o now, we have to understand: did the cops use excessive force leading to death? Or were they justified? Did they taze him after he was subdued? Or not? You have to admit...a jury of this man's peers will want to side with him given bath salts were involved. It's impossible for Joe and Jane Q. Public to not be fearful of that drug's effects, what with all the media hooplah and propaganda surrounding it.
Again, I think my point stands. The only reason tasers are in the hands of policemen is because prosecutors are too effective at proving excessive force when officers use batons or nightsticks or other devices. Which gets the accused person on the streets again, potentially to re-offend, after having gotten off on a technicality. We don't want to see that either.
I will agree with you though that the public's tolerance for what appears to be mounting numbers of deaths due to tasers is slowly but surely waning. They want a better solution. I believe there must be something out there. But folks will find the police unions to be a strong opposing force to changes here.
We'll see.
This is the issue, Tasers can be used and have little to no after effect on an individual, but their are times when the TASER is FATAL. I find it hard to accept that Prosecutors find it easy to prove excessive force when a more direct physical approach is taken, and yet can't find the same ease in proving this with TASERS. I think because the research regarding TASERS is heavily biased in favor of the TASER group. The fact that TASER is a commodity that can be publicly traded sets up a conflict of interest that leads to such bias. When their is pressure for a company to make profits so it's share holders can enjoy the dividends, their is going to be huge pressure to utilise their product as often as possible. This means USE the TASER as much as you can. I think this is a big factor in mission creep and the overuse of the device with minimal provocation.
Also because Police use the device often without fatality, police consider the device safe, so they use it when it isn't required, and if someone dies, the Police know exactly what to say to get off the hook. If you study the case of the young brazillian man Roberto Laudisio Curti who was tasered and died on the streets of Sydney last year, the Blue code of silence was quite perverse, and the lies were so obvious that the coroner labelled the Police as "Thugs" and like "schoolboys in Lord of the Flies". The coroner made it quite clear very early on that she didn't expect honesty from the police involved. Anyway, due to our corruption and the police knowing exactly what to say, they got away with killing a man who was running away from them.
Due to the overwhelming fatalities, the company itself has had to acknowledge that rather than labelling the device "non lethal", they now phrase the term 'Less Lethal". They also changed the phrase “leave no lasting after-effects” to “are more effective and safer than other use-of-force options”.
Here in Australia, after Tasers were introduced, gun use remained relatively constant. Which doesn’t really make a convincing case that Tasers are being used instead of firearms. Tasers haven't lessened gun use as a force option, They’re being used as well as, not instead of guns. The average persons gut instinct would be to believe that shocking someone with 50,000 volts of electricity causing temporary paralysis would easily be described as an excessive use of force, the problem is, all these paid off Professors who bamboozle the public with hard to understand pseudo-science convincing the people that they don't have the expertise so trust them when they tell you delivering a paralysing 50,000 volts to someone is perfectly safe.
I believe a lot of the time the use of patient skilled communication would prevent a lot of these incidents, but the Police force attracts people who are attracted to FORCE and potentially aren't great communicators to begin with.
