Tasers Are an Outrage We Must Resist

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.

He
didn't know what they wanted, but obeyed when they told him to approach
slowly. "I then had this incredible jolt of pain on the back of my
head," he explains. The electricity made him spasm; as he fell to the
ground, he felt his teeth scatter on the tarmac and his bowels open.
"Then they shot me again in the head. I can't describe the pain."
(Another victim says it is "like someone reached into my body to rip my
muscles apart with a fork.") The police then saw he was not the person
they were looking for, said he was free to go, and drove off.

This
did not happen in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or any other country notorious
for using electro-shock weapons. It happened in north London and, if
the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has her way, it will be coming soon
to a street near you. In Britain there are 3,000 police officers
trained to use Tasers as part of specialised armed response units, but
Smith has fired a jolt forward. She wants there to be 30,000
Taser-carrying officers, authorised to use them against unarmed
citizens, including children. These "stun-guns" fire small metal darts
into your skin, and through the trailing wires run an agonising
electric current through your body.

Smith is right to say that
the police face a growing threat of violence, and these heroic
frontline officers must have the means to defend themselves. She's also
right to argue it better to use a Taser than to use a gun. But the
police can already swiftly call out armed response teams, equipped with
Tasers and firearms. If we move beyond this to a widespread culture of
assault by electricity, it will only endanger the police - and the rest
of us.

Smith wants Tasers to be distributed well beyond the ranks
of specially trained firearms officers, but Tasers can kill. Amnesty
International has just published a report showing that, since 2001, 334
people have died in the US during or just after Tasering. Jarrel Gray
was a partially deaf 20-year-old black man involved in an argument in
the street in Frederick County, Maryland, when the police approached
him and ordered him to lie on the ground. He didn't hear them - so they
Tasered him. As he lay paralysed on the ground, they told him to show
his hands. He couldn't obey. They Tasered him again. Jarrel died in
hospital two hours later.

Ryan Rich was a 33-year-old medical
doctor who had an epileptic seizure while driving his car on a Nevada
highway. He crashed into the side of the road. The police smashed a
window to get into the car and Ryan woke up, startled. The police
officer reacted by Tasering him repeatedly. Only when they were
handcuffing him did they notice he was turning blue. He was dead before
he got to hospital. The coroner noted dryly that the Taser "probably
contributed" to his death. Taser International's brochures claim their
weapons have "no after-effects."

There may, in fact, be even more
deaths than are recorded. Taser International has responded to medical
examiners saying their weapons kill not by changing their weapons, but
by suing the medical examiners. After the chief medical examiner of
Summit Country, Ohio, ruled that Tasering caused the death of three
young men, they sued her, and she was forced to remove the conclusions
from her reports. The president of the National Association of Medical
Examiners says Taser International's behaviour is "dangerously close to
intimidation".

Yet Smith appears still to be taking the
corporate propaganda of Taser International - who dominate the
international stun-gun market - at face value. The company are
startlingly glib when their spiel begins to crumble. A recent
scientific study conducted by biomedical engineers for the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation found that nine per cent of the guns give a
far larger electric shock than advertised. Some sent a 58 per cent
higher voltage through the victim's body. Steve Tuttle, the
vice-president of Taser, responded: "Regardless of whether or not the
anomaly is accurate, it has no bearing on safety." The UK Defence
Scientific Advisory Council has warned there is research suggesting
that Tasers could cause "a serious cardiac event" when fired at
children. But still Smith won't compromise.

Everyday
on-the-beat policing does n0t happen in the tightly controlled
scenarios imagined by the Home Office. It is messy and scrappy and
carried out at high speed by people who are frightened and coursing
with adrenaline: some 90 per cent of Tasered people in the US are
unarmed. Matthew Fogg, who led a SWAT team in the US, warns that Tasers
create a culture where "if I don't like you, I can torture you".

If
we slip into that policing culture, mistrust and violence against
police officers can only increase. That's why so many senior police are
highly sceptical about Smith's plans, from the former head of the
Flying Squad, John O'Connor, to the former head of the West Midlands
Police, Barry Mason.

Far from lowering violence, Tasers seem to
lower the threshold that by which the police resort to violence - and
criminals respond by lowering theirs. In the US, a 16-year-old
schoolboy was Tasered by cops in a playground for "using profanity"; a
dementia-riddled man in his eighties was shocked for urinating in the
park; 50,000 volts were fired at a 17-year-old boy who had fallen off
an overpass and broken his back.

The Metropolitan Police have
said they won't participate in Smith's Taser roll-out because they know
it'll be particularly disastrous for relations with black and Asian
communities. In the US, only 18 per cent of Tasered people are white.
Imagine if the boys in Brixton and Moss Side weren't just been
stopped-and-searched - which creates enough grievance - but apprehended
in this way. How many Taser attacks would have to make it onto YouTube
before we have riots?

Daniel Sylvester still has nightmares about
what happened to him. If we don't stop Jacqui Smith, many more British
people will be joining him - and we will all be in for a shock.