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The taser was invented by NASA scientist Jack Cover in 1969, and he finished the first version in 1974. Over the last few decades, the taser has gradually become more and more popular with law enforcement agencies around the world. Finland's police force officially adopted it in 2005.
To take a fairly random example, last year a 60-year-old man with a heart condition in Marin County, California, fell and hurt himself when he and his wife returned home from a fundraiser. His wife called paramedics, and as they were treating him, two police officers turned up at his house.
A word of warning: no sensitive person should watch the video. Seriously.
ABC: Man sues Marin sheriff after being Tased at home
"All of a sudden, they just showed up, they came in here like there was a fire going on, like a gunfight was going on," McFarland said.
What happened in the following minutes was captured on a camera mounted on the deputy's Taser.
The deputy tells McFarland he is going to take him to the hospital because he may be suicidal.
"We want to take you to the hospital for an evaluation, you said if you had a gun, you'd shoot yourself in the head," the deputy can be heard saying.
McFarland says it was just hyperbole. He was tired and in pain.
The deputy orders him numerous times to get up or else.
"Stand up, put your hands behind your back or you're going to be Tased," the deputy says.
McFarland keeps refusing.
The exchange goes on for about five minutes; his wife keeps pleading with the deputies not to Tase him, saying he has a heart condition.
Then, McFarland tells the deputies in no uncertain terms to leave.
As he gets up to go to bed, McFarland is Tased. Not once, but three times.
The video accompanying the article is honestly shocking. There's a 60-year-old man lying on the ground, screaming in pain as he's being electrocuted by the Taser. The deputy keeps shocking him and shouts "Stop resisting!". It's like a sick torture scene.
There are too many infamous Tasering incidents like this to list. There's a couple of particularly glaring ones here. To make a very long story short, over the past decade or so it's become almost standard policy for far too many US law enforcement agencies to use Tasers to arrest people, violent or no.
The idea that they're needed for "officer safety" is nonsense, and as for making the public safer:
The Houston Chronicle: The Taser Effect
Since the Houston Police Department armed itself with Tasers, touted as a way to reduce deadly police shootings, officers have shot, wounded and killed as many people as before the widespread use of the stun guns, a Houston Chronicle analysis shows.
Officers have used their Tasers more than 1,000 times in the past two years, but in 95 percent of those cases they were not used to defuse situations in which suspects wielded weapons and deadly force clearly would have been justified.
Instead, more than half of the Taser incidents escalated from relatively common police calls, such as traffic stops, disturbance and nuisance complaints, and reports of suspicious people.
In more than 350 cases, no crime was committed. No person was charged or the case was dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by judges and juries, according to the Houston Chronicle's analysis of the first 900 police Taser incidents, which occurred between December 2004 and August 2006.
Of those people who were charged with crimes, most were accused of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies.
Here's another study that found no change in injuries to officers, but a dramatic increase in deaths in custody. The ACLU had this to say in 2005:
Few if any controls are imposed on police using Taser stun guns to subdue suspects, which could explain the rise in Taser-related deaths throughout the region, according to a new study released today by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
"The lack of regulation of Tasers is very disturbing in light of the increasing number of deaths associated with their use," said Mark Schlosberg, the ACLU of Northern California's Police Practices Policy Director. "We fear that in the absence of strong regulations on how police use the weapon, we are likely to see more unnecessary deaths."
In an exhaustive survey of Taser policies and training materials in more than 50 police departments across central and northern California, the ACLU found that while stun gun-related deaths have risen dramatically, the weapon remains largely unregulated. Tasers work by firing twin metal barbs that emit a 50,000-volt charge into an individual, causing him to collapse from loss of muscular control.
Since 1999, at least 148 people in the United States and Canada have died after encounters with police who shocked them with Tasers. More than half of those deaths occurred in the past year, of which 15 took place in northern and central California.
Despite these alarming figures, the Scottsdale, Arizona based manufacturer, Taser International, continues to encourage liberal use of the weapon while grossly downplaying safety concerns. These misleading promotional tactics are reflected in the training materials, which are almost exclusively relied upon by police departments, the ACLU said. Indeed, the ACLU study found that only four of the departments surveyed created their own training materials.
Taser International has also pursued an active policy of silencing its critics with threats of lawsuits, so the actual lethality of the Taser is still an open question. What isn't a question is that Tasers do consistently kill people.
This is just a very brief introduction to the way Tasers are being used in the United States and Canada these days. Their introduction has led to more police brutality and more deaths in custody, with very little to show in the opposite direction. What everyone needs to be aware of is that tasers are not Star Trek phasers that you set on "stun" and then harmlessly knock someone out: they're potentially lethal. The taser, combined with the cult of officer safety, are combining in the US to create a culture where it's become acceptable, even normal, to tackle anyone being arrested, from the elderly and disabled to professional athletes, to the ground and shock them with a Taser. It's a disgrace, and it's pure brutality.
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