Taser Usage With Law Officers

Taser Usage with Law Officers Responding to a Disturbance Call

Imagine if someone gets into an argument with someone else and the police are called. When the police arrive the person’s adrenaline is pumping and on top of that they are angry. At the same time they are trying to talk to the officer; the officer keeps telling them to calm down which they are trying to do. All of a sudden the officer shocks them with his taser. They become stiff has a board and fall forward. Now was it really necessary for the officer to use his taser? The taser gun causes no long term health damages, but that should not be taken as a green light for police to use them without an adequate reason.

A taser gun is a weapon that has two probes that penetrate into the skin and delivering a 50,000 volt shock to the body for five seconds. The shocks send electricity into your muscles causing them to pulsate 19 times harder per second. The current from a taser shock is dispersed through the body rather than running into the heart (Berenson 1). During these five seconds, you are unable to move and become “stiff as a board” and fall either forwards or backwards. Within a minute your body should be back to normal without any long lasting side effects. Critics say the weapon is ripe for abuse because the shock leaves no obvious mark, other than a small dot that looks like a bee sting.

Being shocked by a Taser gun is definitely better than being killed but tasers are not necessarily an acceptable replacement when being used aggressively. There have been many cases and stories reported where people are shocked by a taser gun multiple times. It is completely unnecessary to be shocked multiple times. According to Officer McClelland, from the Waterloo Police Department, it all goes back to the training each officer receives. Each department should have very strict and clear guidelines on when a tasers gun should be used. If adequately trained, an officer should know that one shock from a taser is enough. He compares tasing someone over and over to hitting someone over and over. He doesn’t feel there is a difference (McClelland 2).

The police and other supporters of the taser guns also say that they have built-in safeguards to prevent abuse of the guns. Each taser is battery powered and has a data port that records each shock and is used by police departments when they prepare incident reports, allowing supervisors to count how many times a taser gun was fired. Police can not deny that a misguided officer could abuse any weapon. But there are many instances where police have used the taser gun in place of their fists, nightsticks, pepper spray or guns, which could have a much longer and larger effects than the taser shocks (Kershaw 3).

Tasers are being used all over the country. Estimated 4,000 police departments are now using them and roughly 170 new departments are buying taser guns every month. Even the Army has begun using them in Iraq, according to Taser International, the Arizona company that makes them (Kershaw 1). The taser is another form of fear in the community due to the chance of over reaction and abuse by police officers. Citizens have been tased during traffic stops. Police must realize the impact of tasing a citizen is the same as pulling a gun.

Studies conducted by multiple national and military groups produce multiple results ranging from good to bad. An independent academic study found that tasers do not cause heart rhythm disturbances when used for short periods of time on healthy adults (Berenson 1). However, Dr. Ted Chan, the lead investigator on the report and an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Diego, said that the study’s results were preliminary and that much more research was needed (Berenson 1).

A Wisconsin scientist conducted a study to see what an affect taser guns had on a healthy pig’s heart, whose hearts are similar to those in humans. According to his study, the shocks from the tasers cause the hearts to stop beating (Berenson). Victims of tasers may not die immediately but hours or days later. While most taser shocks land too far from the heart to be lethal, probes that penetrate the spaces between the ribs that surround the heart may have the potential to cause electrocution, according to Dr. Webster, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin (Berenson 2). Regulations must be put into place to avoid loss of life and abuse by police.

Some cardiologists and neuroscientists are less confident in the safety of the taser gun. “I don’t think we can say tasers are completely safe,” says Dr. Zian Tseng, assistant professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. “We are seeing a finite number of tasered suspects dying suddenly, and unless you have a cardiac monitor right over them, you can’t prove or disprove causes of immediate death” (Porges 1). Amnesty International has documented more than 270 deaths in the U.S. following the use of tasers since 2001. There of course is no documentation that the deaths per caused by the taser. Obviously, tasers have been used thousands of times without incident, but 270 is a significant number. Some people say tasers should be more of an alternative to a gun and should be used only at that high end. Some police departments use the taser gun that way but others put them at the low end, using them instead of pepper spray.

Before officers began carrying tasers, they would take time to talk and reason with people. Now it seems the first time someone resists an officers orders, the taser gets used. While the vast majority of law enforcement personnel are cautious of using a taser; some have taken it too far. Using a taser in an unwarranted situation only causes distrust and fear in the community. Private citizens must feel they can