Post by Shuftin on Sept 14, 2006 3:02:36 GMT -5
A deputy needed just nine words to justify firing his Taser stun gun at a 15-year-old girl:
"Subject was given several commands, but did not comply."
That was enough for six Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office supervisors to unanimously approve knocking a 115-pound girl to the ground with a paralyzing 50,000-volt electric shock.
The deputy's report is one of more than 1,000 that The Palm Beach Post examined in reviewing three years of Taser use by police from Boca Raton to Fort Pierce, starting in 2001, when the weapon arrived in South Florida.
While some of the reports show that the weapons defused violent confrontations and averted the use of lethal force, the investigation also found:
• One out of every four suspects shocked with Tasers was unarmed, nonviolent and not posing an apparent immediate threat.
• While health risks from Taser shocks remain under debate, officers have fired them at the very young and the very old — at least 35 people 16 and younger, including a 13-year-old girl, and seven people 61 or older, including an 86-year-old man, were shocked. The Post also found that at least three women claiming to be pregnant were shocked.
• Tasers were fired at more than 425 suspects who were being arrested on misdemeanor charges.
• Departments vary widely in how they record and track Taser use, some requiring little or no explanation for why officers fire the weapon.
"There is no medical evidence to support the cavalier use by some police departments," said Ed Jackson, a spokesman for Amnesty International, which has called for a moratorium on the weapon's use. "Tasers are being used in situations where guns, batons, pepper spray would never be used."
Officers used Tasers to stop people who ran, people who were verbally threatening, people who refused to put their hands behind their backs. They used Tasers on handcuffed people who refused to put their feet in police cars. Once in custody, some were let go with notices to appear in court on minor charges.
"There are less draconian tactics that can and should be used in those situations," said former officer George Kirkham, a Florida State University criminology professor. They include reasoning, commands, guiding with open hands and "pressure pain compliance" — pressing sensitive areas, such as the jaw, he said.
"Officers are taught these measures that are lower on the force continuum in training. We have pictures of people who won't let go of a steering wheel, and when pressure is applied, their hands come off and no harm is done."
Instead, says Kirkham, "Police are skipping up the use of force continuum through impatience and lack of training."
Kirkham, who travels from his suburban Boynton Beach home to testify in cases involving police use of force, echoes Amnesty International's concerns that the weapon is potentially dangerous when used on people with health problems — "much of which you can't know," he points out. "It's a great device, but it should only be used when someone is posing a danger.
"It's not a toy."
From October 2001, when Boca Raton police added Tasers to their arsenal, to last December, 19 police agencies in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast adopted the stun guns. Their use soared from 82 firings in 2002, to 226 in 2003, to 712 last year.
The increase reflects a nationwide trend, and as use has increased, so have calls for moratoriums on the weapons until more is known about their effects and whether they are being abused.
Chicago officials halted distribution of new Tasers to officers after a 14-year-old suffered a heart attack and another man died within a week.
Civic rights activists in Houston called for police to stop and study the weapon's use after 12 people were shocked for "verbal threats" to officers. Police there, since receiving Tasers in late December, have averaged one Taser firing a day.
Police chiefs in Brevard County recently agreed on a unified policy that Tasers "will only be utilized when the officer reasonably believes that a subject is an imminent physical threat or the person is demonstrating an articulable threat to him/herself, the officer, and/or others."
Taser International spokesman Steve Tuttle attributes the increasing scrutiny given the weapons and how they are used to "phenomenal growth," which, according to the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, caused the company's revenue to climb from $2.2 million in 1999 to about $67 million in 2004.
Some departments urge firing over chasing
Until November, Taser International's Web site stated that the weapon is "solely designed to stop the most hardened of targets: extremely violent, aggressive, goal-oriented and drug induced suspects."
Taser's Tuttle said that refers to "the 1-percenters with superhuman strength and mind-body disconnect." But he adds, the weapon can be used on suspects "up to" that level of resistance as well.
The wording no longer appears on Taser's Web site, but the company's manual used to train Taser instructors, says: "The Taser is best utilized in situations where a hostile or potentially hostile individual is threatening himself or another person." On its Web site, the company typically refers to the target of a Taser as "the attacker."
Cops tout the effectiveness of the weapon in such situations. At the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, assaults on deputies went down from more than 400 in 2003, the year the department adopted the weapon, to 200 assaults the following year, said Capt. Frank Demario, a training supervisor. During that year, officers fired their Tasers 274 times.
In nearly 800 reports from Fort Pierce to Boca Raton, officers fired Tasers to subdue armed, violent and threatening suspects and suspects who refused to show their hands after repeated commands or who were running toward a house or car from which a weapon could be retrieved.
Described in those reports are a man reaching for a deputy's gun, a suicidal woman holding a knife to her throat, a man armed with a machete who told a deputy "God help you if you come near me" and a violently psychotic man, covered with his own blood and urine, who fought off pepper spray and baton strikes and injured six of seven officers who grappled with him. In nine instances, they were used on snarling dogs.
Of 1,017 accounts of Taser use on humans examined by The Post, however, at least 237 described encounters with people who were not reported to be armed, violent or posing any immediate potential harm to anyone, including themselves. Of those, 142 were charged with misdemeanors, and at least two were not criminally charged at all. They included:
• In Riviera Beach, a police officer used his Taser on a man he was trying to question after finding him asleep on a park bench. The man cursed at the officer and refused to stand to be searched. The officer shocked him on his leg and his shoulder and then released him with a warning about trespassing. A Riviera Beach police supervisor said the officer was reprimanded for the inappropriate use of force.
• In suburban Lake Worth, a deputy investigating a car theft fired his Taser at a man who refused to follow orders. The suspect then complied but wasn't arrested.
• A Boynton Beach officer stopped a man for riding a bicycle after dark with no headlight. When the man dismounted and started to run, the officer shot him with a Taser. The officer took the man and his bike to the police station, issued him a citation, then released him to ride his bicycle into the night — with no headlight.
Officers and their trainers say capturing fleeing suspects is part of what the Taser is designed for; it is a "distance" weapon that works where others such as pepper spray wouldn't.
Some police departments encourage officers to fire their Tasers rather than chase a fleeing suspect, according to Josh Ederheimer, director of the Police Executive Research Forum's Center for Force and Accountability. That is because foot pursuits can lead to ambushes and accidents. But, he added, "You have to think about it. If someone is running away, the darts can miss or disengage."
Scott Greenwood, a former general counsel of the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union and current member of the organization's national board, has examined the weapon's use and submitted to a Taser shock during training. He echoes local police trainers and supervisors, who note the risk of injuries to officers and suspects from tackling a fleeing suspect.
But, he also said, the force officers use to capture suspects should be commensurate with offenses.
"It would be a complete violation of almost any department's policy to use force on someone that you are not going to arrest or detain. If not an arrestable offense, force shouldn't be used at all."
The St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office is the largest agency in the three-county region that has refused to issue Tasers to its officers.
"There are some benefits to the tool, but I think that there are too many cases we have seen where there are questions of abuse or excessive use," Chief Deputy Gary Wilson said.
Until they see more specific guidelines for use and more convincing studies showing the effects of 50,000 volts of electricity flowing through the bodies of the elderly, pregnant women and drug addicts, Wilson said, they will not use the weapon.
Agencies vary on extent of accountability
Some departments weigh officers' canisters of pepper spray at the start and end of every shift.
Tasers come equipped with a dataport in the weapon that is designed to record every trigger pull.
That record protects officers from unfounded complaints of abuse and allows supervisors to track their use, Taser International points out.
Departments vary widely, however, in how thoroughly they require officers to explain each use and how much the use is scrutinized by supervisors. In addition, only a handful of departments attempt to track how often their officers point the weapons without firing.
In addition, reports in which officers fired at "unknown" suspects who escaped without being hit by the prongs don't in themselves raise a red flag, according to Ederheimer of the Police Executive Research Forum because it is understood that Taser shots can go astray. Such incidents, however, leave only an officer's account of why the Taser was used. Of 16 reports of "unknown subjects," nine from Riviera Beach, cops did not report any description of who they were firing at, including gender or race or why they were trying to detain or arrest the person.
That, said Greenwood of the ACLU, should be a red flag.
West Palm Beach police require supervisors reviewing Taser incidents to interview suspects and to evaluate the use of force in their own words.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, in contrast, requires supervisors only to read the officer's report and conclude whether the use was within department guidelines.
Supervisors unanimously approved all 274 reports of Taser use examined by The Post, including several incidents in which two officers fired simultaneously at the same person and one in which three deputies each shocked the same suspect.
That happened in October, when two deputies were helping arrest a suspect on armed drug trafficking charges. They both fired Tasers at him as he fled. Use-of-force reports by both officers are identical in their wording, and each was signed by six supervisors. A third officer had his Taser aimed at the suspect after his arrest as his handcuffs were removed so he could sign permission to search his home. That deputy's Taser "malfunctioned," striking the suspect in the back, according to the third report filed that night.
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, who was West Palm Beach police chief when that department's Taser policy was crafted, said the use-of-force policy at the sheriff's office soon will be as extensive. "Uses of force will be tracked by incident and tracked for early warning systems."
Police chiefs in Palm Beach County now are working on countywide guidelines for Taser use. A panel headed by Boca Raton Police Chief Andrew Scott has examined restrictions on stun-gun use, circumstances under which the weapons should be used and medical treatment following Taser shootings. Scott declined to point to specific changes being considered but said resulting guidelines are likely to go beyond issues addressed in existing local policies.
Bradshaw is optimistic, too, about those efforts.
"Obviously you're going to prohibit use of Tasers on pregnant, elderly, children, people in high places," he said.
Currently, however, only one agency — North Palm Beach Public Safety — instructs officers to avoid using Tasers on people under 16. The Post survey showed that officers from eight departments fired Tasers at 16 people younger than 16, including four 14-year-olds — a 100-pound boy among them — and a 13-year-old girl.
Similar incidents in his district led state Sen. Gary Siplin, D-Orlando, to propose a bill that would restrict the use of Tasers to firing only at violent or threatening lawbreakers.
"I was hearing reports of Tasing for jaywalking, a 75-year-old woman, a 5-foot, 100-pound high school girl — by a 200-pound officer," he said. "I know she may have a big mouth, but was it necessary to Tase her?"
His bill died in committee May 6, but Siplin said plans are moving ahead for a state-sponsored study of the effects of Tasers on people with cardiac, neurological and respiratory conditions, and on people taking drugs.
"You shouldn't be killed for being on drugs. You've got to take the subject the way you find him."
"Subject was given several commands, but did not comply."
That was enough for six Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office supervisors to unanimously approve knocking a 115-pound girl to the ground with a paralyzing 50,000-volt electric shock.
The deputy's report is one of more than 1,000 that The Palm Beach Post examined in reviewing three years of Taser use by police from Boca Raton to Fort Pierce, starting in 2001, when the weapon arrived in South Florida.
While some of the reports show that the weapons defused violent confrontations and averted the use of lethal force, the investigation also found:
• One out of every four suspects shocked with Tasers was unarmed, nonviolent and not posing an apparent immediate threat.
• While health risks from Taser shocks remain under debate, officers have fired them at the very young and the very old — at least 35 people 16 and younger, including a 13-year-old girl, and seven people 61 or older, including an 86-year-old man, were shocked. The Post also found that at least three women claiming to be pregnant were shocked.
• Tasers were fired at more than 425 suspects who were being arrested on misdemeanor charges.
• Departments vary widely in how they record and track Taser use, some requiring little or no explanation for why officers fire the weapon.
"There is no medical evidence to support the cavalier use by some police departments," said Ed Jackson, a spokesman for Amnesty International, which has called for a moratorium on the weapon's use. "Tasers are being used in situations where guns, batons, pepper spray would never be used."
Officers used Tasers to stop people who ran, people who were verbally threatening, people who refused to put their hands behind their backs. They used Tasers on handcuffed people who refused to put their feet in police cars. Once in custody, some were let go with notices to appear in court on minor charges.
"There are less draconian tactics that can and should be used in those situations," said former officer George Kirkham, a Florida State University criminology professor. They include reasoning, commands, guiding with open hands and "pressure pain compliance" — pressing sensitive areas, such as the jaw, he said.
"Officers are taught these measures that are lower on the force continuum in training. We have pictures of people who won't let go of a steering wheel, and when pressure is applied, their hands come off and no harm is done."
Instead, says Kirkham, "Police are skipping up the use of force continuum through impatience and lack of training."
Kirkham, who travels from his suburban Boynton Beach home to testify in cases involving police use of force, echoes Amnesty International's concerns that the weapon is potentially dangerous when used on people with health problems — "much of which you can't know," he points out. "It's a great device, but it should only be used when someone is posing a danger.
"It's not a toy."
From October 2001, when Boca Raton police added Tasers to their arsenal, to last December, 19 police agencies in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast adopted the stun guns. Their use soared from 82 firings in 2002, to 226 in 2003, to 712 last year.
The increase reflects a nationwide trend, and as use has increased, so have calls for moratoriums on the weapons until more is known about their effects and whether they are being abused.
Chicago officials halted distribution of new Tasers to officers after a 14-year-old suffered a heart attack and another man died within a week.
Civic rights activists in Houston called for police to stop and study the weapon's use after 12 people were shocked for "verbal threats" to officers. Police there, since receiving Tasers in late December, have averaged one Taser firing a day.
Police chiefs in Brevard County recently agreed on a unified policy that Tasers "will only be utilized when the officer reasonably believes that a subject is an imminent physical threat or the person is demonstrating an articulable threat to him/herself, the officer, and/or others."
Taser International spokesman Steve Tuttle attributes the increasing scrutiny given the weapons and how they are used to "phenomenal growth," which, according to the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, caused the company's revenue to climb from $2.2 million in 1999 to about $67 million in 2004.
Some departments urge firing over chasing
Until November, Taser International's Web site stated that the weapon is "solely designed to stop the most hardened of targets: extremely violent, aggressive, goal-oriented and drug induced suspects."
Taser's Tuttle said that refers to "the 1-percenters with superhuman strength and mind-body disconnect." But he adds, the weapon can be used on suspects "up to" that level of resistance as well.
The wording no longer appears on Taser's Web site, but the company's manual used to train Taser instructors, says: "The Taser is best utilized in situations where a hostile or potentially hostile individual is threatening himself or another person." On its Web site, the company typically refers to the target of a Taser as "the attacker."
Cops tout the effectiveness of the weapon in such situations. At the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, assaults on deputies went down from more than 400 in 2003, the year the department adopted the weapon, to 200 assaults the following year, said Capt. Frank Demario, a training supervisor. During that year, officers fired their Tasers 274 times.
In nearly 800 reports from Fort Pierce to Boca Raton, officers fired Tasers to subdue armed, violent and threatening suspects and suspects who refused to show their hands after repeated commands or who were running toward a house or car from which a weapon could be retrieved.
Described in those reports are a man reaching for a deputy's gun, a suicidal woman holding a knife to her throat, a man armed with a machete who told a deputy "God help you if you come near me" and a violently psychotic man, covered with his own blood and urine, who fought off pepper spray and baton strikes and injured six of seven officers who grappled with him. In nine instances, they were used on snarling dogs.
Of 1,017 accounts of Taser use on humans examined by The Post, however, at least 237 described encounters with people who were not reported to be armed, violent or posing any immediate potential harm to anyone, including themselves. Of those, 142 were charged with misdemeanors, and at least two were not criminally charged at all. They included:
• In Riviera Beach, a police officer used his Taser on a man he was trying to question after finding him asleep on a park bench. The man cursed at the officer and refused to stand to be searched. The officer shocked him on his leg and his shoulder and then released him with a warning about trespassing. A Riviera Beach police supervisor said the officer was reprimanded for the inappropriate use of force.
• In suburban Lake Worth, a deputy investigating a car theft fired his Taser at a man who refused to follow orders. The suspect then complied but wasn't arrested.
• A Boynton Beach officer stopped a man for riding a bicycle after dark with no headlight. When the man dismounted and started to run, the officer shot him with a Taser. The officer took the man and his bike to the police station, issued him a citation, then released him to ride his bicycle into the night — with no headlight.
Officers and their trainers say capturing fleeing suspects is part of what the Taser is designed for; it is a "distance" weapon that works where others such as pepper spray wouldn't.
Some police departments encourage officers to fire their Tasers rather than chase a fleeing suspect, according to Josh Ederheimer, director of the Police Executive Research Forum's Center for Force and Accountability. That is because foot pursuits can lead to ambushes and accidents. But, he added, "You have to think about it. If someone is running away, the darts can miss or disengage."
Scott Greenwood, a former general counsel of the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union and current member of the organization's national board, has examined the weapon's use and submitted to a Taser shock during training. He echoes local police trainers and supervisors, who note the risk of injuries to officers and suspects from tackling a fleeing suspect.
But, he also said, the force officers use to capture suspects should be commensurate with offenses.
"It would be a complete violation of almost any department's policy to use force on someone that you are not going to arrest or detain. If not an arrestable offense, force shouldn't be used at all."
The St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office is the largest agency in the three-county region that has refused to issue Tasers to its officers.
"There are some benefits to the tool, but I think that there are too many cases we have seen where there are questions of abuse or excessive use," Chief Deputy Gary Wilson said.
Until they see more specific guidelines for use and more convincing studies showing the effects of 50,000 volts of electricity flowing through the bodies of the elderly, pregnant women and drug addicts, Wilson said, they will not use the weapon.
Agencies vary on extent of accountability
Some departments weigh officers' canisters of pepper spray at the start and end of every shift.
Tasers come equipped with a dataport in the weapon that is designed to record every trigger pull.
That record protects officers from unfounded complaints of abuse and allows supervisors to track their use, Taser International points out.
Departments vary widely, however, in how thoroughly they require officers to explain each use and how much the use is scrutinized by supervisors. In addition, only a handful of departments attempt to track how often their officers point the weapons without firing.
In addition, reports in which officers fired at "unknown" suspects who escaped without being hit by the prongs don't in themselves raise a red flag, according to Ederheimer of the Police Executive Research Forum because it is understood that Taser shots can go astray. Such incidents, however, leave only an officer's account of why the Taser was used. Of 16 reports of "unknown subjects," nine from Riviera Beach, cops did not report any description of who they were firing at, including gender or race or why they were trying to detain or arrest the person.
That, said Greenwood of the ACLU, should be a red flag.
West Palm Beach police require supervisors reviewing Taser incidents to interview suspects and to evaluate the use of force in their own words.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, in contrast, requires supervisors only to read the officer's report and conclude whether the use was within department guidelines.
Supervisors unanimously approved all 274 reports of Taser use examined by The Post, including several incidents in which two officers fired simultaneously at the same person and one in which three deputies each shocked the same suspect.
That happened in October, when two deputies were helping arrest a suspect on armed drug trafficking charges. They both fired Tasers at him as he fled. Use-of-force reports by both officers are identical in their wording, and each was signed by six supervisors. A third officer had his Taser aimed at the suspect after his arrest as his handcuffs were removed so he could sign permission to search his home. That deputy's Taser "malfunctioned," striking the suspect in the back, according to the third report filed that night.
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, who was West Palm Beach police chief when that department's Taser policy was crafted, said the use-of-force policy at the sheriff's office soon will be as extensive. "Uses of force will be tracked by incident and tracked for early warning systems."
Police chiefs in Palm Beach County now are working on countywide guidelines for Taser use. A panel headed by Boca Raton Police Chief Andrew Scott has examined restrictions on stun-gun use, circumstances under which the weapons should be used and medical treatment following Taser shootings. Scott declined to point to specific changes being considered but said resulting guidelines are likely to go beyond issues addressed in existing local policies.
Bradshaw is optimistic, too, about those efforts.
"Obviously you're going to prohibit use of Tasers on pregnant, elderly, children, people in high places," he said.
Currently, however, only one agency — North Palm Beach Public Safety — instructs officers to avoid using Tasers on people under 16. The Post survey showed that officers from eight departments fired Tasers at 16 people younger than 16, including four 14-year-olds — a 100-pound boy among them — and a 13-year-old girl.
Similar incidents in his district led state Sen. Gary Siplin, D-Orlando, to propose a bill that would restrict the use of Tasers to firing only at violent or threatening lawbreakers.
"I was hearing reports of Tasing for jaywalking, a 75-year-old woman, a 5-foot, 100-pound high school girl — by a 200-pound officer," he said. "I know she may have a big mouth, but was it necessary to Tase her?"
His bill died in committee May 6, but Siplin said plans are moving ahead for a state-sponsored study of the effects of Tasers on people with cardiac, neurological and respiratory conditions, and on people taking drugs.
"You shouldn't be killed for being on drugs. You've got to take the subject the way you find him."