The maker of Taser stun guns is advising
police officers to avoid shooting suspects in the chest with the
50,000-volt weapon, saying that it could pose an extremely low risk of
an "adverse cardiac event."
The advisory, issued in an Oct. 12 training bulletin, is the first time that Taser International has suggested there is any risk of a cardiac arrest related to the discharge of its stun gun.
No longer the stuff of disturbing
futuristic fantasies, an arsenal of "crowd control munitions,"
including one that reportedly made its debut in the U.S., was deployed
with a massive, overpowering police presence in Pittsburgh during last
week's G-20 protests.
Nearly 200 arrests were made and civil liberties groups charged the
many thousands of police (most transported on Port Authority buses
displaying "PITTSBURGH WELCOMES THE WORLD"), from as far away as
Arizona and Florida with overreacting...and they had plenty of weaponry
with which to do it.
Like Glenn, I write a lot about civil liberties, which have been at the heart of the national conversation since the beginning of the War On Terror and the expansion of the national security state. But my interest in civil liberties predates 9/11 and until then was usually pointed at the far more prosaic issues of police and prosecutorial misconduct (and the inevitable conclusions any study of those things brings to the issue of the death penalty).
MOBILE, Ala. - Officers who used pepper spray and a Taser to remove a man from a store bathroom found out only later he was deaf and mentally disabled and didn't understand they wanted him to open the door, police said Tuesday.
A spokesman for the Mobile Police Department said the officers' actions were justified because the man was armed with a potential weapon -- an umbrella.
But relatives of Antonio Love, 37, have asked for a formal investigation and said they plan to sue both the police and the store.
OTTAWA - The RCMP complaints commissioner says the Mounties should be more careful about using stun guns on young people and the mentally ill.
In a final report on RCMP Taser use last year, Paul Kennedy also says the force's tracking and analysis of incidents still needs improvement.
The findings come 10 months after Kennedy, chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, called on the police force to rein in Taser use and better monitor how officers use the potent device.
[Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.]
On paper, every session looked like gold to me. Technology and the Warfighter. Neuroscience and Its Potential Applications. Lethality Technologies. Autonomous/Unmanned Systems. (Robots!)
Daniel Sylvester can't forget the night the police fired 50,000
volts of electricity into his skull. The 46-year-old grandfather owns
his own security business, and he was recently walking down the street
when a police van screeched up to him.
LONDON - Amnesty International warned Tuesday against a proliferation of Taser stun guns, saying they were responsible for dozens of deaths in the United States and should only be used in extreme cases.
In a report entitled "'Less than lethal?' The use of stun weapons in US law enforcement," the London-based human rights group urged governments to either limit their deployment to life-threatening situations or to suspend their use.
Industry claims that so-called "Conducted Energy Devices" are safe and non-lethal do not stand up to scrutiny, it said.
A new study shows that some Taser stun guns can deliver a much
bigger jolt of electricity than the manufacturer says is possible and
could increase the risk of cardiac arrest by as much as half in some
people.
The study done by researchers commissioned by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corp. also concluded that even stun guns firing at
expected electrical levels carry some risk of inducing cardiac arrest
in some people.
