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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 9:55 pm
Time: 9:55 pm
Results for tasers (new york city)
1 results foundAuthor: Stoughton, Corey Title: Taking Tasers Seriously: The Need for Better Regulation of Stun Guns in New York Summary: Tasers or “stun guns,” deliver up to 50,000 volts of electricity intended to incapacitate their victims. Long lauded as safer alternatives to deadly force, Tasers are in use by 16,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S.—including 350 in New York State—and have been linked with hundreds of deaths. More than a dozen New Yorkers have died after Taser shocks, some in police custody and others with mental illness whose families turned to law enforcement for help, only to suffer mortal loss. Since February 2004, news reports have documented five deaths after Taser shocks in Suffolk County alone. Scores more across the state have been hurt or humiliated when officers, lacking consistent guidelines and thorough training, deployed Tasers inappropriately. To better identify and understand patterns of Taser use in New York State, the New York Civil Liberties Union analyzed 851 Taser incident reports from eight departments across the state as well as 10 departments’ guidelines for Taser use, obtained through the state Freedom of Information Law and public sources. These records show that officers misuse and overuse these weapons, resorting directly to Tasers rather than less intrusive police tactics to calm, subdue or arrest people they encounter. They also suggest a lack of awareness of the risks of multiple, prolonged shocks; of the particular danger Tasers pose to vulnerable populations; and of the need to avoid sensitive areas of the body, including the chest. While some studies tout the benefits of Tasers as a tool for law enforcement, the absence of sound policy, training and guidelines to direct the powerful weapons’ proper, lawful use contributes to this disturbing pattern of misuse and overuse and puts the state’s residents and visitors at unnecessary and unjustifiable risk. The NYCLU’s analysis found: Nearly 60 percent of reported Taser incidents did not meet expertrecommended criteria for justifying Taser use—criteria that limit the weapon’s use to situations where law enforcement officers can document active aggression or a risk of physical injury. Fifteen percent of incident reports indicated clearly inappropriate Taser use, such as officers shocking people who were merely passively or verbally noncompliant with a police order, or where a suspect was already handcuffed or restrained. Only 15 percent of documented Taser incidents involved people who were armed or who were thought to be armed, belying the myth that Tasers are most frequently used as an alternative to deadly force. More than one-third of Taser incidents involved multiple or prolonged Taser shocks, which experts link to an increased risk of injury and death. More than 1 in 4 (27 percent) of Taser incidents involved shocks directly to subjects’ chest area, despite explicit 2009 guidelines by the weapon’s manufacturer instructing users to avoid firing Tasers at the chest area, citing a risk of “potential cardiac consequences. In 75 percent of incidents, no verbal warnings were reported, despite expert recommendations that verbal warnings precede Taser firings. Half of the jurisdictions surveyed do not, in fact, require officers to issue verbal warnings. Forty percent of the Taser incidents analyzed involved at-risk subjects. Taser experts caution against Taser use on children, the elderly, the visibly infirm and individuals who are seriously intoxicated or mentally ill — “the very individuals” most likely to be in contact with police, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Of these incidents, 30 percent involved situations where officers were called to assist with a mentally disturbed individual with no indication or suggestion of criminal activity. People of color are overwhelmingly represented in Taser incidents. Of all incidents in which race was recorded, 58 percent involved black or Latino New Yorkers. In Albany, where 28 percent of the population is black, 68 percent of Taser incidents involved black subjects; similar disproportionalities were evident in Syracuse and Rochester. As the NYCLU’s analysis demonstrates, these problems are directly linked to the fact that use-of-force policies governing the use of Tasers lack consistency and, with the exception of the NYPD, do not comply with the recommendations of national law enforcement experts that have developed model policies for Taser use. Moreover, seven of the eight jurisdictions surveyed by the NYCLU analysis appear to rely exclusively on training materials provided by TASER International, the weapon’s manufacturer—an approach that experts widely condemn as inadequate preparation for crucial decisions in the field. In addition to these fundamental flaws in policy and training, law enforcement agencies are not doing enough to monitor and supervise the use of Tasers in the field. The incident reports obtained by the NYCLU showed grossly inconsistent and incomplete record-keeping, a significant obstacle to accountability and proper assessment of the risks and rewards of Tasers. Defining and practicing the “appropriate use” of Tasers remains the outstanding challenge in the effort to ensure that Tasers do not cause more harm than good. Accordingly, the NYCLU recommends the following: 1. New York State law enforcement agencies must reform use-of-force polices and Taser training programs to comply with nationally recognized expert guidelines, such as the guidelines created by the United States Department of Justice and the Police Executive Research Forum. 2. The State of New York must play an active role in promoting and achieving universal adoption of these expert-recommended policies and guidelines, and in ensuring that local agencies coordinate their Taser policies and training programs. 3. The State of New York and local law enforcement agencies must require accurate, complete reporting and robust monitoring of Taser use. Such reporting should be made available to the elected officials responsible for oversight of law enforcement agencies and to the citizens whose taxes support them. Details: New York: New York Civil Liberties Union, 2011. 40p. Source: Internet Resource: accessed October 2, 2011 at: http://www.nyclu.org/files/publications/nyclu_TaserFinal.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.nyclu.org/files/publications/nyclu_TaserFinal.pdf Shelf Number: 123072 Keywords: Non-lethal WeaponsPolice Use of ForceStun GunsTasers (New York City) |