Legal Commentary

Reasons to Fear Increasing Taser Abuse in NYC

By TChris

The headline in the Metro section of today's New York Times only tells half the story:

Tasers Getting More Prominent Role in Crime Fighting in City

The title to this post reflects the other half.

NYPD officers now use their 500 Tasers in limited situations. Expanding Taser use is a perilous experiment. It isn't particularly comforting to know that only sergeants will have the authority to handle Tasers, in light of this:

Stun guns were introduced in New York in the early 1980s, when officers were confronting a higher number of disturbed people because of the rapid and widespread deinstitutionalization of mental health patients. The devices were not seen as a success. ... Several high-ranking officers and sergeants were transferred from the 106th Precinct in Queens after officers were charged with using stun guns on drug suspects during interrogations. [emphasis added]

The most important facts, at which the Times headline does not hint, come at the end of the linked article: [more ...]

On Monday, a 26-year-old man died after he was shocked twice with a Taser by an officer on Long Island trying to keep him from swallowing a bag of cocaine, the Suffolk County police said. The man, Tony Curtis Bradway of Brooklyn, spat out a white powder and “remnants of a plastic bag,” the police said, and he died at a hospital nine hours after the episode.

The next day, news broke that a federal jury in California had held Taser International partly responsible in the death of a Salinas, Calif., man and had awarded his family more than $6 million in that civil case. ...

On Wednesday, Sanford A. Rubenstein, a lawyer, announced the filing of a lawsuit against New York City in the case of a retired police lieutenant’s son who had been hit four times with a Taser after the police responded to a barbecue at his Harlem home last August. The man, Alexander Lombard III, who was 18 at the time, “has permanent Taser marks and scarring,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “And he is getting counseling and getting physical therapy.”

Also on Wednesday, Amnesty International said it had tracked more than 300 cases since 2001 in which people died after being shocked by a Taser. And although studies have not shown what role the devices might have played in those deaths, “extreme caution” is in order, said Larry R. Cox, the executive director of Amnesty.

In light of the well-founded fear that officers will use a supposedly nonlethal weapon inappropriately, either unnecessarily or as punishment, the warning sounded by Larry Cox should be at the beginning of the Times article, not at the end:

“They should be fired in circumstances when the use of deadly force would be the only alternative,” said Mr. Cox. He said that the Taser’s billing as a “safe, nonlethal instrument” was faulty.

TalkLeft has made that point repeatedly.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 15, 2008 (boomark / email).