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Comment by tomschlick | Hacker News Reader

A taser wont (solely) be used in a lethal force scenario. If someone is threatening an officer with a knife, they counter with their own lethal force.

Officers are always +1 on the force level. If you are combative, they use mace/taser, if you have a knife they use a gun, etc.

The only exception to this is when an officer has backup on scene and they can coordinate enough to allow one or more to provide lethal cover (guns) while the others try to employ less lethal tactics (taser, mace, beanbag shotgun, etc). This way, if those less lethal items dont work (and they dont 30% of the time) they are not scrambling for their gun while a pissed off suspect is charging with a knife.

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Is mace lethal? Putting it at the same force level as tasers seems weird.

No, its classified as "less lethal" which is the same as tasers, batons, bean bag rounds, etc.

What people don't realize is that before tasers the method of making someone comply (when fighting handcuffs being put on) was batons or actual punches. Yes tasers may cause health issues in 0.001% of uses but batons and punches would cause many more.

Also, a lot of officers don't even carry mace anymore as it generally sucks for everyone when its employed. They are going to get it on them via wind or handling the suspect and it impacts their ability to function.

> Yes tasers may cause health issues in 0.001% of uses...

This is simply not true and weakens your argument quite a bit.

Do you have any proof?

The article listed states 276 related reports of death after taser use since 2000. I'd imagine tasers are used a few hundred times per day across the US, if not more.

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

[2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/csllea08.pdf

There s a whole other level of accountability with devices which leave marks.

I would actually be curious what is the ratio of deaths between batons and tasers.

It might not seem obvious, but I suspect that people tend to be a lot more careful with direct application of force that they can feel (if you have ever punched or hit someone else hard, you know what I mean). Tasers make it much more... impersonal? I dunno what the right word is, but it seems like it's much easier to kill with a Taser while remaining cool, than to do the same with a baton.

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