Green Mountain Daily has obtained a copy of this open letter to the Montpelier City Council from its author, Aaron Kromash, who authorized us to publish it in its entirety.

An open letter to:

The Honorable Mary Hooper

Councilors

 Tom Golonka

 T. Andrew Hooper

 Sarah Jarvis

 Jim Sheridan

 Nancy Sherman

 Alan H. Weiss

By e-mail

Dear Mayor Hooper and Council Members:

I hope the new year begins well for you.  In advance of your Jan 12 meeting, I am writing to you to address the subject of “Electronic Control Devices” (i.e., Tasers), which I know is on the next meeting agenda.

Because Montpelier is my capital and a city I enjoy and visit, and because I will therefore be affected by your decisions on this issue, I am writing to brief you on relevant facts I have learned in the course of preparing two public information programs on Tasers for the towns of Greensboro and Hardwick last November.  I have reviewed the documents provided in your packet by Chief Facos, and I find that they do need supplementation with substantial facts of concern to the public.

In the first instance, you should know that Tasers more resemble firearms than any other weapon in police arsenals, despite the fact that the VLCT “Response to Resistance” explicitly equates Tasers with chemical sprays.  The only reason that this latter comparison is even credible is that Taser probes are fired by compressed nitrogen, not gunpowder, and this design was deliberate, being an attempt to completely circumvent any federal ATF regulation.

Nonetheless, Tasers are in fact lethal weapons,

Nonetheless, Tasers are in fact lethal weapons, and though none of the documents in your packet mentions Taser-related deaths explicitly, the most comprehensive online registry of these statistics (reference below) lists 530 individuals who have died to date after tasering by police in the US and Canada alone.  The most recent of these fatalities is Kelly Wayne Sinclair, age 41, a mentally ill man tasered by police in Amarillo, Texas on January 5, 2011.  Statistics from other countries are not readily available but would surely add to this total.

Likewise, please do not be confused by the IACP printout in your packet (“What Every Police Chief Should Know…”) stating that the injury rate from tasering is lower than 1%.  These statistics are not collected through mandated reporting and are often prepared by the manufacturer of the weapon, Taser International.  They exclude primary injuries caused by the Taser itself (i.e., puncture wounds, bleeding, and burns), and they often exclude “non-serious” secondary injuries that individuals incur when they fall to the ground after tasering, as all individuals do.  The Attorney General’s report and other references below indicate that roughly 20-30% of people shot with Tasers require medical treatment for injuries such as punctures, contusions, lacerations, burns, fractures, and broken teeth.  To some extent, this phenomenon is a shifting of policing costs from the public sector to hospitals, private insurers, and the public.

Locally, even during the presentation I made in Hardwick, a man named James Anair came forth to speak publicly about how, during an adverse drug reaction, he had been tasered multiple times by Morrisville police in an incident two years prior and suffered several secondary injuries and intense, lasting psychological trauma as a result (a DVD is available).  According to the statistics you have been given, Mr. Anair should have been a rarity, but he was not, and my sense is that there are many more Vermonters who could tell similar stories if the issue were brought to a larger forum.

Were officers to have inflicted the aforementioned injuries through “hands-on” methods rather than high technology, I think the perception of police conduct would be rather different; yet, the end result is the same.  Tasers are serious weapons with the potential to injure or kill people.

For all this death and injury, you might expect to hear about more Taser-related litigation, again only lightly mentioned in your documents, and there has been much litigation, but until very recently Taser International had successfully settled every claim in secret or prevailed in litigation by virtue of its vast legal and financial resources.  These cases includes at least several claims by police officers themselves who were permanently injured in training under optimal training conditions.

Only in 2008 did Taser International lose its first product liability lawsuit, with a jury awarding $6.2 million to the estate of Robert Heston, a California man killed by multiple tasering in 2005.  And since that landmark case, the company has finally relented and begun to settle product liability suits for its defective products, the very first of which was paid just last August, when the company ceded $2.85 million to Steven Butler of California, who suffered debilitating brain damage and permanent immobility after he was shocked with a Taser.

You, who have all felt the obloquy over the city’s missing $400,000, should perhaps take these multimillion figures into account before you commit the city to a potential liability that could make $400,000 look small.  And to be rigorous, you should also consider these numbers against the $6,000 that Chief Facos cites offhandedly as the approximate recent annual cost to Montpelier for officer injuries from “combative action.”  A cost-benefit analysis is needed.

Amid the most recent lawsuits and reaction, Taser International has admitted to the need for redesign to make its weapons “safer”, bowing, for example, to pressure from none other than the Police Executive Research Forum to build in a stop control that limits the duration of electroshock that a shooter can deliver.  This new feature is supposed to be available in 2011, and I am not aware of whether Chief Facos proposes to purchase the current, now legally defective, model of Tasers, or a newer generation, but you would be advised to ask this question as well.

You should also ask the Chief many questions bearing on accountability for Taser use, where the VLCT document displays substantial weakness.  Why, for example, is “passive resistance” nowhere defined in that policy?  Does “active resistance” include techniques of civil disobedience, such as those employed in the infamous Brattleboro case reviewed by the AG report in your packet?  Does the MPD request include Taser-mounted video cameras?  Will the MPD commit to archiving and public access to Taser firing data and video footage?  Will the MPD publicly report each and every Taser deployment, including purely deterrent uses?  Satisfactory answers to all of these questions would go a long way to ensuring good community perceptions.

Despite all else I’ve written, I would not minimize the problem of officer injuries and the right of police to as safe a working environment as possible.  This is the context of Chief Facos’ request, and likewise, Sergeant Cochran’s survey, and Burlington Chief Schirling’s memorandum.  But these documents are largely anecdotal, and they contain few statistics, little interpretation of the numbers they present, and a narrow argument that is not by itself a compelling case for Tasers in Montpelier.  Though the concern for officer safety is legitimate, what you as civilian policy makers need to understand is, as the VLCT document correctly states, that use of force policy must, “serve all citizens while at the same time respecting the rights of suspects and balancing the need for officer safety.”  

But it is not the institutional mission of police to consider this balance; it is, rather, yours.  And the problem of Tasers in achieving this balance is that they seem to make of safety, civil liberties, and public finance a zero-sum game, giving to law enforcement only to the extent that they take away from others.

In considering Chief Facos’ request, it is then your job to balance all of these factors¬officer versus public safety, large-scale litigation versus occupational claims, and humane and just treatment versus cruel and unusual punishment.  In the process, you cannot rely unduly on the police perspective or privilege their concerns above all others; for, to do so would be to make the police, quite puzzlingly, a reason unto themselves, when they are only empowered in the first place to serve the public.  Simply put, you must make the MPD prove a case that seems conspicuously weak in the documents I’ve reviewed, and in the larger context of what is known about the risks and benefits of Tasers.  Yours is not a simple decision, and you should approach it with a wide perspective of knowledge, which is why I hope you will review the sources I list below.

But finally, regardless of your decisions this week, you should understand that the issue is not settled so simply.  Though this is indeed a major policy juncture for you and the city, others will follow, because the engineers at Taser International get up every day and return to work.  Next year you may be asked to fund a purchase of the Taser X3 triple-shot Taser gun, or the XREP Taser shotgun shell, or the vision-disrupting “Dazer Laser”, and the requests for ever more advanced weaponry will not end.  If there is, then, something enduring in the values that underlie your policy decisions, I urge you to focus on that instinct as much as what the current technology promises.

Sincerely Yours,

Aaron M. Kromash

Greensboro VT