Why Don't I Believe This?

Somehow, I find the doctor's testimony suspect:

“In Mr. Dziekanski's death, we know his [heart stopping] was not immediate, we know he had an adequate cardiac rhythm for a number of minutes following exposure to Taser,” said Dr. Swerdlow, who works at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles and also teaches at the University of California.

“So nothing here fits with direct cardiac electrical stimulation.”

Dr. Swerdlow also said that if the heart is affected by electrical current, the resulting heartbeat would be either too fast or irregular. The first time anyone noticed anything wrong with Mr. Dziekanski's heart was when firefighters arrived and found he had no pulse at all.

... and just what do we know about Dr. Swerdlow?

A cardiology expert paid by the company that makes Tasers told a public inquiry Tuesday he doesn't think Robert Dziekanski's death was at all related to the controversial stun guns.

Uh huh. So, this is one of the people Taser pays to claim that their weapon is "harmless". That's like going to a doctor paid by the tobacco company for an explanation of the relationship between lung cancer and tobacco smoke.

There have been far too many deaths occurring after people have been assaulted with these things for me to buy that there is "no connection" between their death and the jolt the Taser delivers. Once or twice is coincidence, after that we have to start getting suspicious.

Not being an MD myself, I can only speculate on how a Taser might cause death some minutes later. However, we know that electrical discharges can cause all sorts of problems with various parts of the nervous system and like all complex systems, the nervous system doesn't necessarily respond immediately or as we might have initially predicted.

For now, I think that Tasers should be treated by law enforcement with the same caution that firearms are.

You Figure?

After a spate of reported fatalities involving the use of "Tasers", some went and tried to reproduce the phenomenon experimentally.

The team of doctors and scientists at the trauma centre in Chicago's Cook County hospital stunned 11 pigs with Taser guns in 2006, hitting their chests with 40-second jolts of electricity, pausing for 10 to 15 seconds, then hitting them for 40 more seconds.

When the jolts ended, every animal was left with heart rhythm problems, the researchers said. Two of the animals died from cardiac arrest, one three minutes after receiving a shock.

The findings call into question safety claims made by Taser International, the Arizona company that makes the stun guns, which are used by dozens of police departments across Canada.

According to Taser International's website, "independent medical and scientific experts have determined Taser devices to be among the safest use-of-force options available."

This doesn't come as any big surprise to me - we use several forms of electrical stimulation in medical circumstances to regulate the heart or to prod it into moving. It shouldn't be "news" that nailing the body with 50,000V (at near zero amperage) is going to have some kind of effects.

It has always struck me that saying the Taser is "safe" is misleading at best. Disrupting the body's nervous system has all sorts of interesting potential consequences.

As I said in an earlier post on the subject, the protocol around using Taser-like devices should be as stringent as that involved in the use of firearms. I can appreciate that there is a "time and place" for any tool, but recent months have shown us too many cases where the device has been used far too casually.

Tasers Aren't Lethal???

I'm getting quite upset with the underlying dishonesty of the claim that "Tasers aren't provably lethal".

Not only does it smack of purchased science, not unlike the tobacco lobby's "Tobacco Institute" studies that claimed that tobacco smoke was harmless.

The ongoing case of Robert Dziekanski is another example.

While I might be willing to accept that we do not really understand why people die after being hit by a taser, I do not think that it is reasonable to claim that there is no evidence. Mr. Dziekanski himself is evidence of lethality, as are several other people who died in custody after being tasered in the following weeks.

I do not claim that Tasers should be banned. I do, however, argue that the policies around the use of tasers should be as strict as those surrounding an officer's use of conventional firearms.

A bullet is in general not lethal - unless it goes through the right organs. A Taser may not be "generally lethal" either, unless it happens to disrupt some yet to be fully understood part of the nervous system. Given the recent spate of 'in-custody' deaths, I think it is most reasonable to relegate the taser to the "last resort" status of firearms. Clearly it is far more dangerous to the suspect than a few bruises.