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The fatal shooting this month of Daunte Wright by a Minnesota patrol officer who allegedly confused her pistol for a Taser had every appearance of a freak accident.
Tasers are designed as non-lethal weapons, a tool for law-enforcement officers to safely subdue noncompliant suspects. Had officer Kim Potter drawn the intended weapon and tased Wright instead of shooting him, the 20-year-old Black man might be alive today.
Yet Potter’s mistake was no anomaly.
It’s part of a pattern of sloppy, reckless and deadly use of the weapon involved in hundreds of deaths and injuries in the past decade because of substandard or inconsistent training for law enforcement, an investigation by USA TODAY and the Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism at Indiana University found.
Officers in many cases defied best practices recommended by device manufacturers and sidestepped basic use-of-force protocols.
In July 2013, a Chicago police officer tased a pregnant woman three times – including once in the abdomen – after she pretended to use her cell phone to record authorities towing her van. She miscarried her baby.
Four years later, two Arlington, Texas, police officers fired a Taser at a 39-year-old suicidal man after watching him douse himself with gasoline. The electrical currents immediately set Gabriel Olivas aflame and burned down his house. Olivas died of his injuries a few days later.
Two years after that, Louisiana state troopers tased 49-year-old Ronald Greene at least three times in 20 seconds after he failed to stop his car for an unspecified traffic violation. Police initially told Greene’s family he died from crash injuries. But a medical report noted that his bruised and bloodied body also had two Taser probes still lodged in his back.
Such incidents highlight a lack of uniform state or national standards for the use of conducted energy weapons like Tasers and comprehensive training for the officers who wield them.
No federal agency tracks how many people are killed or seriously injured following Taser use by law-enforcement officers, nor how many departments are equipped with the devices. And no one keeps tabs on how many law enforcement agencies adopt the dozens of safety guidelines recommended by device manufacturers and other police training organizations.
One of the few sources tracking fatalities is an online database started by a former newspaper editor.
Since 2010, there have been at least 513 cases in which subjects died soon after police used Tasers on them, according to fatalencounters.org. Examples from the data include a man who fell to the ground and hit his head after being tased and many more who die after losing consciousness, sometimes hours after they were tased. Because there’s no government source for the data, the actual totals are undoubtedly higher, the website’s founder said.
Reporters at USA TODAY and the Arnolt Center scoured hundreds of pages of arrest and court documents from Pennsylvania to California, interviewed dozens of attorneys, law enforcement and criminal justice experts, and analyzed scores of documents. Among the findings:
In the absence of federal guidance, most decisions about Taser use and training are left to individual agencies. While some have adopted strict Taser policies and use-of-force reports, others give officers the tool without training. The result is a hodgepodge of guidelines with no outside oversight.
Compared with firearms training, Taser instruction is treated as an afterthought in many departments and training academies. The Indiana Law Enforcement Academy, for example, does not include Taser training in its 16-week police cadet training curriculum. One suburban Philadelphia police department allowed virtually all its officers to carry Tasers with lapsed certifications.
Taser-like devices are marketed as a less-lethal option for emergency self-defense and preventing harm. But police have been accused of using them as punishment, repeatedly firing 50,000 volts of electricity into individuals when there is no apparent imminent threat of harm, temporarily paralyzing the nervous system and muscles.
Four of five cases that ended in death began as calls for non-violent incidents, and 84% were unarmed. In cases where race could be determined, Black people accounted for nearly 40% of those killed, about three times their share of the U.S. population.
“Mistakes happen,” said Maria Haberfeld, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, “but if mistakes happen over and over, they are not necessarily mistakes.”
Law enforcement and device manufacturers argue that Tasers and similar weapons have saved more lives than they’ve ended since law-enforcement agencies started using them more than two decades ago.
When used properly, such devices allow police officers to bring under control threatening and unruly subjects without the need for deadly force or physical restraint maneuvers, supporters say. They minimize the risk of harm to suspects and officers.
While no reliable data exists on how often law enforcement uses weapons like Tasers, a 2011 Department of Justice report cited survey-based studies that put the risk of death from the devices at less than 0.25%, or 1 in 400.
Mistakes happen. But if mistakes happen over and over, they are not necessarily mistakes.
Read the full story in USA Today.
