Trying this again and please read this time?

trooper3316

The video shows one of the RCMP kneeling on Robert Dziekanki's neck. This caused his to stop breathing. In addition, no one began CPR until the paramedics arrived 15 minutes later. The taser did not kill him, asphyxiation was his cause of death. Strangely enough, there is not a single link to his autopsy. Only preliminary reports indicating no drugs or alcohol. Apparently the media wants to keep the controversy alive.

Most departments require an officer to be tased as part of the certification process, and many are tased several times. This amounts to hundreds of thousands of officers. There is not one single report of an officer being killed, or even injured by a taser. This tells me they are extremely safe, and any death would be the result of some other complication.

Nothing is 100 percent. You fight with the cops, you are always going to risk injury or death. However, the lives saved using a taser are substantial compared to the miniscule amount of lives lost. I won't repeat the statistics from your other question, but I can tell you in the four years I've carried a taser, I've only pulled the trigger three times. However, I've put the red dot on hundreds of people, and that alone gained compliance. When you take that into considersation, you have a greater chance of winning the lottery than you do being killed by a taser. Especially when you take into consideration every single video I've seen starts with the person ignoring lawful orders from the police, even after warnings.

gunsandammoatwork

No one has ever said Tasers or any other less-lethal options are "100%" safe. That is statistically impossible. But, these people put themselves into the situation where the force was applied to them.

Tasers do not affect your heart. We put one of our CSO's on a heart monitor operated by a paramedic. We then tazered him three times. His heart rate or rhythm never changed.

What does being mentally ill have anything to do with it? Can someone mentally ill hurt or kill an officer?

Deaths from a fight with the cops where a Taser was used are the result of pre-existing conditions, heath issues, and drug usage that leads to exited delirium. A Taser isn't even needed. We had a guy strung out on meth who robbed a woman, ran down the street, and collapsed from exited delirium. He would have died if the police hadn't brought him to the hospital.

bluelotussmellslikebananas

I don't know any stats on them but I would imagine that for some people, they are not safe. It's just not a good idea to get tazed.

ec911dude

Nothing is 100% safe. Law enforcement has few tools at their disposal to compel a person to cooperate. "Less than lethal" means are safer for the officer and quite frankly the suspect than breaking out the knuckle sandwiches. It is a very technical issue.

If I use a beanbag shotgun to subdue a person because he is throwing bricks at people from behind a big pile of bricks, it is generally looked at as being "humane". But if that beanbag hits him in the head and gives him a subarachnoid bleed and he dies, then I'm a heartless killer.

If I use an expandable baton on a suspect to apply strikes to the common peronial nerve on the thigh just above the knee, while that suspect is resisting to the point of physically exhausting two officers, and those strikes cause enough pain without causing permanent damage and he then complies, then I have done my job. But if you grab a camera and film it, it looks like three guys beating down one poor soul. If those baton strikes miss and strike the suspect in the spine and paralyze him because he moved suddenly, then I'm a lunatic cop who is nothing but a bruiser looking to put people in the hospital.

If I use a taser to take down a very large, psyched out threatening suspect and it works, then it was a technical application of less than lethal force that was superior to hooking and jabbing with a 6 ft 7, 350 pound slab of muscle. But if I tase him and he falls backwards and strikes the occipital bone of his skull and dies, I'm paraded through the media as a murderer. If that taser which, based on good scientific evidence and statistics is expected to incapacitate that suspect, fails to do so and only pisses him off, should I escalate my less than lethal force to "lethal" or apply more less than lethal force? How bout two shocks? Three? The man is a freak of nature. He is resisting what no one is supposed to be able to resist. But what do you do? What would you do? Now he has a seizure and dies. Was it because he has a history of seizures and physical excitement exacerbates his condition? Would he have had that seizure if we were wrestling around? Was it because I didn't care? Was it because I was too aggressive? What was the alternative? If I applied the force longer and with more intensity than was necessary to restrain and gain control of the suspect then I am at fault. If I acted within the scope of my training and encountered unexpected, in fact "freakish" results from a level of force that normally works without injury, then I am not.

If I pepper spray a hysterical woman who's clawing and fighting to resist being arrested and she ceases to the point that I'm able to arrest her, then I've done my job all without having to injure a 120 pound woman by throwing my 240 pound frame onto her and basically beating her up. But if I spray her and she has an anaphylactic shock and has to be hospitalized, then I'm making the evening news and everyone will see the big brutal cop spraying the poor defenseless woman.

I give you all these examples in order to demonstrate to you that there is a science behind less than lethal force. It is not perfect science but it is pretty reliable and the statistics speak for themselves. But freakish things do happen. The public perception of some of these less than lethal applications, like baton strikes, is that they are brutal. But the reality is that they are targeted at specific areas that cause maximum pain with minimum injury. If a man is lying on the ground and won't allow the police to put his hands behind his back, he is resisting! He might be super strong and using that strength to resist being arrested. Baton strikes weaken his resolve to resist and all without serious injury. Suspects who resist are countered by less than lethal "force" and that "force" must be at a level that is slightly higher than the "force" being encountered.

I'm getting off on a tangent here and I'm not trying to dodge your question. In fact I hope I've answered it. I just see it as part of a larger problem and I think that problem is that the public generally doesn't understand our tactics, the science behind them and how and why they are applied.

God's people

i believe that its not the weapon that is leathal but the person behind it. I can kill someone with a dry wall nail. We just have very bad athority figures

passingtime...

i think they use them cause they have nothing else to use ..i heard if u tell them ur on crack they cant tase you

Aaron H

As much as I don't want to agree with trooper3, he's dead on. I volunteered to be tazed while in the Marines. Its not that big of a deal. I mean its a big enough deal for you to lose all desire to resist arrest for sure, but that's about it. Of course it doesn't matter since cops are trained to yell "STOP RESISTING" regardless of whether or not the person is resisting to give the impression to bystanders and/or viewers of any video that their actions were justified. If you watch any arrest irl or on "COPS" you'll see this occur.

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