Commissioner calls for more “lethal weapons"
01 May 2004
London's most senior police officer, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, John Stevens, has called for the police use of the Taser to be expanded, despite international concerns about its safety. In April, five UK police forces finished a year-long trial of the M-26 Taser (see Statewatch vol 13 no 2, 14 no 1), a "less-lethal" hand-held weapon that disables individuals by firing a dart for up to 7 metres delivering a 50,000 volt electric charge. A final decision on whether the guns will be used nationwide has yet to be made, but the Police Federation has also backed them. Stevens, who will be retiring at the end of the year, said that he would like to see "police response cars in the force kitted out with the Taser."
There is widespread alarm at the use of such an unstable weapon, which is banned for export from the UK "because of evidence of their use in torture", according to Amnesty International's UK arms campaigner, Robert Parker. Amnesty has documented electro-shock torture in 87 countries since 1990 including in at least three EU member states, Greece, Spain and Austria. They note that this figure is certainly an underestimate and observe that: "Those who manufacture and trade in this equipment benefit from official secrecy and lack of accountability."
There is also concern about the weapon's general safety. According to Alex Berenson, writing in the New York Times, manufacturer Taser International's primary safety studies for the latest M-26 model "consist of tests on a single pig in 1996 and on five dogs in 1999". The results were never published in a peer-reviewed journal. Taser International "has no full-time medical director and has never created computer models to simulate the effect of its shocks...". Moreover, no US federal or state agencies have studied the safety of Tasers or the deaths alleged to have been caused by them. They are, to quote Berenson, "effectively unregulated."
Police Review 16.7.04; Alex Berenson "As Police use Tasers, Questions over Safety Increase" New York Times 18.7.04; Brian Rappert "Moralising violence - representions of electro-shock weapons"
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2001/aug/taser.pdf;
Amnesty International "The Pain Merchants: Facts and Figures" (2003) http://news.amnesty.org/may/Index/ENGPOL300272003