Efforts to curb Taser use by border patrol follow reports of injuries, newspaper says
Billed as a safer alternative to firearms for law enforcement use, Tasers can nonetheless inflict injuries, even lethal ones, and are responsible for dozens of injuries in the hands of federal border patrol officers.
So efforts have been made to discourage use of the electronic stun guns, except in situations where they are clearly needed, according to a lengthy Los Angeles Times (sub. req.) article, which reviews 450 reported incidents of Taser use by border patrol agents between 2010 and 2013.
A total of 86 people were injured by the use of Tasers by the border patrol during that period, 68 of them seriously enough to require treatment. Several died, including one man who burned to death after an agent smashed a window, leaned into his vehicle and deployed the Taser inside, accidentally setting the vehicle on fire, the newspaper reports.
His family filed a federal lawsuit. But their complaint was nixed last month by a judge, who said the Taser use was reasonable given the subject’s “extremely reckless driving” and a risk that he could have used a weapon, or fled.
Most of the targets of the Taser deployments were trying to enter the U.S. from Mexico, suspected of being in this country illegally or simply fleeing, sometimes by trying to return to Mexico, rather than being involved in any violent crime, according to the article.
“When you put that weapon out there and they have access to it, they’re going to use it,” said Ralph Basham. A former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency in charge of the border patrol, he OK’d Tasers for border patrol use seven years ago. “Having spent my life in law enforcement, I know you hate to see someone getting away,” he told the Times.
However, the current commissioner, former Seattle police chief R. Gil Kerlikowske, imposed a new use-of-force policy last year that tells agents to deploy Tasers only when an individual is an imminent threat.
“You’re seeing much less of the Taser being used when someone is in a precarious position, or fleeing,” he said.
While “not risk-free,” said spokesman Steve Tuttle of Taser International, the company that makes the stun guns, “you have to look at this relative to other uses.”
Batons or chokeholds are more likely to cause injury, said Bruce Taylor, an expert on policing practices who has researched injuries during arrests.
