Headline O’ the Day: Taser-time
by digby
So LAPD is saying that tasers don’t work very well necessitating a resort to firearms. They used to work but now they don’t and so they have no choice but to shoot unarmed suspects. And because they don’t work officers no longer like to use them and instead are turning to their guns out of fear for their lives from these unarmed suspects.
Weirdly, one of their primary complaints is that the taser won’t work on the suspect who then grabs it and turns it on the officer who is left incapacitated. This could happen if the dart don’t deploy at all and then do deploy in the hands of the suspect so it’s possible. But it’s not likely to be something tht could happen very often.
All of this may be true. Maybe Taser is making a lot of defective weapons these days and LAPD is using a new model that might not work as well. But sadly, considering everything we know about how modern policing works, this seems a likely explanation in at least some of these cases:
Dan Stormer, an attorney representing Keunang’s family in their wrongful death lawsuit, was skeptical that the problems with Tasers are so widespread. He said he believed officers blame the devices when explaining later why they fired their guns.
“I think it is often used as an excuse for police officers who become panicked and go to lethal force rather than wait for the Taser,” he said.
And, as I mentioned, the mere fact that the reputation of Tasers is that they’re unreliable makes officers less likely to use them for anything but punishment.
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