 forces in England and Wales reported to a survey, two-thirds of them had fired the weapon “significantly more” last year compared to the year before. Meanwhile London […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS : Detractors of tasers – we read on this police news site, with close links to TASER Inc. – often complain about its “so-called overuse”. This can only be determined by highly-skilled personnel (i.e., police) “incident recordings on a case-by-case basis” ùnd then you find “…in nearly all — if not all […]
[[SUMMARY /COMMENTS: Does a young man using a fake ID to get into a bar justify the use of a taser? Police say 20-yr-old James Roberts tried to escape after being busted for using a fake ID and the officers followed protocol. “That is authorized. If you chase somebody, an officer can get hurt, the […]
[[SUMMARY /COMMENTS: A clear case of the taser as an invitation for abuse and as a weapon of choice: Bystander calls police to say a man seemingly drunk had fallen off his bike; police arrive, see him cycling and pursue him with sirens blaring, yelling to stop. He doesn’t, and appears (to the police) to […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS : An Arkansas cop has been suspended after tasering a ten-year-old girl who repeatedly “screamed, kicked and resisted” when her mother attempted to get her to have a shower before bed. Officer Bradshaw wrote that the girl was “violently kicking and verbally combative”, and noted: “Her mother told me to tase her […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Israseli police currently have 150 tasers in their arsenal. Following complaints by demonstrators in Sheikh Jarrah – a predominantly Palestinian part of Jerusalem – protesting new Jewish settlements in the area, Israeli policve have been charged with repeated improper use of taser guns in dispersing protests. Questions have also been raised by […]