How Taser inserts itself into investigations involving its own weapons

Re:How Taser inserts itself into investigations involving it... by tomschlick on Thursday September 07, 2017 @05:48PM (#15196070)

Do you have any proof?

The article listed states 276 related reports of death after taser use since 2000. I'd imagine tasers are used a few hundred times per day across the US, if not more.

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Re:How Taser inserts itself into investigations involving it... by bustadjustme on Thursday September 07, 2017 @07:41PM (#15196784)

Yeah your number's surprisingly (to me) actually not far off.

Use of Tasers varies pretty widely from department to department -- according to [1] the Richmond County SD reports about 0.053 uses per officer-month, Miami-Dade PD about 0.0074 uses per officer-month, and Seattle PD about 0.056 uses per officer-month.

Extrapolating the RCSD value across the US, with over 800k officers total [2], it comes out to about 43k uses per month. Given the ~200 months over which this data was gathered, that's 9.2M uses, which makes the 276 fatalities only 0.003% of all incidents (as a best-guess).

Obviously that in no way implies Taser's behavior was ethical; but it's actually a surprisingly low fatality rate for a weapon still considered somewhat lethal.

[1] https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/231176.pdf

[2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/csllea08.pdf

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