Zap, You’re Dead!

In recent years, there have been around 1,000 police shootings per year that have resulted in the death of the relevant suspect. We’ve seen riots, protests, criminal proceedings against cops (few ever get convicted) and political upheavals flowing out of public reaction to some of these fatalities and a strong push to retrain police officers to think and slow down before pulling that often-fatal trigger. While the U.S. Department of Justice had been pressing certain notorious police departments – even securing court-ordered restructuring – the Trump administration has pretty much reversed that practice under the “law and order” mantra that has gathered a rather nasty connotation among minority communities where most of these police killings occur. Clearly, government sanctioned racism is alive and well.

There has been an equal pressure to train police officers in the use of what is generally thought to be non-fatal alternatives to traditional bullets: rubber bullets, which can certainly kill or severely injure if they hit a particularly vulnerable part of the human anatomy, pepper spray and tear gas plus the increased use of Tasers to take down and control suspects. Tasers seem to be the preferred go-to non-lethal weapon of choice for close range, one-on-one, police/suspect confrontations. Over the past five years, Taser usage by police has risen by 50%. But how “non-lethal” are they in practice?

Alex Pasternak, writing for the August 22^nd FastCompany.com and citing a Reuters report, addressed this frequently overlooked question: “Tasers save lives, say police officials and Axon Enterprise, the company that makes them, citing independent studies showing that when deployed correctly—according to ‘guidelines’ Axon offers to police—Tasers reduce injuries among both officers and the people they subdue. Steve Tuttle, the company’s vice president for communications, said they are ‘the safest force option available to law enforcement.’

“But amid widespread concern about police use of force, there is no authoritative data about fatalities involving Tasers or any weapon used by police. The Taser is one of the most widely used: More than 90% of U.S. police agencies use them, and they have been deployed more than 3 million times in the field, says Axon.

“The company says that only 24 people have ever died from Tasers—18 from fatal injuries in falls caused by a Taser strike, and six from fires sparked by the weapon’s electricity. Not a single person, the manufacturer says, has died from the direct effects of the Taser’s powerful shock to the heart or body. Axon called the Reuters report misleading because most of the deaths also involved other use-of-force and because the autopsies had not been peer-reviewed, even though courts don’t require that standard…

“[Nevertheless,] Reuters has counted 1,005 incidents in the U.S. in which people died after police stunned them with the electrical weapons, most since the early 2000s. The Taser was ruled to be a cause or contributing factor in 153 of those deaths—far more than the 24 cases the company has counted.

“According to court records, police reports, and news stories from 1983, as well as reports by other organizations, Reuters found that

·         Nine in 10 of those who died were unarmed and one in four suffered from mental illness or neurological disorders, according to Reuters.

·         In nine of every 10 incidents reviewed, the deceased was unarmed.

·         More than 100 of the fatal encounters began with a 911 call for help during a medical emergency.

·         More than 400 incidents included court documents that had detailed accounts of the incidents, and a fourth of those showed that Tasers were the only form of police force.

·         In 193 out of a total of 442 wrongful death cases filed after the deaths, cities and their insurers paid a total of $172 million, but due to confidentiality, the actual value of awards in legal settlements is certainly higher than $172 million…

“The probability of dying from a Taser in a police encounter may be impossible to calculate, researchers say, given a lack of official data on their use, the fact that deaths often have more than one cause, and other complexities. Partly due to ethical constraints, little scientific research exists on how Tasers affect people in mental health crises, people under the influence of drugs, those with heart defects, and those who may be pregnant.

“Axon also keeps a record of deadly incidents involving Tasers, but the company doesn’t share that data. After learning of the Reuters investigation, Axon sent a memo to law enforcement groups summarizing some of the key points of the Reuters report, describing them as ‘not new’ and promising to provide ‘key resources’ to repudiate its findings.”

The American criminal justice system has a particularly bad reputation among developed nations. Not only are we the most incarceration-happy nation on earth – with only 5% of the earth’s population, we have a quarter of global incarcerated people – but beginning with the Reagan administration’s closure of legions of mental hospitals, releasing some pretty impaired people into the streets, we seem to have transferred those people needing medical mental help into jails and prisons ill-equipped to handle the caseload.

“[It] has been shown that about 20 percent of prison inmates have a serious mental illness, 30 to 60 percent have substance abuse problems and, when including broad-based mental illnesses, the percentages increase significantly. For example, 50 percent of males and 75 percent of female inmates in state prisons, and 75 percent of females and 63 percent of male inmates in jails, will experience a mental health problem requiring mental health services in any given year.

“It also appears that the individuals being incarcerated have more severe types of mental illness, including psychotic disorders and major mood disorders than in the past.  In fact, according to the American Psychiatric Association, on any given day, between 2.3 and 3.9 percent of inmates in state prisons are estimated to have schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder; between 13.1 and 18.6 percent have major depression; and between 2.1 and 4.3 percent suffer from bipolar disorder.

“Across the nation, individuals with severe mental illness are three times more likely to be in a jail or prison than in a mental health facility and 40 percent of individuals with a severe mental illness will have spent some time in their lives in either jail, prison, or community corrections. I think we can safely say there is no doubt that our jails and prisons have become America’s major mental health facilities, a purpose for which they were never intended.” Dean Aufderheide writing in HealthAffairs.org (4/1/14). Police often do not know what to do when confronted with the bizarre behavior of a mentally-ill suspect, and Tasers have become a very common tool in containing these individuals, with often horrible results.

“In a quarter of the 1,005 fatalities examined by Reuters, a quarter involved people suffering from mental illness. Amid cuts in government-funded mental health services, police encounters with those people have become more common: 1 in every 100 police calls involves a person with a mental health disorder, according to research by the American Psychiatric Association. Police experts worry that Tasers are used too often by officers when handling those encounters.” FastCompany.com

And once we incarcerate seriously-mentally-ill inmates, what happens? Stuff like this, earlier this year: “For 46 hours, Andrew Holland’s legs and arms were shackled to a chair in San Luis Obispo County Jail… The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was left in his own filth, eating and drinking almost nothing. He was naked, except for a helmet and mask covering his face and a blanket that slipped off his lap, exposing him to jail staff who passed by his glass-fronted cell.

“When he was finally unbound, guards dumped him to the floor of a nearby cell. Within 40 minutes, he had stopped breathing… Holland’s death Jan. 22 has provoked outrage in the Central Coast county, a record $5-million legal settlement, and questions about the way California jails handle a sharp increase in the number of mentally ill inmates…

“The surge in inmates requiring psychiatric care follows changes to California sentencing laws meant to reduce the state prison population, shifting offenders to county jails built to house those awaiting trial or serving short sentences rather than provide intensive, long-term care. At the same time, mental health experts say, an acute shortage of long-term care facilities makes it more likely that patients will experience a crisis that ends in their arrest, turning jails into the mental health centers of last resort.

“After nearly three decades of federal litigation to establish that psychiatric care in prison is a constitutional right, advocates for the mentally ill now find themselves starting over. Unlike the centralized state prison system, counties operate independently, and jail standards have few specific requirements. Mental health experts say most counties are ill-prepared for the challenge.

“From 2012 to 2016, jails in California reported a 30% jump — from 13,270 to 17,350 — in the number of inmates identified as needing mental health services, according to the California Board of State and Community Corrections.” Los Angeles Times, August 24^th. It’s the same story across the entire country. Zap, you’re dead.

In the end, this does come down to the moral imperatives – our value system – required by our society, the allocation of resources, a willingness to change and admit when we are wrong, and a rather significant push for attitude adjustment and retraining in most of this nation’s police forces. It is a question of priorities.

The message from the feds – given the above-noted reversal of DOJ priorities from true justice to a general blanket license to police departments under a “law and order” view of the world and a president who actually pardoned a former police chief who violated a federal court order aimed at that “equal justice” priority – pretty much tells you that we are going in the opposite direction. By most measures, from moral to hard-dollar costs to taxpayers, this negative trend is a very, very expensive choice. This most definitely does not make America safer – or “great” – again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what seems most lacking in this new retrograde trend is a combination of a lack of empathy with and even greater lack of common sense.