From yesterday Strathclyde Police became the first force in Scotland to be issued with taser stun guns. It’s part of a 6 month pilot scheme where officers in Cambuslang and Rutherglen will get to use the weapons,

The stun guns deliver a 50,000 volt shock, which incapacitates you by causing massive involuntary spasms. Below you can get an idea of what using one looks like:

Strathclyde Police have lobbied hard for the right to use these weapons, claiming they will help reduce the number of assaults on police officers, as the threat of using a taser is very intimidating, and means they can threaten somebody without getting in close contact.

The police claim that use of the taser will always have to be shown to be measured, justified and proportionate. However, if you look into parts of the world where police already have tasers, you can find huge numbers of cases where the weapons have clearly been abused. Here’s a few:

-A student was tasered at UCLA for refusing to show ID. A friend was threatened with being tasered for asking for the officer’s badge number and name.

-Another student ran into a lecture being given by former US Presidential candidate John Kerry, being chased by cops. He asked a question, and then was removed and tased by the cops in what has become a notorious incident of police brutality. It’s at about the 3.20 mark in the video that he is actually tased:

-A man in Leeds went into a diabetic coma on the bus, and was left slumped on the bus clutching his rucksack. When the bus reached the depot police were called. When he didn’t react to their commands (because he was in a fucking coma!) they held a gun to his head and tased him. This is despite the fact he was wearing a tag round his neck that warned about his condition. The police only realised he was in a medical emergency when he later came round.

-This Utah man was tasered for refusing to sign a speeding ticket. The officer responsible apparently later boasted of how “he wasn’t playing that game,” after the person involved made a reasonable request to point out the speed sign he had ignored.

-This Kentucky 16 year old was tasered as he lay below a bridge he’d fallen off with a broken back. The effect of the tasering raised his white blood cell count and temperature, meaning the surgery for his back was delayed by two days.

No doubt Strathclyde Police would argue their officers are being carefully trained, and that such incidents would never happen here. But you have to ask yourself, are Glasgow’s cops in some way inherently superior to cops in other cities or countries? Is there some magic quality that means cops in Glasgow are immune to using tasers for abuse? No, there’s not, and as long as these weapons are available there’s the potential for severe abuse. The scheme just now is a pilot, in the future we could be seeing the wider deployment of tasers throughout Scotland.

Amnesty International conducted a major investigation into the use of tasers, and uncovered that more than 300 people died after being tased in the US between 2001 and 2008, with coroners listing the tasing as a contributory or direct cause of death.

The weapons are often listed under “non lethal” alternatives to firearms, although in fact tasers are specifically called “less lethal.”

We don’t pretend there aren’t a lot of horrible assaults committed on police officers, but giving cops these deadly weapons is not the solution. We reckon the £45,559 this project is going to cost would be better spent on programmes to end drug and alcohol abuse, work with young people affected by violence, and generally try and take preventative action against the conditions that create someone who is going to assault a police officer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 11:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.