The Taser’s edge

The safety of Tasers has been a hot topic of discussion as the stun guns have been gradually adopted by various police departments in Indiana. This should add to the debate:

Researchers tracked police Taser use on 962 people in six jurisdictions around the country from July 2005 to June of this year. The study was funded by the U.S. Justice Department.

Three of these people sustained moderate or severe nonfatal injuries requiring hospital admission, the study found.

Two of them had head injuries suffered when they fell to the ground after being stunned. One had a type of muscle breakdown condition also seen in people whose body temperature gets too high, the researchers said.

Of the rest, 216 people sustained mild injuries like abrasions, contusions and minor cuts requiring outpatient medical treatment, and 743 suffered no injury, the study found.

Two who were shocked with the weapon died, but the researchers said investigations and autopsies determined the deaths to have been unrelated to the Taser.

“The data that we’ve got supports the safety of these devices, in that 99.7 percent of the people on the receiving end in the real world had either no injury or mild injury,” Dr. William Bozeman, an emergency medicine specialist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

This isn’t satisfying critics, of course. Amnesty International perfers its own data, which show that 277 people have died in the U.S. since June 2001 after being shocked by a Taser.

That 99.7 percent figure seems impressive to me, and having one more non-lethal option for police seems hard to disagree with. But how “safe” Tasers are depends on numbers it would be hard to come up with. How many times were Tasers used when guns would have been used had the Tasers not been available? We can’t really know. On the other hand, how many times were Tasers used when no force at all would have been used in the absence of Tasers? We can’t know that, either.