Saturday, April 5, 2008

"... far preferred to a gun..." If only. Dream on.

2007 British Columbia
496 taser incidents
Robert Dziekanski, killed Oct. 2007
Robert Knipstrom, died Nov. 2007

Would BC police have shot (with a gun) hundreds of people in one year if they hadn't been equipped with the taser? Is this what your argument is based on?

And keep in mind that tasers are far from universally employed by all law enforcement agencies in B.C. It would seem only natural that if they became more widely employed, that the associated outcomes based on the risk (never explicitly numerically defined by Taser) would increase in proportion to their availability.

In other words, virtually every police officer in B.C. has a gun. Relatively few have a taser. In spite of this huge statistical advantage to the taser, their statistics are still looking pretty horrid.

Time to cut-and-paste from my previous summary:

Better than a gun? Don't be stupid. Taser deployments are about two orders of magnitude (~100:1) more frequent than the historical/accepted rate of police shootings (varies by jurisdiction). It’s not even a good lie that tasers replace the gun. Tasers replace talking; to just 24 seconds in the Vancouver Airport incident for example.

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