Progressive Voices

It’s not like the North Carolina TASER Safety Project is asking for much - just a few common sense regulations put in place in every county or municipality that arms law enforcement officers with TASERs. The Project makes suggestions such as adopting policies restricting tasing obviously pregnant women, children, and people with disabilities in a report released recently.

Currently, seventy counties in North Carolina arm their sheriffs’ field deputies with TASERs. Some of these counties have no policy at all in place regulating how law enforcement officers should handle the weapon. This is by any fair analysis, if you’ll pardon the pun, shocking.

Since the fall of 2006, six North Carolinians have died after being tased. In 2003, the U.S. Department of Justice suggested that TASERs should be labeled a “less lethal” rather than “non-lethal” weapon. The obvious conclusion that can be drawn from the Department’s suggestion is that TASERs can cause death. 

TASER International, the primary distributor of TASERs to law enforcement includes warnings in their own materials that suggest as much. One such warning states that the risk of death is greater if an individual is shocked multiple times with the TASER. According to the “TASER International Instructor and User Warnings, Risks, Liability Release and Covenant Not to Sue,” which all law enforcement officers must sign before being exposed to tasing, “Persons who are  . . . pregnant are among those who may be at higher risk” of “serious injury or death.” Yet, right now, only 42.9% of counties using TASERs reported restrictions on tasing pregnant women.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether you want to define the TASER as a “lethal,” “less lethal” or “non-lethal” weapon. The point is that it is still a weapon, and a pretty terrifying one at that. Law enforcement-issued TASERs shoot 1,200 volts of electrical pulses through the body at a rate of 19 pulses per second for five seconds. This can cause miscarriages or stillbirths in pregnant women, vomiting in children, muscle contractions, spinal fractures, and can ultimately contribute to the risk of death. It is ridiculous to arm law enforcement officers with such a weapon without making training and a comprehensive policy regarding use a priority. 

The TASER Safety Project makes this need clear in its report, Not There Yet: The Need for Safer TASER Policies in North Carolina. Any law enforcement agency in North Carolina equipping or planning to equip its officers with TASERs should consult that report to fully understand the complex safety issues surrounding this weapon.   Communities should also read the report and demand that their local law enforcement agencies using TASERs put these minimal requirements in place to help prevent any more of these tragic and unnecessary deaths in North Carolina.

To read the report, go to:  http://www.acluofnorthcarolina.org/documents/NotThereYet.pdf. 

Sarah Preston in the Legislative Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 10:11 am and is filed under Progressive Voices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.