UPDATE: NEXT TASER HEARING THURSDAY, JANUARY 20.
The next hearing on the Tasers will be held Thursday night. This will be the time for the council to decide whether to go ahead with the purchase.
The City Manager is recommending it, so they really need to hear from you.
Date: January 12, 2011
Place: Montpelier City Hall
Time: 7:00
As we reported a couple of months ago, the Montpelier Chief of Police is asking the voters to buy Tasers for the Montpelier Police. Wednesday night is the first public hearing on the budget which, as drafted, includes the funds for the Tasers. This hearing will be your chance to let the Council know how you feel about deployment of Tasers in the Capital City.
We've covered the issue many times in the past. Its uses and especially abuses in and out of Vermont are well documented. Because I think the acquisition and deployment of Tasers in Montpelier would be a dangerous step, I will be there tomorrow night, and I hope you will join me.
1. Tasers are deadly force. While touted as nonlethal or “less lethal” (note the ass-covering change in terminology), there are hundreds of documented cases of deaths resulting from or arising after Taser shocks.
2. Defenders of Tasers will argue that they should not be considered lethal, or that it is improper to call the Taser the cause of death in the known cases. They will argue that the actual cause of death was some previously unknown medical condition. What they conveniently ignore is that any one of us could have one of those previously unknown medical conditions, and that the police won't know until after the administer the shock.
3. Taser deployment lowers the threshhold. Every time they argue for Tasers they claim they need them because Tasers save lives. Then they wind up using them when someone's making a nuisance of themselves at the corner store.
Join us tomorrow night. Speak out against the irresponsible deployment and use of deadly force.
As a Selectboard member in Essex, I participated in the decision to get Tasers, which I did not support. Our “debate” lasted about 15 minutes. The vote was 4-1 in favor, and I was the lone “no” vote. Subsequent to that vote, I discovered that the San Francisco Police Commission debated the taser issue for five hours! They did not allow them, although recent shooting incidents have renewed the call for these items.
See this link to a story on the debate last year in San Francisco: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/sto…
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 capitol 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, 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.
Truth Not Tasers blog
http://truthnottasers.blogspot…
Report of the Maryland Attorney General’s Task Force on Electronic Weapons
http://www.oag.state.md.us/Reports/ECWReport.pdf
“One-third of people shot by Taser need medical attention: probe”
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story…
‘Less than lethal’? The use of stun weapons in US law enforcement
http://www.amnesty.org/en/libr…
If you have not already come across it yet, check out an online slideshow presentation of mine concerning Montpelier, Vermont and Tasers, here. I’ll be updating it sometime Sunday or Monday with additional information about the upcoming meeting.
include discussion of the operators of the tasers. The weapon (because that’s what it is) cannot be considered in clinical isolation from the culture of the police force that will be using it.
If the city is foolish enough to avoid discussion of their police force’s culture and history of behavior, they will not be making a responsible decision.
It’s possible that you’ve already covered this ground, but the link included in this statement is broken. As a result, I’m having difficulty establishing whether or not your claim that the use and especially abuses are “well documented”.
Is there any way to assess the number of times tasers have been used, as opposed to abused, in Vermont or nationally?
In your opinion, is there a difference between “use and abuse” or are all uses of this weapon abusive?
If it’s possible that not all uses of tasers are abusive, what is your estimate of the percentage of abuses vs. uses?
Are there reporting requirements (locally, nationally) when law enforcement deploy tasers?
Thanks in advance, to anyone who takes the time to help me learning more about this.
There is a pretty good list of national misuse and deaths from tasers.
Locally I think Barre has tasered two or three homeless people (one was loitering !) with emotional problems in the short time since they got them with Federal money.
Vermont State Police cost the state 40,000 dollars in an out of court settlement for tasering a man under a truck having a seizure of some kind.
And of course Attorney General Sorrel was test-tasered (seriously)as part of his evaluation to see if the state should impose guidelines for the entire state.