A tool of compliance

I was listening to a very interesting news item today on Radio 5 Live. The subject matter was some kind of suggestion that tasers should be made available for wider use within the police forces in Britain rather than being limited to use by qualified firearms officers as an alternative to lethal hardware.

As part of this programme they played an audio snippet from an altercation within the United States where a police officer had stopped a female motorist for an unspecified reason and demanded that she terminated a telephone call that she was having. She refused. The officer asked her a number of times to end the call and each time she refused. At some point the officer started stating that if she did not end the call he would taser her. She continued to refuse and he continued to threaten the use of the taser. The audio ended in a number of long screams from the woman as the officer fired his taser and deliberately delivered a number of shocks to her. It was a shocking piece; the woman was clearly in a great deal of protracted pain.

This has been seen as mission creep where an alterative method to lethal force has been used (on a number of occasions apparently) by the police for situations where lethal force should and would (hopefully) never be used.

The term banded around during the broadcast, and I think it’s an excellent and accurate term, is that tasers are increasingly being used as tools of compliance.

This was the argument that was put forward by an interviewee who was against the wider issuing and use of tasers by the police within Britain. It was a compelling piece and a compelling argument. Let us not forget that tasers have two reasons for their application. Firstly to incapacitate an individual and secondly to cause an individual pain. It should never be used simply for the later but, as is apparently happening in the United States, its application as a method for delivering pain is a compelling and attractive property of the device for some officers.