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@TheShannonWiley
The Salisbury Police Department has set in motion a year-long pilot program that will introduce tasers as another tool of law enforcement despite the three civil suits against the department for excessive force.
The program, which has been supported by Salisbury Mayor James Ireton and the city council, includes continued research and training by officers who will beutilizing the tasers.
Ireton declined a request for interview with himself or the SPD until after the trial period is over, but Salisbury University Police Department Lieutenant Brian Waller, the investigative and support service commander of the department, has done extensive research on the use of tasers by police departments across the country.
“These are a less lethal instrument for law enforcement to carry,” Waller said. “It doesn’t replace or supplement any other tool in the tool box it just adds an additional one.”
Waller explained that tasers are used in law enforcement much like pepper spray or a baton would be.
Throughout the country, different law enforcement agencies create their own use of force continuum which includes everything an officer can use to gain or maintain control of a situation.
“Anything from the lowest level, the officer’s presence, which may go up to verbal commands,” he said. “Then you have your less lethal tools like pepper spray, your baton, the taser, up to lethal force with a firearm.”
Departments start to research and debate utilizing tasers in their use of force continuum to determine where this instrument will lay, specifically if it will come before or after either pepper spray or a baton.
One major factor in this decision is the type of pepper spray used by departments and surrounding departments that could be called for backup, according to Waller.
Often, pepper spray’s active ingredient, capsaicin, is dissolved in alcohol which is the vehicle used to spray it. However, this means that a flammable substance is now used on the individual that officers are attempting to subdue. The use of a taser after this, which sends an electric jolt though the body to causes temporary paralysis could be extremely dangerous and could cause the liquid to ignite.
If a department would like to carry tasers, they must make sure their pepper spray is non-flammable. Further, Waller said, the department must make sure that surrounding departments are not carrying flammable pepper spray, as well, because if they are called for backup and use their pepper spray before the department uses their taser, the same dangerous consequences could occur.
For the SPD, departments that are often called upon include the SUPD, the Fruitland Police Department, the Maryland State Police and the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Department.
If factors are sorted out which allow a department to obtain tasers, Waller said, they could be beneficial for the department because a lot of the research on these tools show that injuries to officers and the individuals being arrested go down when tasers are an available tool for officers.
Waller said that these findings are due to the quick recovery time that tasers allow and the lack of close, physical contact they require.
“How a taser works is it incapacitates by basically interrupting the messages that your muscles get,” Waller said. “So you get hit by a taser and while that taser is activated, you basically lose muscular control and you go down. The moment that stops, all effects of the taser stop.”
This fast revival is not as available, though, for many other tools officers can use.
“If I utilize a baton and beat you with it, those affects don’t end when I stop beating you,” Waller said.
Similarly, if pepper spray is used, the subject will still feel the effects after the officer has stopped spraying and he or she must go through a clean out process.
Likewise, if an officer must take down someone, if he or she has a taser readily available, the officer could deploy it from farther away than he or she would have to using pepper spray or a baton. With these methods, the chances of either party getting injured are heightened.
The tasers that SPD officers will be using will record the audio and action of an event whenever a taser is utilized.
Another possible benefit of officers using tasers include violent behavior and resisting arrest rates going down, as studies and other departments’ experiences have shown a trend towards.
“I’ve spoken to individuals at departments that after a period of time of having this device, their incidents of resisting arrest or fleeing drop considerably,” Waller said. “In essence, once community members that don’t want to obey the law, your frequent fliers, see that they’re not going to fight and win or run and get away because they’re going to get tased, they don’t try. Often times there are measurably results from putting this in use. Once it’s put in place and used a number of times, it’s not needed to be utilized frequently (anymore).”
Despite the benefits of the tasers, there are still negative consequences.
One of these such consequences is that the taser is not as “foolproof and guaranteed to stop someone,” Waller said, especially if someone has a firearm or is coming at the officer with a knife.
“If it is a deadly force situation, then a taser isn’t necessarily the adequate tool,” he said.
Also, there is a risk of a taser not working properly if both probes that do not make contact with the person in order to complete the circuit or if the individual is wearing clothing that is too thick.
Another negative consequence is that it can cause death in a person with Excited Delirium, a condition in which an individual has an extremely high body temperature above 100 degrees and has often times had a history of stimulant narcotic abuse, although this chance is just as great with the use of other law enforcement tools, according to Waller, due to their heightened state and officers are now being trained to look out for this state.
In order to bring tasers to a department, officers must go through training that the Maryland Police Training Commission requires, as well as the training required of law enforcement departments that are nationally accredited such as SPD and SUPD.
In this training, officers are taught to aim carefully for the low center of a person in order to not get the probes in someone’s face or eye which could cause injury.
“You basically have something comparable to a small fish hook in an individual’s eyeball,” Waller said. “There are risks to all law enforcement, but if you’re deploying it in a situation where force is required to get hold of someone, it is a cost-risk benefit.”
On the SUPD’s side, while the department is not currently planning on getting tasers soon, they have looked into the possibility multiple times and are considering getting body cameras to put on their officers in order to protect the community and officers, according to Waller. However, they are constantly looking at the newest trends in law enforcement and looking back on tools that in the past the department has felt unnecessary to see if anything has changed.