How leathal is Non-leathal, Taser Death Options

[D Minor]

This video is causing a bit of a stir.Link
The video is roughly 9 min long

Full Story can be found here
The other link

[mfb]

your second link leads to the front page of an online paper, not to any specific article.

as far as tasers and other 'non-lethal' measures go, well, they're not non-lethal. the term that should be used is less-lethal, because that's what they are. any application of force against a human has the potential to be lethal. less-lethal measures simply have a greater capacity for stopping the target without causing permanent injury.

[D Minor]

Look under Web extras.

[kzt]

Most of what are called "non-lethal" weapons are really less likely to cause injuries resulting in death. These include shotgun bean bags, wood battons, tear gas, peper spray etc.

<obligtory slap at SR stupidity>
You'll notice that nobody in the ENTIRE world has decided to use bullets fired out of regular handguns that are supposed to not injure the target. The insanity of "Gel Rounds" are pretty obvious to the casual observer.
</obligtory slap at SR stupidity>

Tasers are far less likely to cause death than most of other techniques of apprehending violently combative people. Beating them with a two foot steel rod or having them bitten by a large angry dog are alternative that usually appears on the same level of the use of force continuum.

People have died after being shot with tasers. Often they are people who are acting combative and nuts because they have taken large amounts of meth and/or cocaine. This is typically called excited delirium

A chunk of an article

The subject officers confront, often on a property damage or unusual behavior call, will be "acting in a bizarre manner, often partially clothed or naked," Lawrence reports. He will likely be incoherent or speaking in gibberish or what seems to be another language. He'll be yelling or screaming loudly, seem to be disoriented or hallucinating and may be foaming at the mouth or drooling. He may be sweating profusely or the opposite, his body temperature soaring and uncooled by perspiration. Glass often will somehow be involved in the encounter, reason unknown.

Usually ED symptoms are well underway when officers arrive, but lately Lawrence has found instances in which a subject is speaking calmly and rationally with officers and then suddenly explodes into ED. However the onset occurs, the condition, while relatively rare, is always high-risk, he stresses.

As officers try to gain physical control of the subject, his "extraordinary strength" will be "a central feature of the struggle." Several officers will be needed to overcome his determined resistance and immunity to pain.

"During the restraint process, the subject will often be grunting and making animal-like noises."

The biggest problem may come after he is controlled - when, after struggling against restraint, there may come "a period of sudden tranquility." At this point, Lawrence says, "the officers realize the subject has stopped breathing. Invariably resuscitation efforts fail."

http://www.southernnevadahealthdistrict.or...ed_delirium.htm

[D Minor]

In my personal experiance in Canada. Police use non leathal methods with a bit more gusto than what is nessesary. The man in the vidio was upset but does it require a second taser shot. His sreams and grunt where from pain

[mfb]

heh. what's funny is, Molly Millions' flechette pistol didn't work at all like the AVS. Molly's pistol didn't shoot a spray of flechettes, like a shotgun fires pellets--it fired a stream of them, like a machine gun, or even one flechette at a time.

[kzt]

This thread isn't the thread you think it is.

[mfb]

yeah, well... shut up!

[hyzmarca]

Police encounters involving tasers tend to go something like this:

Guy minding his own business: Howdy officer, what can I do for you?
Officer: He's delirious!
Guy minding his own business: No, I'm not. Do you want to see my ID?
Officer: He's resisting arrest!
Guy minding his own business: No, I'm not. Look, I'm putting my hands on the back of my head and lying face down on the ground. *does so*
Officer: He's attacking me. My God! He has superhuman strength!
Guy minding his own business: What?!
Officer: I have to tase him.
Guy: No! Don't!
Officer: *tases* If you stop resisting I can stop zapping you.
Guy: I'm not resisting.
Officer: *Zaps again* I said stop resisting.

[kzt]

Lone Star warning a suspect

Bang
"Stop"
Bang Bang
"Police"
Bang"
"Stop or"
Bang
"I'll shoot"
Bang Bang Bang

[Jack Kain]

May also be used as an example of LA police warning a suspect.

[bibliophile20]

Stealing my own post from one of the humor threads...

Governor Strouthers, tired and fed up with Lone Star's apparent ineptitude in controlling crime, decides to hold a test for the various police corps that want the job. He releases a rabbit into a nearby forest and each of them has to catch it.

Eagle Security goes in first.
They place animal and spirit informants throughout the forest.
They question all plant, mineral and nature spirit witnesses.
After three months of extensive investigations they conclude that rabbits do not exist.

Then Knight Errant goes in.
After two weeks with no leads they burn the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit, and they make no apologies.
The rabbit had it coming.

Then Lone Star goes in.
They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear.
The bear is yelling: "Okay! Okay! I'm a rabbit! I'm a rabbit!"

[Critias]

[Apathy]

[kzt]

You'll notice that they are vastly larger than pistol bullets, require specialized launchers, and they are designed to cause pain to disperse crowds. Which isn't at all how SR "gel rounds" work per the RAW or are described as being used.

[cx2]

Perhaps the issue is that police need to be told, and convinced, that tasers are as you put it "less lethal" rather than "non lethal".

"You shot him!"
"Oh don't panic, it's just a taser."

Just thinking this might be a problem with the general perception of tasers across the board.

[Hank]

Ok, then, what's the alternative to tasers? Batons? And please don't say hand-to-hand...it's hard enough to demand that cops take low pay, physically dangerous jobs, and deal every day with the dregs of society. You just can't fill that job with expert hand-to-hand heroes. There aren't enough people willing to do it, nor should they be expected to.

[Critias]

[Glyph]

Plus, the ones who do wind up dying from tasering have, for the most part, been found to have died from causes other than the tasering. Generally, the excited delerium that kzt mentioned. But every time someone hopped up on meth gets tasered and kicks the bucket, the media gets all worked up about another "tasering death". :S


By the way, in SR, you can die from stun damage - overflow stun damage bleeds over into physical damage.


I have never had a problem with gel or stick-n-shock rounds in Shadowrun - by that far in the future, special kinds of ammo that can be fired from a regular handgun aren't that implausible.

[CircuitBoyBlue]

[eidolon]

Leave the political sniping out of it, please. Thanks.

[imperialus]

Well in this case he was a 40 year old Polish gentleman, who didn't speak a word of English, who'd never been in trouble with the law coming to visit his mother in Canada... Not normally the type to be hopped up on meth.

Now here is my interpretation at least of what happened.

Buddy gets off the plane after what was probably the longest flight of his life. He's tired, grouchy, and all that fun stuff that one expects after a long flight. Nothing too unusual there. He's also apparently a heavy smoker and has probably just gone at least 8 or 9 hours without a smoke.

He goes to customs and they open his suitcase finding a whole stack of Geography textbooks on the Canadian Rockies. Apparently this was because geography was something of a passion for him but it was enough to raise the suspicion of the customs officer, I don't really get this part, I mean the day terrorists start using geography against us we're in real trouble.

The customs officer starts questioning him about his books, Dziekanski doesn't speak English and begins to get agitated. I must admit I'd probably get a little ticked off too if someone started questioning me in a language I didn't understand over my choice of reading materials too.

It gets to the point that he has basically barricaded himself in the customs area and begins throwing furniture and computer parts. Numerous people tried to calm him down, find out what language he was speaking. I don't think I'd ever get to the point where I do something like that... Clearly at this point he was acting pretty irrationally.

The customs officer calls police to come diffuse the situation. Now this is a guy who would have been 21 years old when Communism fell in Poland. He's lived half his life under a regime where being scared of the cops was a way of life, and I still don't think they're a model of the free world. The cops basically surround him and back him against a wall. In the video you don't see him make any aggressive moves towards them until they taze him. He tries to run away and is tazed again. He kept fighting right up until the point where he lost consciousness.

Honestly, I think the cops might have been a bit quick to use their tazers. Draw them, keep them pointed at him and zap him as soon as he makes a threatening move but at least make an effort to communicate with him first. You're telling me that in an international airport the size of Vancouver's no one spoke Polish(or Russian)? Just make an announcement over the PA system asking anyone who speaks said language to find the nearest employee, we need your help diffusing a situation.

[GryMor]

ED deaths are generally CAUSED by restraint, it is the final straw that pushes heightened metabolic activity over the edge to death, and in the case of this video, apparently unneeded restraint. The man was already contained, and wasn't an immediate danger to anyone other than himself. They knew who he was and where he was from. It was apparent that he was in distress. It should have been trivial to contact someone that could speak to him and either talk him down or let it burn out.

Instead, they decide to kill him. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming the taser, as far as I can tell, pretty much any restraint at that point would have been lethal, but, from what I know, police KNOW that restraining ED victims can the lethal.

[Adarael]

You know, I had a meticulously crafted response to all of this and then I deleted it because it was just totally boring. So here's how it goes:

Cops are generally good people with generally good motives and are generally awesome most of the time. But over time, I think some cops forget that the original intent of the taser (at least in California) was to provide an officer with a means of incapacitating a suspect without blowing their head off or crushing their skull. It was intended as a level of force one level below gun and one level above club. Yet over days and weeks and months of dealing with crack heads, some police have taken to using tasers as a step above ordering someone to comply. It's faster, easier, and more convenient to tase somebody than to wrestle with them - and safer for the cop, most times, too. I have personally witnessed someone get tased as the second step in an altercation. The first step was "Get down on the ground." The person said no. The cop tased. There was no negotiation or pepperspray, no wrestling. Then again, this was in LA near Watts just outside of USC, so infer what you will from that.

What's more having the ability to incapacitate someone so quickly and easily can feed into the sense of arrogance and perpetual authority that some police have. Don't know what I mean? Try talking to some local cops like you would any other human being on the street. Some of them - about one fifth to one quarter, in my experience - have a sense of perpetual entitlement and authority. They appear to feel that they are the person who is in charge of all situations in all locales at all times. And that's fine, if there's a law being broken, but I think that if a cop gets upset over how much he's getting charged for coffee and tries to make an issue out of it because he's obviously 'in charge', you can see how that attitude might also cause problems in terms of 'acceptable use of force'. For my money, these are also the kinds of cops who ususally get excessive force charges levelled at them.

Tasers are useful. Tasers save lives. Don't ever mistake cops for infallible, saintly, unerring people, though. And don't ever suggest there aren't cops that don't unduly escalate force. They're in the vast minority, but it does happen. To suggest otherwise - or even to suggest that it isn't happening on a daily basis - is to be blind to statistics, the world, and what's going on around you.

[Apathy]