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Four people were shot and injured by police after Tasers used against a suspected fare evader in Brooklyn were “ineffective” in subduing the man.
The incident has raised questions about the use of deadly force by police for a petty crime, but also of the usefulness of the Taser as a tool for police to control suspects following years of similar incidents.
Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project, described the Taser as “an escalation of the use of force.”
“There’s this question about whether or not it’s a proportional use of force,” she told The Independent. “In this instance, it’s not even clear to me that the individual was actually engaging in a threat that justified the use of a Taser.”
The New York Police Department said its officers fired shots during the weekend encounter in Brooklyn after their Tasers failed and the suspect advanced with a knife. One bystander and the suspect were critically injured, while another bystander and an officer were also shot.
A Taser is a compressed-gas-powered device in the shape of a handgun that releases two probes connected to the device by 15ft wires at high speed. The probes pierce the skin and temporarily incapacitate subjects using an electrical current that tenses muscles all over the body.
At least that is what they are supposed to do.
The latest Brooklyn incident follows years of incidents in which the use of Tasers by police has turned into deadly shootings. Less than two months ago, a man wielding a knife was shot and killed by police in Deer Park, Texas, after a Taser failed to subdue him.
A 2019 investigation by APM Reports found more than 250 cases over three years in which a Taser failed to subdue someone who was then shot and killed by police. In 106 of those cases “the suspect became more violent after receiving the electrical shock,” it found, “suggesting the Taser may have made a bad situation worse.”
The investigation also found that Tasers, which are carried by more than 400,000 officers nationwide, are unreliable up to 40 per cent of the time.
A review of reports from the Los Angeles Police Department by the Los Angeles Times in 2016 found that nearly a quarter of people shot by LAPD police officers in the year prior were wounded or killed during encounters where a Taser was used without success.
In one of the incidents, police fired a Taser at a homeless man suspected of an assault. When it didn’t work a second time, the officer engaged in a struggle with the man on the ground, before he was fatally shot.
The NYPD has been the subject of dozens of lawsuits over the last ten years for incidents involving the use of Tasers, many of them resulting in payouts of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In one incident, police used a Taser against Jah’Lire Nicholson inside the home where he lived with his mother in the Laurelton neighborhood of Queens.
According to the lawsuit, “Nicholson had a screwdriver in his hand at the time the officers arrived, but officers did not instruct him to drop the screwdriver.”
“The officers fired Taser barbs in Mr. Nicholson’s direction, but Mr. Nicholson moved away from the officers and the Taser barbs, at which time one of the officers shot and killed Mr. Nicholson with a firearm,” it continued.
The case was settled for $962,000.
The company that manufactures the Taser has made bold claims about its effectiveness and benefits for years. Axon, which has a monopoly in the US market, says on its website that its “energy weapons have been used to save more than 275,000 lives from death or serious bodily injury.”
The company claims that the weapons have been used over 5 million times in the field, and that its own study of 1,201 field cases show that the use of a Taser results in no direct serious injuries from the weapon more than 99 per cent of the time.
But that study likely does not include deaths caused by police shootings as a result of an escalation caused by the use of a Taser.
Axon did not respond to a request for comment.
Wong believes that the use of Tasers should be considered in a wider debate about how police use force when responding to a potentially dangerous situation.
“I think that there has to be a reconsideration of what is proportional use of force by officers,” she said. “While training has obviously a huge part to do with that, there’s still a portion of policing culture that has to do with how an officer approaches the use of force.”
“I mean, we’re talking about $2.90 right?” she said of the subway fare the man was alleged to have dodged.
