3 ms·
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
by bustadjustme 9y ago
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 https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/231176.pdf
[2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/csllea08.pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/csllea08.pdf