"Medical documentation strongly supports that the Tasers are a safer use of force alternative compared to hands on, punches, chemical sprays, batons and canine bites," Tuttle said.
Hi Gopher: Yes, this statement is so over-simplified as to be meaningless. Begs questions: Safer for who? As a percentage of what?
It's been about 2 years since I saw an incident across the street from me (this was in Northern California). A clearly problemmatic man was standing naked on the sidewalk at about 11:00 PM. There were four police officers ranged around him. While I couldn't hear anything that was being said, i could clearly see that there were no antagonistic moves being made. One of the officers has a taser out, and at some point (as I said, without visible provocation) shoots the naked man. The man immediately goes down, backwards, crashes the back of his head on the sidewalk. After a few seconds of the man not moving, one of the officers produces a rolled towel from his patrol car and places it under the man's head. The man never got up - after about 10 minutes an ambulance arrived and took the man away.
Of course, the immediate death of some people from tasers has been in the news.
The place tasers play in LE may need to be refined a bit; from what little I've seen, it appears that there may have been a certain nonchalance regarding their presumed non-lethal properties, or that they have become overused. Of course, the company the produces them would prefer that their product continue widening sales.
Off Topic Comment:
The south did before the civil war, and if they'd just not had to take the first shot they might have lasted longer.
I believe the southern states had self-assessed that their economy and "way of life" (e.g., slave labor) would not survive without an expansion of "slave states". If I understand it, this was at the crux of their political debate. As the territories became states, would they be "slave states"? If not, that was it - they were doomed. This explains a bit of the desperation with which they approached secession - the Federal government was setting things up so that there would be no new "slave states". So, in their own estimation, they were destined for extinction unless they fired the first shot.
