I guess this ensures full employment for Radley Balko for a couple more years:
Controversial electroshock weaponeer Taser International is quickly building up it arsenal. But the results from the safety and field tests of that new gear – well, that’s coming along much more slowly.
The firm recently made available a shocking XREP shotgun projectile. It also introduced a new specialist shotgun (pictured) optimized for the XREP and other ‘”less lethal” rounds. And then there’s the ghastly teaser campaign for the company’s forthcoming “X3.”
Danger Room looked at XREP –- eXtended Range Electronic Projectile -– before its big launch last year. The original work was carried out for the Marine Corps, which was looking for a less-lethal weapon for clearing buildings. XREP packages a complete Taser system including power supply in a 12-gauge shotgun round with a range of 100 feet. On striking, it inflicts a 20-second Taser shock cycle via some clever electrodes, immobilizing the target.
Excellent.
Mr. Poppinfresh
Tazers, without meaningful reform of the asshole protection racket that modern policing has become, are no less lethal than anything else.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Dziekański_Taser_incident
Punchy
WTF does this phraseology mean? Does this make you less dead?
Crashman06
Digby too.
Bob In Pacifica
In California the cops can’t tell the difference between their guns and their tasers and end up shooting suspects in non-lethal situations.
Duh! Whoops!
The Moar You Know
Hooray!!! Legalized torture!
The Grand Panjandrum
Oh goody. MORE militarized police departments.
The Moar You Know
@Bob In Pacifica: If you think that Mehserle didn’t know which weapon he pulled out, I have a nice orange bridge to sell you.
NutellaonToast
These weapons would all be great if they were used smart. They’re just as good at stopping an imminent threat but much less lethal.
Unfortunately, cops think of them as “non-lethal” and so use them against any random fuck who refuses to leave the auditorium. I hate cops.
kay
@Mr. Poppinfresh:
I don’t understand how the acceptance of tasering happened. Are people this stupid? How is this any different than beating the shit out of someone to subdue them?
Because it doesn’t leave a mark? If I can work a way to render someone who isn’t even arrested yet unconscious and helpless yet don’t leave blood it’s a-ok and I can do it all over the country, thousands of times, day after day, with no review other than the personal discretion of the officer? Since when?
The first demonstration I saw I knew this was a horrible idea, and I was listening to the people seated around me joking about it.
NutellaonToast
@Punchy:
Um, it means it kills you less often. Did you really not know that?
malraux
I really dislike the idea, but as near as I can tell, any cop using a taser frivolously should be treated by citizens as though he were randomly firing a gun into a crowd. Using a taser when someone is slow to get out their drivers license or is verbally abusive but compliant is little different than firing a warning shot or two towards the person. You probably won’t do lasting damage, but there’s a not insignificant risk that you will kill them.
linda
and how about that smaller one being developed (in pink!) for the ladies a couple of years back…
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1535826020070815?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews&rpc=22&sp=true
kay
@malraux:
It’s very different than firing a warning shot. It hurts. A lot. It renders you helpless, which is a complete loss of personal autonomy, and a powerful lasting lesson about questioning an arrest.
Irrelevant,YetPoignant
As one who has had police officers point loaded firearms at me (twice, now), I would have rather had them pointing tasers – even if that would have meant that there was a higher probability of them pulling the trigger.
This is just reasoning from personal anecdote, of course, not based on data, and I am young(ish) and healthy (so tasers are less of a mortal threat than if I were older, or had heart issues), and an over reliance on “less than lethal” measures would probably greatly increase unnecessary trigger happiness, leading to abuse – but I still feel that anything that reduces the number of police shootings, with guns, firing chunks of metal into people’s bodies at very high velocities, is a net positive.
SpotWeld
It’s the new “shooting guns from their hands”
In 70s and 80s cops shows you’d frequently have the main character hero cop save the situation by shooting the gun or knife from the bad guy’s hand, saving the day etc. etc .etc
The main reason you saw it on TV was it was a “family friendly” way of letting the hero shoot the bad guy without going into bloody violence.
Of course that is utter baloney.
Tasers are now showing up as the new version of that same baloney.
And somehow, were every cop and corrections officers knew that shooting a gun from someone’s hand was total BS, the idea that tasers are just “mostly harmless” is really getting ingrained out there in reality too.
I’m really afraid that the small number of officers that are shown using tasers excessive are the same ones who were using guns as little signs that say “Do what I tell you” instead of tools that cause grievous bodily harm. (Only now the targets of thier attention are more likely to live?)
kay
@linda:
I’ll make a prediction. Tasers will be outlawed in ten years, and committees will be formed to try and figure out what mass hysteria prompted their introduction.
There will be a critical mass of people who have actually been tasered, or had a relative tasered, and some of those people will be powerful.
The Raven
“Irrelevant,” they don’t point Tasers, they just use them. It’s “non-lethal,” must be OK.
Less food for corvids, sigh.
Bertie Wooster
Awesome. We’ve had cops in Houston carrying tasers for a few years now, and the studies indicate that they are used more or less indiscriminately, and for punitive rather than defensive purposes. Since they’re “non-lethal”, the threshold for deadly force doesn’t apply. Deadly force doctrine at least somewhat (this is Houston) restrained officers from opening fire.
Now if you mouth off or strike them as a DFH, they taze you. Sometimes repeatedly.
Now it will come with the force of a 12-gauge blast. I can’t wait.
inkadu
If tazing is just a harmless way to stun someone into immobility, I am sure cops won’t mind if I find out what streets they walk down off duty and taze them in the back a few times. I am sure the fines would be equivalent to that for throwing a water balloon.
kay
@Bertie Wooster:
The city closest to me had a series of taser deaths. They responded with a new rule: if a police officer discharged a taser, he had to take the tasered individual to the emergency room, and have him medically cleared. It took hours. They were sitting in the emergency room, waiting.
Taser usage dropped dramatically. Tell me again how it’s only used when the police officer or others are in imminent danger.
kay
@Bertie Wooster:
There are going to have to be lawsuits, and dead people who were stopped without cause, and tearful testimony from parents in front of state legislatures. Hell, we may have to taser everyone, just so they finally, finally come to their senses.
What scares me is the industry that’s growing up around this insanity.
There will be lobbyists, and a profit motive.
Bertie Wooster
@Kay
I like that rule. We should apply it here.
We’ve had incidents of officers repeatedly tazing individuals in their cell, then just leaving them twitching. Inevitably a few died. The Houston Press did a great expose that everyone should read whose town is about to roll out the tasers.
Thanks for that tidbit. I know someone who can raise it with our councilman.
Comrade Dread
While I appreciate the theory behind creating weapons that are less likely to kill people they are employed against, in practice, I think it makes it far more likely for a$$hole cops to shoot first and make up a story with their buddies/accomplices that they tried to talk to you first later.
Bertie Wooster
@Kay
I like that rule. We should apply it here.
We’ve had incidents of officers repeatedly tazing individuals in their cell, then just leaving them twitching. Inevitably a few died. The Houston Press did a great expose that everyone should read whose town is about to roll out the tasers.
Thanks for that tidbit. I know someone who can propose it to our councilman.
General Winfield Stuck
Can they do math, cure cancer, educate dumb cops?
Dennis-SGMM
@kay:
My small town hasn’t had any taser deaths, possibly because the PD put that same policy in place when its officers began carrying tasers. The arresting officer must take a tasered suspect to the ER immediately after securing the suspect.
Emma Anne
@Irrelevant,YetPoignant:
The problem with your argument is that tazers are used way more often than chunks of metal are fired into people’s bodies. Tazers may be lethal less often per use, but if they are used more just as many people may die.
We had a guy die in a field near our house from tazing. It was a few years ago, but IIRC, he was running from the police after they caught him with marijuana. This guy would not have been shot without tazers. He wouldn’t be dead.
The Raven
Doesn’t the growth of Taser, Inc. parallel the early growth of the modern firearms industry? The claims about how good the weapons are, and how everyone should have one? Only, kraw, the firearms mostly sold to armies; convulsers (Tasers) are mostly sold to police forces. Perhaps you hominids need to turn this critique around and ask questions about the widespread use and marketing of firearms.
Krawk!
malraux
Umm, tasers are chunks of metal fired into people’s bodies. Its much lower speeds, but still.
El Bandito Blancito
Sweet Jesus. When I was “voluntold” to be a Taser guinea pig, that was with a five-second shock cycle (what the cops use now). It was absolutely the longest 5 seconds of my life.
The Raven
Violence with less death (maybe.) Guess that makes it OK, by hominid lights. Krawk!
gex
Remember kids, Tasers are “safe” if used on a normal, healthy human. Unfortunately, as someone who is 5′ tall, the use of normal people for safety testing leaves me out of the loop (air bags are a danger to me rather than a safety device). And thanks to the ever increasing rolls of the uninsured in this country, that leaves Tasers safe for a subset of Americans. Never mind that this subset of Americans is probably the least likely to get confronted with a Tase-happy cop gone wild.
MNPundit
This is why whenever the criminal beat up on the cops I don’t feel sad and a part of me smiles nastily.
The police departments are full of fascist wannabees and ordinary citizens can never beat them.
El Bandito Blancito
Also,
“The police departments are full of fascist wannabees and ordinary citizens can never beat them.”
MN Pundit, I don’t know what this means, but it is the most insane shit I have read from a commenter not named Atanjaurat or Brick Oven Bill.
IndieTarheel
@Punchy: “mostly dead” is the phrase that comes to mind here.
The Raven
This isn’t actually true; they are safe provided the involuntary muscle spams the convulser induces don’t make the target fall, or bang into something. They could break something, like, say, their neck.
A la lanterne les aristos!
The cops are a problem, but the other half of the problem is the public perception of tasing as basically a harmless slap on the wrist.
Even in my circle of liberal, anti-authoritarian friends I was practically the only one who didn’t find the ‘don’t tase me bro’ video just hilarious.
Throwin Stones
Forced compliance through electroshock with a slight chance of death.
No one could have foreseen a problem with this line of thinking.
Interrobang
Tasers are making inroads here in Soviet Canuckistan as well — the RCMP in Vancouver tasered a guy to death in the airport for the heinous crime of walking three steps toward them while agitated. (When they said “The Mounties always get their man,” I didn’t think that meant lethally.)
If I ever get stopped by a cop with a Taser, I’m going to have to be the world’s most compliant person, because I’m terrified of tasers — given the nature of my disability and how I’ve reacted to electric shocks in the past, I’m fairly sure being tasered would kill me.
Thanks, Taser International, for taking away my constitutional rights in a law-enforcement context, since I can be fairly sure a Canadian cop woudn’t shoot me randomly for mouthing off, but courtesy of your wonderful less-lethal technology, I now get to face the choice, mouth off and maybe die, or shut up and do what I’m told! I’m so grateful to you for making it so abundantly clear to me, that Constable Friendly is my friend…whether I want hir to be, or not…
Blue Raven
@The Raven:
Yeah. We don’t get no respect.
The Raven
Blue Raven, #40: Krawk!
Wakefield Tolbert
All these mumblings elsewhere about the majesty of using government force and power to get social deeds done, but when some recalcitrant punk spits on you, or, alternately, has you chase his sorry dope-addled arse 180 miles across the byways of America, and somehow can’t manage to get his Baron von Motorschport shiney 22″ rims to cool down, the choices are apparently to be a bangstick to the nuts or a pulled Glock.
Perhaps some feel American cops are to just barehand every threat that comes their way from punks. I guess the playing field needs to be level. That would be the utlimate in social justice. A denuded citizenry that is gun free (or so liberals say should be the case) and a denuded government that is to avoid offending the wondrous ways of Allah overseas, should have no problem with a castrated police force.
Do any of you know how much crap cops go through in so much as a football game turned sour in some districts? Their patience is tested daily and in some cases in legendary fashion.
Someone said “I hate cops.”
Well, um…that “fo dam shore”, buddy. But the rules be the dem rules, child.
Many on this site no doubt do hate cops. Likely, few sites have as many people told to knock it the hell off by an officer as this one.
But I’ve always found it interesting that, elsewhere, the use of force advocated by the Lefter side of the aisle is just par for the course when it comes to those numerous “bitskrieg” rules and regulations that liberals have bequeathed to us that it takes tweezers to dissect and a walk on eggshells to avoid upsetting the myrmidons of the modern State.
Then it’s time to crack some skulls. Monetarily, in most cases, yes. But I’ll take a bruised head over a bruised bank account.