Meanwhile, in other emergency service news: a milestone has been reached in the United States. 500 people, most of them unarmed and unthreatening, have been killed* by police officers using Tasers:
According to data collected by Amnesty International, at least 500 people in the United States have died since 2001 after being shocked with Tasers either during their arrest or while in jail. Amnesty International recorded the largest number of deaths following the use of Tasers in California (92), followed by Florida (65), and Texas (37). The Oklahoma City Police Department led all law enforcement agencies in deaths (7) following by Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, Harris County Sheriff’s (Tx), Phoenix, Az and San Jose, Ca., all with six deaths.
On Monday, Johnnie Kamahi Warren was the latest to die after a police officer in Dothan, Al. deployed a Taser on him at least twice. The 43-year-old, who was unarmed and allegedly intoxicated, reportedly stopped breathing shortly after being shocked and was pronounced dead in a hospital less than two hours later.
Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that US cops are both more likely to use so-called “non-lethal force” than their British counterparts and that, again just for the sake of the assumption, that British police officers may be better trained than their American cousins. Assume all that, make all the allowances for scale or deaths-per-tasering you like and you still struggle to avoid concluding that sooner or later people in Britain are going to be killed by taser-wielding police officers. And the more forces that use Tasers the more people are likely to be killed.
So why are police forces across Britain purchasing more and more Tasers?
*Technically, have died when being tasered or shortly after being tasered. Taser does not normally, I think, appear on the death certificate. It is presumably a coincidence that all these people, with little in common save being tasered, should die shortly after being tasered.
UPDATE: Perhaps I should have checked this myself, but I’m grateful to Gemma Hallam for tweeting me to point out that British cops have already killed people with Tasers. There was a case in Barrow-in-Furness last year.
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