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Set Tasers to pun | Sep 03, 2006 13:49
Thanks for all the comments, folks - this is certainly an emotive issue. And fair enough - a device that causes pain should cause some emotional response. But some of the rhetoric is starting to snowball now, and surely, this can only cheapen the debate.
I was particularly miffed by what Hone Harawira said (according to a commenter on Frogblog who was present) at the Taser protest: "I've been arrested about 30 or so times, if the Police had Tasers back then I wouldn't have survived to be here speaking to you, or to have made it into Parliament…"
Let's get some geek on.
What is the likelihood of being killed with a Taser?
Chance of death = Total number Taser deaths / Total number times of Taser used
Total number of times Taser used (in the US) = 200,000+
Number of deaths where Taser was a factor, according to coroners (in the US): 23+
(Why do the Greens/Maori Party/Amnesty keep using the ~180 figure? The 23+ is the official opinion of coroners, who's job it is to determine the cause of death and who are professionally trained to do so. The ~180 is simple correlation. This isn't an unprofessional opinion, it isn't even an opinion: In no way does the ~180 number substantiate any sort of causal link between the Taser and the deaths.)
Chance of death = ~0.012%
I thought 50,000 volts was pretty deadly?
The Taser is fundamentally different from, say, the electric chair, because it uses electrical energy to disrupt the nervous system, rather than to destroy tissue (i.e. Cook it). Because all it needs to do is to confuse muscles with random electrical signals to override the electrical signals from the brain, it only needs a very small current. The high voltage is necessary to send that current through the body, but it doesn't carry a lot of energy.
To use an analogy with water, voltage is the pressure of the water, rather than the volume of water. A high-voltage system like the Taser would be like a supersoaker - it's high pressure, but there's not really a heck of a lot of water coming at you.
For practical purposes, the voltage affects how likely the current will zap you, but not how much damage it will cause.
How often will they be used?
Here are the rules of engagement that the police are under, according to the Herald.
Police may use Tasers only to:
* Defend themselves, or others, if they fear physical injury to themselves, or others, and they cannot reasonably protect themselves, or others, less forcefully.
* Arrest an offender if they believe on reasonable grounds he or she poses a threat of physical injury and the arrest cannot be effected less forcefully.
* Resolve an incident where a person is acting in a manner likely to physically injure themselves and the incident cannot be resolved less forcefully.
* Prevent the escape of an offender if they believe on reasonable grounds that he or she poses a threat of physical injury to any person, and the escape cannot be prevented less forcefully.
* Deter attacking animals.
Tasers come with their own internal logging system, recording exactly when they are used.
Police maintain that pepper spray will be their main means of personal protection.
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Still, it's all about trust, it seems, according to PA readers.
James:
If we needed Tasers in this country then I'd expect the Police to be able to point to an overwhelming weight of specific incidents in the past where the use of the Taser would have resulted in a demonstrably better and safer outcome (for the police, the public and the crim).
And don't start with the Waitara shooting - that doesn't count as the Police continue to use utterly faulty logic to justify the use of force there.
I don't trust the Police - I accept we need them, and a good friend is on the road to becoming a copper - but too many of my personal interactions with them (and I'm no crook, but I've been both a 'victim of crime' and a student protester) have left me with the sicky feeling that many cops are jumped up wannabe fascists who shouldn't be allowed near weapons that can inflict the level of pain the Taser can.
I've seen too many student protests, too many arrogant bobbies, too many Clint Rickards....
End of the day - I don't trust them, and I shouldn't have to trust the with Tasers."
Nick from Youth Law:
Sure, the Taser may be an effective tool, but this isn't America. Why do *our* Police need it? I just haven't heard a convincing explanation of the need for this weapon in NZ.
I have little faith in the "strict policies and guidelines for use" approach. I see the trusty phrase "reasonable belief" scattered through Police Taser literature. In other words, its open slather. And *how* will Police officers be accountable for misuse of the Taser? Through the Police Complaints Authority? Sounds like a good one for a Tui billboard.
If introduced, the Taser will eventually be misused by NZ Police. This is inevitable, just as it was inevitable that they would misuse pepper spray, batons, hand-to-hand combat techniques, and of course, the power to prosecute.
Our Police are doing a great job against violent criminals by using the significant powers they already enjoy. The trouble is they are also doing a great job of exercising those powers against innocent citizens. If they struggle to exercise their powers responsibly now, is adding the Taser (just for the hell of it, apparently) going to make me feel any safer?"
Amanda K:
Tasers are popular in the US police force because they incapacitate without killing and they probably prevent lots of gun deaths, right? We probably all agree on that one. But NZ police don't routinely carry guns, so why are we upgrading to a terrible weapon that inflicts such extreme pain? My fear is that it's too easy. NZ cops seem to have been getting more punchy and shouty as they watch more US cop shows, and it's probably likely that many will be keen to try out a Taser if they get the chance. It would be a very sad and horrid thing if Tasers became as routine here as they are in other countries. I rather enjoy living in a country where we treat even prisoners like human beings (or strive to, anyway)."
[Google-ad-irony-watch: Why are PA's Google-ad selling Christian t-shirts and asking whether Christ is coming back? I blame Tze-Ming for mentioning National's 'bedrock values'. It's bloody creepy how Google-adsense can pick up dog-whistle rhetoric so efficiently...]
Tasers: You think they'd be funny... | Aug 31, 2006 04:06
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Let's start with the funny, then. Big burly bear of a cop takes one for the team and pretends to get nuts on another cop right before he's being shot with a Taser. His expression: Somewhere between Wile E Coyote with an anvil on his head and McCully Culkin in Home Alone. Much profanity ensues. Hilarious.
Also in the "Comedy" section of YouTube: Drama Queen Gets Tasered by Cops. Not so hilarious. (Warning: It's not graphic, but it's real, and most definitely disturbing.)
In the clip, Victoria Goodwin is pulled over by Officer Rich McNevin for going 51mph in a 35mph zone (that's about 80km/h in a 50km/h zone). She's pretty pissed off and proceeds to give McNevin an earful while he's getting dispatch to run a check on her vehicle.
McNevin hears back from dispatch - aside from the speeding, driving with a broken windshield, broken brake lights and no seat-belt, it turns out that Goodwin is also a disqualified driver.
McNevin approaches the car, tells her to put out the cigarette, put down the phone and get out of the car. She refuses. McNevin tries to pull her out, she resists. After a brief tussle, McNevin pulls out his Taser.
"Get out of the car now, or I'm going to tase you. Get out of the car now, or I'm going to tase you. I'm going to tell you one more time: Get out of the car. Get out of the car, or I'm going to tase you."
Goodwin refuses to get out of the car and continues phone call to her brother, informing him that she is being arrested.
You can't say he didn't warn her.
"Arghhhhh!"
Much screaming ensues. As Goodwin squirms on the ground alternating between screaming and whimpering, McNevin orders her to get on her stomach and put her hands behind her back. She can't, she says - probably because of the paralysis or the shock. With the electrodes from the Taser still attached, McNevin zaps her again. More screaming ensues.
The Palm Beach Post reports the story, including an interview with McNevin's partner, Sergent Sedrick Aiken, who explains why McNevin acted as he did. I'd actually say this one was a marginal call, but there's a TV Guide's worth of American police brutality on YouTube.
This clip from Fox shows a man in an armchair getting tasered. This one has a protester being tasered while on the ground. And this utterly inexcusable one: A prisoner in an interrogation room is tasered for refusing to stand up (after he's fried, he's ordered to sit down).
Finally, in this one, 31-year-old Frederick Williams is tasered five times in a row while half a dozen cops hold him down. He dies. (Warning, warning, warning: Do not view this clip. Just don't.) Here is the news story explaining what happened.
This, awkwardly enough, is where I state that I'm not against the trialing of the Taser, and I'm firmly unconvinced by the Greens' argument, namely, that we don't know that the Taser is safe and that we need "a more thorough investigation into Tasers and their effects".
We're not talking about waffle-makers here. This is supposed to be a weapon that can instantly neutralise potentially dangerous persons. It fires metal darts that deliver excruciating, paralysis-causing, 50,000-volt electric shocks. Being on the receiving end of such a device is, obviously, not "safe".
According to an Amnesty International report, more than 150 people in America have died after being struck with a Taser since June 2001. The report also notes that only in "at least 23 cases" have the coroner listed the Taser as a cause of contributory factor to the death. "Most of those who died were agitated and/or under the influence of drugs and most were also subjected to multiple or prolonged electro-shocks... Many of the deaths have also continued to involve the application of physical restraint and/or pepper spray," says the report.
Taser International says that all the deaths were caused by pre-existing heart conditions or drug use. Ahem. Astoundingly, they back this up with a University of Missouri study where they shocked a dog 236 times (!) with a Taser. This study found that the "risk of inducing ventricular fibrillation by the normal use of these Tasers in healthy humans is very small".
Of course, the Taser folks are generally full of shit (check it out - it reads like something out of Lord of War or the very excellent Thank You for Smoking). However, all Amnesty has to go on is correlation. 150 people died "after being struck with a Taser", but not necessarily because of it. When you factor in other force used during the arrest, drug-use, pre-existing medical conditions and general violence against prisoners (by police or otherwise), it's very hard to swallow the 150 figure. It's not as if the coroners in those cases were unaware of the Taser use, they were aware of it and did not consider it to be a contributing factor in the majority of cases.
There's no reason to doubt the 23 coroners' who found that the Taser *was* a contributing factor, though. But to put it into perspective, the United States had around 2,000 cases of justifiable homicide by police officers during the same period. That is, around 2,000 people were killed by on-duty cops (nearly all with firearms), and this is not even counting deaths in custody, manslaughter, all the accidents and the "accidents" that happen to suspects.
So, if it has the potential to kill, why use it?
The Taser is a "less-than-lethal weapon". It's primary purpose is to quickly and effectively neutralise a target; not killing the target is secondary (important, but still secondary). When does it come in handy? Here are the other YouTube clips that I've been saving.
This drunk driver starts attacking a cop.
This guy is making a break for it.
This suspect is fleeing the scene of a shooting, possibly armed.
They are dangerous, they get tasered, they become incapacitated. If there is a risk associated with the Taser, it needs to be weighed against the danger a suspect poses to the rest of the community, and it needs to be weighed up against the dangers associated with neutralising the suspect with another method (danger to suspect as well as the police).
Where a suspect is dangerous, that clearly outweighs the risks; and while Tasers have the potential to kill, so does a baton or a fist.
The problem, as demonstrated by some of the earlier YouTube clips, is when the Tasers is used to "induce compliance". The interrogation room clip, for example, was absolutely disgusting. The prisoner posed no threat, but the cop used a Taser as a pain-on-demand device to "induce compliance" for a trivial command.
In Frederick Williams' example, the cops used the Taser senselessly and ceaselessly.
Sick puppies like Frank Haden say that "most people will be glad that he [the generic criminal] has been made to feel pain, and humiliated by being heard yelling" - but fuck him, for us sane folks, this is certainly not about causing pain for the hell of it. There is a genuine role for the Taser as a tactical weapon; these examples of abuse are not it.
The difference between the good and the bad is not in the hardware, but in the situation. Tasers don't come with carte blanche; they come with a strict policy on when and how they can be used, and police officers will be accountable when they use it.
The danger, says Campaign Against the Taser's Marie Dyhrberg, is that Tasers will replace pepper spray and the baton rather than the gun. That is, she is afraid that the Taser will become a low-threshold weapon that the police use at the first sign of trouble.
Well, for their part, the police have said that pepper spray will continue to be "the main means of personal protection for front line officers". And as for the baton being safer than the Taser, that's a dubious claim that nobody except for Dyhrberg seems to be making (okay, she's implying it rather than claiming it).
If the use of Tasers in mundane cases is the problem, then the solution should be to strictly limit their use on dangerous individuals and where other methods are not viable - i.e. *Make* it a weapon of (second to) last resort.
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Steak break | Aug 24, 2006 03:11
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Deadline nights are kinda like slumber parties. By myself. With work. But apart from that, it's just like a slumber party. I drink can after can of Red Bull and eat chocolate biscuits. I get to stay up all night in my jammies and listen to Queen.
I've been triple-stacked with deadlines, this is my second night without sleep, my house is so cold that penniless Ukrainian pensioners wouldn't live here. My will to live is sustained only by that $7 piece of scotch fillet soaking in garlic and pepper downstairs. Ah - the 02:30 steak, you've brought me back from the abyss so many times.
Before my taurine-addled mind forgets, I have a public service announcement for Wellingtonians: An Oxford Union-style debate on New Zealand's international aid contributions (or the lack thereof), entitled "I can smell the stingyness on your breath", will be taking place tonight at 18:00 at Rutherford House, by the Railway Station.
On the pro-handouts side will be Marian Hobbs and Matt Robson; on the anti-poor people side will be John Hayes and Matthew Hooton. Filling out the ranks, I understand, will be Vic's finest, Gareth Richards and Green machine Holly Walker. The debate will be chaired by Cameron Bennett.
That is all.
It's been a long, long week. Not only have I spent most of it in Auckland, but I've spent most of it in South Auckland. On public transport. Yes, that's right Aucklanders, I came to your city and I used your public transport. A rookie mistake, obviously. I spent four hours on the bus on Friday. And here I was thinking that you Aucklanders just liked to have something to whinge about...
And while I'm whinging, what the hell is wrong with your Air Bus?
It wastes half an hour before it even gets out of the CBD, taxiing around 24 (!!!) hotels where nobody gets on. None of the stops have a timetable, so you have to turn up 20 minutes earlier and hope that one will eventually turn up. Online, they provide a timetable with street names, only to have different stops along the route that pass through the same street at presumably different times. A pox on your city, that service is.
Still, the trip wasn't all bad. I got to see Fresher Food's chip factory, where they can produce three tons of pre-cooked/frozen chips every hour. The potatoes get flash steamed and flash cooled so their skins fall off, then shot through a tube of blades to be sliced up. In between, they run under giant spinning wheel of blades, which hang menacingly above the potatoes. If the image recognition system finds a black spot on the potatoes, one of the blade on the wheel snaps out and gouges out the spot.
Mmm. Chips. Mmm. Steak...
And this week's NGA:
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Speaking of drunken yoofs... | Aug 22, 2006 02:19
Ah, drunken student riots - the most well-meaning sort of riots. Except maybe football hooliganism. Oh, and pro-democracy riots. But really, it's the sort of riot that doesn't try too hard to be violent, because trying too hard would be uncool.
John Hartevelt from Critic was there on Saturday and he's put up a blow-by-blow account of the riot on the Critic blog. Sounds like a blast. Particularly interesting is the wide array of culturally-appropriate challenges at the students' disposal (mooning, the haka, "Fuck the Po-Leese", weird chants and generic projectile throwing). It's so PC of them.
I hope he got some good photos, though I suspect the combination of night-time photography, reflecting vests and being caught between bottles and batons would have made it quite hard.
Stay tuned this week for more riot stories...
Dem krazy yoofs | Aug 18, 2006 11:24
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It's still raw, says ex-Scarfies, when they talk about the "Wheelie Bin" incident. In 2001, two 19 year-old Otago students - boozed off their faces - rode down Baldwin Street (aka. "The steepest street in the world") in a wheelie bin. They crashed. One died, the other suffered serious head injuries.
The DomPost has already concluded that Daniel Hansman's death is a result of our "deadly binge-drinking culture". It seems callous in a situation as sensitive as this one to jump the gun in lieu of, you know, evidence, but they do have a point.
Extrapolating the drunken behaviour that we see every weekend (and many weeknights), it's perfectly plausible that someone - anyone - in that state could have fallen into the water and not be able to get out. Even if it wasn't what happened with Hansman, doesn't it indicate that it's unwise to get into that state in the first place?
I think, in the case of student binge-drinking anyway, ALAC is missing the point. It is not that students engage in risky behaviour because they binge-drink; the binge-drinking is part of a wider culture of risk-taking behaviour.
Sure, a sober individual would have known better than to ride a brakeless, rudderless plastic box on wheels down an extremely steep road, but the point is that binge-drinking occurs in the context of "Hey - let's get really drunk and do something really stupid!".
Alcohol is simply one of many means.
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Since Tze Ming is overseas, I'll express appropriately angry outrage on her behalf as the Herald writes:
International students from Asia are turning away from kidnapping and extortion to selling hard drugs..."
Raa. Angry.
At least The Press was good enough to point out that it was "Asian student felons"/"Asian student criminal" who were more interested in dealing drugs than kidnapping these days, rather than *all* "international students from Asia".
Out PCed by The Press? Burn.
It's pretty straightforward, really - not all international students from Asia are kidnappers/drug dealers, so, pretty please Mr Subeditor-Man, don't imply it.
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NGA: sorry, you're still meat | Aug 11, 2006 01:13
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Does your money keep you warm at night? | Aug 09, 2006 02:32
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With the electricity prices, it obviously does. But apparently, it keeps you company, too. According to the Social Report 2006, experiences of loneliness dramatically decreases as you get richer. Higher income also makes you more trusting.
So much for Citizen Kane's you-will-die-bitter-and-alone theory.
Another strange little gem is that more and more people are having multiple ethnic identities. In 1991, there were 4.4% more ethnic identifications than there were people surveyed - i.e. it can be very roughly concluded that around 4.4% of people identified with more than one identity. In 2001, this figure almost doubled to 8.5%. So, either more people identified with multiple ethnicities, or people identified with more ethnicities than before.
With income inequality, it's interesting to note that the biggest jump came in the late 80s/early 90s (duh), but that during National's first two terms, not only did it plateau overall - it experienced the only substantial dip in 16 years. But with most of the jump happening before 1991, it's hard to blame this Labour government for it (about a quarter of the increase in income inequality has happened under Helen's watch).
What's been most picked up by the MSM, though, is the increase in "severe hardship". Brian Easton has a thorough critique of the index used to measure hardship on No Right Turn, but working with the data on face value, it's very interesting to see just which groups score high on hardship.
Top of the list, solo-parent families. 55% of them were reported as having "low living standards" in 2000. By 2004, this percentage grew into 60%. Pacific Island families was just as bad, going from 49% to 54%. This is followed by families on income-tested benefits, then 18-24 year olds and people renting from private landlords.
A much more detailed picture is available in the form of the "Population with Low Income" data. Unlike the "hardship" stuff, this is based on a comparison of household/individual income with the median income. In particular, figuring out who has an income after housing cost that is 60% less than the median. It has more data points, and gives a much clearer picture.
For example, in 1987-88, 13.9% of solo-parent families were below the 60% line (i.e. "poor"). By 1992-93, this went up to [glup] 63.3%. By 1997-98, it dropped to 51%, went back up to 60.7% in 2000-2001, and by 2003-04, it dropped to 43%.
For families on income-tested benefits, 25.1% of them were poor back in 1987-88, this tripled by 1992-93, before dropping back down to 51.2% in 2003-04.
The patterns are glaring, they underlie all the socioeconomic data, and they all point to the blazingly obvious - there were a lot of changes between the Fourth Labour Government and the first term of Bolger's National Government. A lot of people got shafted. It's taken over a decade to heal. The healing isn't done.
Business as usual, then.
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And here's last week's NGA that I was a bit slack in posting. And as an addendum, my belated two-cents on Ron Mark: I rather like the idea of MPs not having the human trained out of them. Doing the finger in jest is a bit naughty, but honestly, you'd have to be quite a prick to attach any kind of moral significance to it. Abusing a position of power to exploit a vulnerable person for financial gain, on the other hand...
As usual, click here for more NGA.
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