January 2023 - “Rethinking Tasers"

It’s not clear why 31-year-old high school teacher and father Keenan Anderson fled from Los Angeles police officers. He had been taken into custody after a traffic accident. Did he know that ten percent of killings by police start with a traffic incident?  Did the recent deaths of Black men and women in police custody lead him to  panic? Perhaps he thought about the tragic fates of Patrick Lyoya, Daunte Wright, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile.  
 
Whatever compelled Anderson to run, he didn’t deserve to be tased for 30 seconds straight, which is a long time to have 50,000 volts coursing through your body. He begged for help as multiple officers pinned him down. While the electricity wracked his body he repeated “help me” over and over.  His cousin, Patrisse Cullors, who co-founded Black Lives Matter a decade ago, pointed out the obvious: “It was a traffic accident. Instead of treating him like a potential criminal, police should have called the ambulance.” Instead, her cousin died from cardiac arrest about four hours later.
 
Some argue that tasers, and other forms of physical coercion, are simply “necessary” parts of police procedure – that the deaths are unfortunate secondary outcomes. I see some parallels with how deadly force was excused in slave culture as “necessary correction.” While some laws protected the lives of enslaved people, they were rarely enforced. According to Philip Schwarz in The Shape of the Shackles, “Masters who killed slaves while correcting them…would be exempt from prosecution.”
 
Even in the context of the horror of slavery, it’s disturbing to read  how what is clearly murder is framed as “nothing more than ordinary domestic discipline.”  Legal cover was given for such murders, as in 1705, when the Virginia General Assembly made the following obscene declaration: "If any slave resist his master...correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction...the master shall be free of all punishment...as if such accident never happened."

Will we allow tasers to be used without appropriate accountability? Originally, when tasers were introduced in 1974, they were intended to reduce police violence. They were marketed as “less lethal” than guns. Recent research in San Francisco (2008) and Chicago (2021), however, suggests that stun guns don’t reduce fatalities. Police were using tasers when they previously would have used no weapon. As a result, according to Amnesty International, since 2001, more than 250 Americans have died after being tased by police. Reuters cited four times that, claiming 1,000 deaths associated with being victimized by tasers.

Finally, sadly, but not surprisingly, there’s evidence that tasers cause disproportionate harm to people of color. Reuters (2020) indicated that out of the 1,081 cases of death via taser, at least 32% of those who died were Black folk.  In the United Kingdom, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (2022) concluded that while only about 29% of white people were tased for more than five seconds, people of color were tased twice as long.  60% of people of color are shocked for a prolonged time. This contributes to making Black men 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police, according to Lynne Peeples in the June 2020 edition of Nature.
 
Two weeks after Anderson’s death last month, Darryl Williams died after being tased by Raleigh, NC, police. He pleaded for them to stop, saying he had a heart condition. At least the six officers involved have been placed on administrative leave and are under investigation. But what we need is more systemic change. Amnesty International is right in proclaiming, “We need concrete steps to eradicate racist police use of Tasers….”
 
Further Action
 
1) Support organizations financially, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, who are managing to get the data necessary to launch strong campaigns to decrease irresponsible use of tasers. The ACLU of Michigan has obtained police reports through the Freedom of Information Act resulting in this important study: Standards for Stun Guns: A Call for Uniform Regulations for Tasers in Michigan. It documented “inconsistent departmental standards for use of tasers, non-compliance with departmental standards, non-compliance with industry standards, and perceived racial discrimination in the use of tasers.”
 
2) Share this report, Catch & Stun, which outlines the use of tasers on children and youth. Let the Annie E. Casey Foundation know that you support their funding of such initiatives.
 
3) Demand that police departments share information about deaths in police custody and use of weapons. Those who resist reform often point out that data is inconclusive about the need for reform. That is, however, because a lack of transparency prevents adequate analysis by independent organizations and researchers.  Consider supporting organizations working to make transparency mandatory, such as these organizations in Chicago’s Invisible Institute currently using it’s Citizens Police Data Project to get information to the public.