Less Lethal Issues in Law Enforcement with Capt. Greg Meyer (ret.)

The latest Amnesty International report on stun weapons

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In mid-December, Amnesty International issued its latest report, ‘Less than Lethal’?—The Use of Stun Weapons in US Law Enforcement. You can read the entire report here.

The report strongly advocates that law enforcement stop using electronic stun devices (like TASER and Stinger) except in situations where deadly force would be the next option. Not even the highly restrictive guidelines issued by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (currently being updated) or the Police Executive Research Forum (which badly need updating) are good enough for Amnesty International.

All in favor of leaving your firearm in its holster and pulling your Taser when you confront a threat of death or serious bodily injury, please raise your hand!

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Hello?

Hello?

Hmmm, no takers. How strange.

The idea that electronic weapons should be banned from the intermediate force levels is illogical. If adopted, this recommendation would lead to more incidents of death and serious injury to officers and suspects.

Without Amnesty saying so—probably because they have no idea what the dynamics of overcoming resistance and aggression are all about--the effect on the street would mean more baton use, more pepper spray use, more flashlight use, more neck restraint use, more police dog use, and—yes—more shootings.

Not that there is anything wrong with those tools, when properly used. But clearly the use of electronic weapons and their accompanying tactics have generally resulted in fewer and less severe injuries to officers and suspects than other tools and tactics in many situations when officers encounter resistance or aggression. (These issues have been discussed at length in previous articles published in this column since early 2006.)

There is not enough space in a single article to do a detailed rebuttal to the latest Amnesty International report. And I’ll generally leave it to the medical professionals to debate the many medical controversies mentioned in the report. But I’ll hit some highlights from a police point of view, and provide page-number references to the report when appropriate.

Amnesty spends a considerable portion of its report focusing on sudden in-custody deaths that occasionally occur after (but not necessarily because of) TASER use. The report documents 334 cases in slightly more than seven years in the United States (2001-2008), but also notes that “In most cases coroners or medical examiners have listed causes of death unrelated to the Taser.” Still, according to the report, in 40 cases it was found (see page 25 of the report) that “Taser shocks caused or contributed to the deceased’s fatal collapse, and in around a dozen other cases they could not rule this out.”

What is remarkable is that Amnesty also reports (see page 26) that the US Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has reported that from 2003 to 2005 “around 300 people a year died in police arrest-related incidents, excluding deaths from police use of firearms. . . . While the [BJS] report showed no apparent statistical change in the number of deaths nationwide after the introduction of Tasers, research indicates that many deaths in US police custody occur during police restraining procedures.”

So let’s use Amnesty’s numbers and do a little basic math.

Assume that the 300 custody deaths per year during arrest-related incidents is an accurate base number. If that’s correct, then over the seven-year, three-month period of Amnesty’s study (June 2001 through August 2008) there would be about 2,175 such deaths, and 334 of those (roughly one out of seven) occurred during incidents in which the TASER was used, according to the Amnesty report. If we accept the reported numbers from coroners and medical examiners that 52 of the cases were caused by Taser use, or that such use may have contributed to the death or otherwise could not be ruled out, then we have 52 cases out of 2,175 (one out of 42 cases, also known as “two percent”).

And what of the other more than 2,100 cases (i.e., 98 percent of the cases)? Amnesty wants us to believe that the TASER is such a big problem, but the report’s numbers only account for two percent of the arrest-related, custody-death problem. Amnesty wants us to believe that law enforcement restraint procedures are responsible for these deaths, and that electronic weapons are so bad that you shouldn’t use them unless you’re about to shoot the suspect.

The problem, of course, is that the extremely small percentages of persons who suddenly die in police custody are typically on drugs (like cocaine, methamphetamine, PCP, LSD) or they are schizophrenic or bipolar and off their medication (or they were never on medication). Amnesty goes to great lengths in its report to advise us to treat these people differently than anyone else that resists arrest or engages in aggressive/combative behavior. There is not a word in Amnesty’s report about the law enforcement officers who have been murdered or who have received crippling injuries at the hands of such suspects.

This is not to say that there have not been some troubling cases involving electronic weapons. A relative few people in various forms of medical crisis suddenly die in custody while resisting the police and being restrained who do not fit the stereotypical drug or mental cases. Dealing with people who are resisting arrest, exhibiting aggression, or completely flipped out is not a game that will have a perfect outcome in each and every case.

You are in a high-risk profession. Your training, experience, judgment, commitment to doing the right thing in difficult circumstances, and your professionalism are usually enough to get you through the day without some incident turning completely tragic. But not always.

It’s easy to poke a lot of holes in Amnesty’s report, and I could spend several days doing it.

It’s also easy to agree with some of what they have to say.

We can probably agree that electronic weapons should not be used on people who are handcuffed or otherwise restrained, absent assaultive behavior (although Amnesty would restrict such uses to when the threat is death or great bodily harm to you).

We ought to be able to agree that the modern thinking when dealing with subjects in excited delirium is to recognize that it is a medical emergency, and get paramedics rolling or get the person to an emergency room right away after restraint.

We ought to be able to agree that electronic weapons are preferably employed in the “dart” or “probe” mode (to try to achieve neuromuscular incapacitation) versus the “drive stun” mode (which is generally only good for pain compliance).

Surely we can all agree that no weapon or tactic, including electronic weapons, should be used as a torture device. Amnesty’s report mentions “torture” frequently, but for this purpose I focus on page 16, which reminds us that the Committee against Torture (CAT) of the United Nations issued a report in 2006 expressing concern about the use of electronic weapons by police. Of course, the Amnesty report failed to mention that the United Nations itself a few weeks later posted procurement request seeking to purchase TASER M-26 devices!

Amnesty throws us a few bones, occasionally acknowledging the difficult challenges you face on the street. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the report (see page 56):

Amnesty International recognizes the importance of law enforcement officials having a range of tools and options at their disposal in order to carry out their duties while minimizing the risk of injury to themselves or others.

The problem is that they don’t really seem to believe that!

What they repeatedly state that they believe in is taking away your electronic weapons, which will increase the use of tools and tactics that result in more injuries to you and your suspects than currently occur.