Drunk in the basement of his family’s home, sick with COVID and suffering from bipolar disorder, the 25-year-old Hazlet man slashed his wrist with a jagged shard from a broken liquor bottle to commit suicide, a police report outlined.

He threatened to harm the police officers called to the home if they got in his way.

“If you guys come downstairs, I’m going to put up a fight, and it is not because I want to fight you guys, it’s because I want to die,” he told the officers, according to the report of the April incident. The report included information from the man’s family on his struggle with mental illness.

After more than an hour of talk and strategy, an officer shot him with two darts from a Taser, a device that sends a jolt of electricity into the body to temporarily immobilize the subject, ending the standoff. He was taken to a psychiatric facility for treatment.

The outcome could have been different. During the tense encounter, another Hazlet officer kept a firearm trained on the man.

In Asbury Park, Hasani Best’s story didn’t end the same way.

Best was armed with a knife and making threatening moves toward police officers in August 2020 when two shots from a Taser fired at him failed to connect.  A city police officer eventually shot and killed the 39-year-old father of three, an incident that was recorded on police body cameras, and is still being investigated by the state Attorney General’s office.

His name was Hasani Best: Asbury Park confronts another killing by police

Both incidents show the range of  outcomes of “conductive energy devices,” commonly called stun guns, that both critics and opponents cite in debating the weapon.

But in New Jersey, even though they can prevent the use of deadly force, they are seldom used by police, the Asbury Park Press found.

Many who use the devices in the field — and the producer of the Taser, Axon Enterprise, which has the market for stun guns virtually cornered — hail them as a life-saving police tool.

USA Today: Tasers are supposed to be safe. Police use ends in hundreds of deaths 

Skeptics cite the number of fatalities they say Tasers are linked to..  According to Reuters, more than a thousand people have died after police stunned them with Tasers, nearly all since the early 2000s. More than 250 people in a two-year period in the U.S. were  killed by police after a Taser failed, according to American Public Media. One hundred of the subjects grew more agitated after being shocked, according to the APM report.

Camden County Police John Martinez points a taser gun that is equipped with a camera on the bottom of the handle in this file photo.

But the experiences in New Jersey are limited.

New Jersey has been slow to adopt Tasers and is still relatively new to them. According to a survey released in October 2020 by the state Attorney General’s Office, law enforcement agencies in New Jersey had 3,184 Tasers. Of the 537 agencies in the state, 324 had none, according to the survey. 

Police employ fists, take-downs, Tasers

New Jersey law enforcement officers reported using conductive energy devices 66 times between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30 of this year, according to the most recent data available. That’s out of more than 11,000 use of force reports filed in the state so far in 2021. Statistics on Taser use in 2020, the only other year recorded, is incomplete. The state data show:

  • Twenty-three of those incidents — 35% — involved a person who police officers perceived as being in the midst of a mental health episode. Some of the 23 were also under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
  • Twenty, or 30%, of the subjects were Black, although Black people make up just 15% of the state’s population.
  • Thirty-five subjects were white and eight were listed as Hispanic.
  • Two of the 66 subjects shocked were women, both Black. Both were perceived to be possibly mentally ill.
  • Subjects ranged in age from a juvenile male to an 80-year-ol. 
  • Police in eight counties, almost all in the north, didn’t fire a Taser at all in those nine months.
  • Animals were stunned in two of the 66 incidents.
  • Edison Police Department, which has the highest number of Tasers in the survey at 200, has not reported using a Taser so far this year.
     

Use of force: What new data says about how police treat Blacks and Latinos

Of the 1,797 use of force reports filed so far in 2021 by Monmouth and Ocean county law enforcement officers, Tasers figured into six of the incidents. Use of force reports are produced by police if they use any force against a subject, from grabbing to gunshots.

Taser use stands in sharp contrast to other methods of subduing a person in Monmouth and Ocean counties.

During the same time, chemical sprays were used 41 times; fists, 50 times; arm bars (a joint lock), 381 times; arms, 603 times; pressure points, 192 times; legs, 30 times; take downs 552 times; and other methods, 188 times. Other methods are not specified. Typically, more than one method is used.

Slow history of use

Limited use of stun guns was first authorized in New Jersey in 2009. But few if any departments acquired the electroshock weapon. Police considered the policy overly restrictive.

Stun guns could be used only when police were dealing with armed, “emotionally disturbed individuals,” the Attorney General’s Office said at the time. The number of stun guns allowed per department was limited based on the size of a municipality. Towns with 25,000 people or less got one per department.

An officer could only use the device if a supervisor on scene gave their authorization.

The 2009 policy underscored that “stun guns can be potentially deadly weapons.”

  • In 2010, a policy change allowed police officers to use stun guns to prevent any suspect from causing death or serious bodily injury to an officer, another person, or himself or herself. Officers could not use the weapon against a fleeing suspect or someone passively resisting. Between November 2012 and March 2016, stun guns were used about 60 times in New Jersey.
  • In 2011, the Attorney General approved two stun gun models for authorized use, both Tasers. That number now stands at three Tasers.
  • In 2016 the Attorney General’s Office loosened restrictions again, allowing stun guns to be used against someone actively resisting arrest “by using or threatening to use physical force or violence” that an officer “reasonably believes creates a substantial risk of causing bodily injury.”
  • In 2020, the office tightened oversight of the use of stun guns, requiring detailed reporting that could make its way to the Attorney General’s Office if an incident was deemed problematic. The new policy also cautioned officers to take into account a person’s age, possible developmental disability, frail physical condition or pregnancy before firing a stun gun.

Dispute over stun gun-related deaths

Tasers have drawn their share of controversy.

In 2017, Reuters published a series examining the effect of the stun guns on people and the company’s way of dealing with problems.

Among its findings, the outlet reviewed 1,005 incidents in the United States in which people died after police stunned them with Tasers. Reuters obtained 712 autopsy reports and identified 153 cases in which the Taser was cited by medical examiners as a cause or contributing factor in the death.

But the company contended then that only 24 people ever died from Tasers: Eighteen from falls and six when the stun guns ignited flammable liquids. The direct effects of the shock never claimed anyone’s life, the company asserted. Since then, Axon has added two more deaths to the list.

It pinned all other deaths following Taser shocks on causes such as drug overdoses and heart problems.

Axon displays a running tally on its website of the number of people it claims Tasers have saved from dying or being seriously injured out of 4.5 million uses since the electroshock weapon was introduced in 1993. The total shows more than 250,000.

In its series, Reuters also outlined how Axon cultivates ties to police, investigators and medical examiner’s and quickly offers guidance on things like press releases and evidence to collect after a death following a Taser strike, “often enmeshing itself in investigations.” It also has connected experts with medical examiners, failing to disclose that Axon had paid those experts before, according to the series.

Steve Tuttle, principal of TASER conductive energy weapon sales who has served as spokesman for the company, denied anything unethical about its practices, saying Axon merely passes along published material and contacts.

Reuters:Black Americans disproportionately die in Taser confrontations with police

Abolitionist view

Jenn M. Jackson, professor of political science at Syracuse University and a proponent of police defunding, acknowledged that Tasers can benefit police, but stressed that they have also killed many.

“There are absolutely instances where using a Taser can help in lieu of other options that are more violent and more harmful and more life threatening. But that does not mean that they should be the go-to option,” Jackson said. “Tasers can still be very lethal.”

But the merits of the Taser are beside the point, she said.

“The alternative is to reduce police contact,” Jackson said. “And in those instances where there is contact, have more tools and mechanisms in place to make sure that the contact does not become lethal.”

Jackson said money should be shifted away from things like Tasers and other weapons and toward prevention and harm-reduction programs such as mental health services in communities, emergency housing, economic development and treatment of drug addiction.

“Defunding is about preventing any of the hypothetical bad guys from existing in the first place,” Jackson said. “The idea is that people often resort to criminal behavior because they are lacking for resources and access that they need.”

‘Absolutely necessary’

But Tom Shea, a retired Long Branch police lieutenant and now program director of the Police Graduate Studies Program at Seton Hall University, said it’s hard to imagine not arming police with Tasers.

“When someone’s holding a knife and is violent and obviously irrational and out of his mind on drugs, those are situations where Tasers are absolutely necessary, because otherwise, you’re going resort to deadly force,” he said.

But Shea said one problem may be holding police back from using Tasers: the optics.

“You look like you’re electrocuting someone,” he said.

How they work

Using compressed nitrogen, Tasers fire two barbed darts attached to the energy source of the gun by thin wires. The darts must connect at least 12 inches apart with either a subject’s body or their clothes to shock them.

The shock incapacitates people by locking up their muscles. It automatically lasts for five seconds, but pulling the trigger again reactivates the charge if the darts remain in place.

A Taser emits 50,000 volts in a pulsing arc to create a conductive path through an air gap, like between clothing and skin. But people hit with the prongs receive 1,200 volts , both when the darts connect with flesh or just clothing, according to Tuttle.

Voltage, however, is less important than a unit of electrical measurement known as a microcoulomb, according to Reuters. Microcoulombs pertain to the number of electrons per pulse. It is a source of some of the controversy surrounding Tasers.

‘Capturing’ the heart

Taser International raised the microcoulombs of its guns after two people were able to resist the shock during a demonstration by the company in the mid-1990s in the Czech Republic.

But in 2008, the company learned that the charge from the popular X26 model could “capture” or speed up a human heart, according to the Reuters series. That made heart failure more likely. Taser International, Axon’s previous name, issued an alert advising police in 2009 to not fire the weapon at a subject’s chest, according to Reuters. But at the same time, the company rejected a recall.

A study published in 2012 in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation showed that the X26 could “provoke cardiac arrest” due to a rapid or irregular heartbeat. As a result of that study, the American Civil Liberties Union called for changes to policies concerning the use of Tasers.

Taser International took the X26 off the market in 2014 in Canada and the U.S. Many are still in use although it’s unclear how many there are in New Jersey. The Attorney General’s Office in its 2020 survey did not include model types. The X26, however, is still approved for use in the state.

The Taser X26 (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

In newer models, the company substantially lowered the charge in new models.

Tuttle maintained that no deaths have been attributed to the Taser’s effect on the heart.

He acknowledged, however, that Tasers can affect heart function, saying that it is extremely rare.

“The probe would have to hit someone with thin skin, like a child, in almost the precise one-in-a-million spots in the heart and the other electrode would have to hit at an angle where you could possibly Tase the heart and cause the heart to rapidly pulsate,” Tuttle said.

Tuttle added: “Anybody with a weakened heart is at risk for any type of threat, whether you’re pepper spraying them, yelling boo, or taking them (into custody) with no force being used.”

How effective is a Taser?

In its report on the effectiveness of Tasers in 2018, American Public Media Reports found 258 fatal police shootings between 2015 and 2017 after which a Taser had been ineffective, meaning the darts failed to connect or bring down a subject. In 100 of them, the subject became enraged or more aggressive after being shocked.

APM also researched Taser success rates at several large city police departments, finding they ran from 54% to 79.5%, well below previous estimates mentioned by the company.

Tuttle acknowledged that 79.5% — the highest mark in APM’s review of success rates – is a “good” number.

“That’s a great success rate,” he said, which adds up to a more than 20% miss rate.

The nature of encounters between police and subjects, given clothing and fast, sometimes erratic movement, make a 100% across-the-board success unrealistic, he said.

“These are used in really dangerous situations,” Tuttle said. “We don’t have a magic bullet.”

Ken Serrano covers crime, breaking news, police accountability and local issues. Reach him at 732-643-4029 or [email protected].

Source: Asbury Park

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