How many tasers

Yet despite the officers following the Axon training for firing at close range, the only apparent effect the Tasers had on Grenon was to enrage him. Axon's new Taser 7 is designed to improve performance at close range, but the change came too late for Phil Grenon.

The decline in Taser effectiveness is especially evident in Los Angeles. The LAPD was an early adopter of the Taser, and nearly every one of its patrol officers now carries one, though the department's own research has shown that Tasers are far less effective than the company has claimed. In March , the LAPD released a report showing a decline in effectiveness at the same time that officers started carrying the new X26P. Three years later, the department has yet to investigate the reasons for the decline in Taser effectiveness.

After the report's release, the Los Angeles Times found that ineffective Tasers were a recurring element in a number of the city's police shootings. Then-Chief Charlie Beck went on local television to defend the weapons.

He described Tasers as just one of several force options, all of which are crucial to officers, but not foolproof. Tasers were the most widely used weapon that year, outpacing chemical sprays, batons or bean bag shotguns.

Between and , the department purchased more than 3, units. And in , officials ordered virtually every patrol officer to carry an X26P. By , when officers began widely using those new X26P Tasers, the weapons were proving to be less reliable. The consequences of those failures were, at times, deadly.

In April , as the LAPD was deciding how to respond to questions about Taser effectiveness, then-Assistant Chief Michel Moore questioned the significance of the department's own stats. Internally, Moore, who's now the chief of police, called for additional research. But Moore's confidence in Tasers remained steadfast, internal correspondence shows, and he wanted more of them. After the LA Times editorial board chimed in the following week cautioning the department not to count on Tasers as a "magic solution" for reducing police shootings, Moore directed a staffer to "Please prepare a rebuttal to support the added devices.

In summer , the department officials made a few changes meant to bolster Taser effectiveness: They purchased new cartridges with a range up to 25 feet and had longer barbs they hoped would more easily penetrate heavy clothing. The department later went on to revise some of its policies on when Tasers should be used, a change that officials say is responsible for a significant decline in the number of Taser uses by LAPD officers in the past year.

LAPD officials say the department did study why the department's overall effectiveness rate about 57 percent was so much lower than other major departments. Not only did the LAPD choose not to investigate the decline in reliability, the department doubled down on the weapons. Less than four months after releasing its initial report, on June 24, , the department agreed to buy 4, more Tasers. Officer David Bowers was just 23 when he shot and killed Phil Grenon.

He'd been with the Burlington Police Department less than two years. When he pulled the trigger, he estimated Grenon was only 4 or 5 feet away from him, slashing at officers with a knife. Bowers was terrified, both for his life and for the other cops in the room. He opened fire, he told investigators, because he knew no one else was in the position to do it in time. The awful responsibility fell to him. As Grenon lay dying on the floor, the chemical irritant from the Pepperballs the officers had used earlier still hung in the air.

Bowers watched as his fellow officers turned over Grenon's body to give him first aid. Bowers saw one of his bullet holes. All of a sudden, he couldn't breathe. He walked out of the apartment. Bowers wasn't physically hurt, but the police chief sent him to the hospital, just to be safe. He wanted to talk to his parents about what happened, but he figured he shouldn't go into the details with the investigation going on. He was worried they'd somehow be dragged into it. The only people he felt safe confiding in were his lawyer and his union rep.

The next night, he couldn't sleep. In the morning, he grabbed his phone and sent a text message to his ex-girlfriend. He didn't want to involve her, but there was something he couldn't get out of his head. There was something else that bothered him. He couldn't believe it had been so easy for Grenon to overcome the effects of the Taser. Bowers had just gone through Taser training a few weeks earlier.

He'd seen people get shocked, and it always seemed to work perfectly. Burlington police don't use Tasers often. It's the biggest municipal police department in Vermont, which isn't saying much. It has about officers, and the year Grenon was shot, department records show only seven officers discharged their Tasers. Three of those were during the incident with Grenon. None of the officers who fired Tasers that day had used the devices in the field during the previous six years — if ever.

Chief del Pozo had never used a Taser in the line of duty, either, though he'd carried one for much of his career as a supervisor in the New York Police Department. But his general impression before that day was that the devices were highly effective. He learned the X2 Tasers the department had bought at the end of put out less electricity than the ones the department had before. And he learned those Tasers fail to subdue suspects more often than he ever would have expected.

So, in the wake of the Phil Grenon shooting, the Burlington police department went looking for simpler solutions. There are a couple of items on the Emergency Response Vehicle del Pozo wished the department had back in One is called a Y-bar.

It's an 8-foot-long steel pole with a semi-circle at one end, about the size of a man's chest. If the cops had one, del Pozo explained, they could have simply pinned Phil to the shower wall at a safe distance.

That way, he couldn't have threatened the officers. The rig also carries a couple old-fashioned chrome-plated fire extinguishers, filled with pressurized water. That and a metal bar shaped like a Y can mean the difference between having to shoot someone or not. There are no Tasers on the Emergency Response Vehicle, but Burlington police officers still carry them on their belts.

Del Pozo says Tasers can be useful as a last alternative to using a gun, and he wants his officers to have as many options as possible. But the Phil Grenon shooting has changed the way he thinks about Tasers. We would not say the best way to end this after hours and hours, is to send in a team that will rely on a Taser," del Pozo said. Taser scene Minnesota MN. Phil Grenon is exactly the kind of person the Taser was designed to save.

The older, more powerful X26 was popular with police. Danny Moloshok AP. Rich Pedroncelli AP. Less reliant on Tasers.

Since , Axon's Taser sales have more than doubled. But the noteworthy growth area in the company has been in body cameras and the data storage plans that come with them. Sales in that part of the company have grown fold over the same time period, meaning Taser sales are making up a smaller percentage of Axon's revenue. Taser effectiveness.

It's important to note that every police department has its own way of tracking and defining effectiveness, and for this reason, their data isn't directly comparable. Also, the time period of the data varies among departments.

He shakes hands with a young employee dressed as Officer Ion, the fictional law enforcement superhero who serves as the company's new mascot. The X2, released in , packed about half the electrical charge of its predecessor. Ethan Miller Getty Images. Axon on YouTube. Jack Cover displays an early Taser in January Police use Tasers more often at close range. That's closer than the recommended 7- to foot range of the X2 and X26P Tasers. Finding the right range.

Over the years, Axon has tinkered with the ranges of its Tasers. For most of the company's history, it put a priority on longer-range accuracy at the expense of performance in close quarters — where the company now acknowledges Tasers are most often used. Range is dictated by how rapidly the two Taser darts separate after being fired. The company recommends that the darts strike at least 12 inches from each other to reliably incapacitate a suspect.

If the darts separate at a wider angle, they are more effective at close range. If they separate at a narrower angle, they'll work better at longer distances. Below we show the varying separation angles of the darts on different Taser models and how those different angles affected the weapons' ranges. Early Tasers. Tasers were around for decades before Axon was founded. The first weapons had a degree separation between darts. This meant they would spread 12 inches apart at a distance of about four feet.

First Axon Tasers. When Axon first started selling weapons under the name Air Taser, it chose a narrower launch angle for the darts: 8 degrees. As a result, the darts spread apart more gradually and took 7 feet to achieve the recommended separation. Axon's 'Smart Cartridge' Tasers. Axon narrowed the dart spread even further when it released the Taser X3 and its more popular successor the X2. The "Smart Cartridges" for these weapons had a 7-degree angle. Their darts wouldn't reach the recommended separation until they'd traveled roughly 9 feet.

Using the weapon at closer than 9 feet would likely reduce the chances of incapacitating the suspect. That didn't jibe with how officers were using the weapons in the field. Other police departments have released statistics showing a decline in the number of deaths of suspects and officers in the months following the introduction of Tasers.

But research by the Police Executive Research Forum has raised the concern that multiple activations of Tasers may increase the risk of death. A Taser shock leaves almost no visible scarring or bruising, as a clubbing or a beating typically would. Could the absence of physical scars lift a psychological restraint on officer behavior?

Should every Taser gun have a built-in video camera? Equipping law-enforcement services with Tasers is likely to reduce the number of bullets officers fire from their handguns and therefore the number of serious injuries and deaths.

At the same time, it may lead police to inflict an unwarranted amount of pain on individuals who commit only minor crimes. The broader questions regarding the social effects of stun guns are, however, beyond the scope of this discussion. The two articles that follow investigate the physiological effects of electric shock.

The first is by Mark W. Kroll, an electrical engineer who has helped invent numerous electrical medical devices and who sits on the board of Taser International. The second is by Patrick Tchou, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, who has tested Tasers experimentally on pigs. You know an engineering problem is difficult when the prevailing technology dates back to the Stone Age.

One reason that finding a good replacement has been such a confounding problem is the nature of the task. Police officers often need to take into custody a violent criminal who has overdosed on a stimulant. Most people probably would be surprised to learn that, at present, the main methods police use in such situations all rely on inflicting pain. The old standbys are wrist twists and other forms of joint distortion, pepper spray, and clubbing. The problem is complicated by the fact that many illegal drugs are painkillers, and as a result standard subduing techniques are frequently ineffective at bringing troublemaking drug users to heel.

Even worse, many of the dangerously drug-addled perpetrators exhibit superhuman stamina and strength. There are numerous accounts of a person on a drug overdose manhandling half a dozen law-enforcement officers at once. Many officers are injured along with those they are trying to take into custody. The ideal arrest tool, then, must meet a number of requirements. First, it must be able to temporarily disable even the largest, most determined drug-anesthetized individual.

Second, it must do so without causing serious injury to anyone involved. Third, its effectiveness cannot be dependent on causing pain. Fourth, it must work reliably. Some approaches to meeting those criteria have come close, but not close enough. Under microprocessor control, the device temporarily, and relatively harmlessly, immobilizes a suspect with a carefully engineered electric signal that is specifically designed with human physiology in mind.

When you pull the trigger of a Taser gun, a blast of compressed nitrogen launches its two barbed darts at 55 meters per second, less than a fifth the speed of a bullet from a typical pistol. Each projectile, which weighs 1. Two whisper-thin wires trail behind for up to 9 meters, forming an electrical connection to the gun. Because the barbs get stuck in clothing and fail to reach the skin about 30 percent of the time, the gun is designed to generate a brief arcing pulse, which ionizes the intervening air to establish a conductive path for the electricity.

The X26—the model commonly used by police departments—delivers a peak voltage of V to the body. Once the barbs establish a circuit, the gun generates a series of microsecond pulses at a rate of 19 per second.

Each pulse carries microcoulombs of charge, so the average current is 1. To force the muscles to contract without risking electrocution, the signal was designed to exploit the difference between heart muscle and skeletal muscle. When your brain orders a muscle to flex, an electrical impulse shoots down a motor nerve to its termination at the midpoint of a muscle fiber. There the electrical signal changes into a chemical one, and the nerve ending sprays a molecular transmitter, acetylcholine, onto the muscle.

In the milliseconds before enzymes have a chance to chew it up, some of the acetylcholine binds with receptors, called gated-ion channels, on the surface of the muscle cell. When acetylcholine sticks to them, they open, allowing the sodium ions in the surrounding salty fluid to rush in. As a result, a wave of voltage rolls outward along the fiber toward both ends of the muscle, moving as fast as 5 meters per second. As the voltage pulse spreads, it kick-starts the molecular machinery that contracts the muscle fiber.

The force with which a skeletal muscle contracts depends on the frequency at which its nerve fires. The amount of contraction elicited is proportional to the stimulation rate, up to about 70 pulses per second. At that point, called tetanus, contractions can be dangerously strong. The same thing happens in the disease tetanus, whose primary symptom, caused by the presence of a neurotoxin, is prolonged contraction of skeletal fibers. The Taser, with its 19 pulses per second, operates far enough from the tetanus region so that the muscles contract continuously but without causing any major damage.

Heart muscle has a somewhat different physical and electrical structure. Instead of one long cell forming a fiber that stretches from tendon to tendon, heart muscle is composed of interconnected fibers made up of many cells. The cell-to-cell connections have a low resistance, so if an electrical impulse causes one heart cell to contract, its neighbors will quickly follow suit. With the help of some specialized conduction tissue, this arrangement makes the four chambers of the heart beat in harmony and pump blood efficiently.

A big jolt of current at the right frequency can turn the coordinated pump into a quivering mass of muscle. The Taser takes advantage of two natural protections against electrocution that arise from the difference between skeletal and cardiac muscle. The first—anatomy—is so obvious that it is typically overlooked. The skeletal muscles are on the outer shell of the body; the heart is nestled farther inside.

In your upper body, the skeletal muscles are arranged in bands surrounding your rib cage. To lock up skeletal muscle without causing ventricular fibrillation, an electronic waveform has to have a specific configuration of pulse length and current. The key metric that electrophysiologists use to describe the relationship between the effect of pulse length and current is chronaxie, a concept similar to what we engineers call the system time constant. In successive tests, the pulse is shortened.

A briefer pulse of the same current is less likely to trigger the nerve, so to get the attached muscle to contract, you have to up the amperage. The chronaxie is defined as the minimum stimulus length to trigger a cell at twice the current determined from that first very long pulse. Shorten the pulse below the chronaxie and it will take more current to have any effect. So the Taser should be designed to deliver pulses of a length just short of the chronaxie of skeletal muscle nerves but far shorter than the chronaxie of heart muscle nerves.

Basically, there are two ways: by using a relatively high average current, or by zapping it with a small number of extremely high-current pulses. All three were unarmed. All three had histories of mental illness. And all three died last year in a single northern California county, San Mateo. They were among at least 49 people who died in after being shocked by police with a Taser, a similar number as in the previous two years, according to a Reuters review of police records, news reports and court documents.

But some communities now are considering more restrictive Taser policies following allegations that the weapons were used excessively or deployed against people with physical or mental conditions that put them at higher risk of death or injury. Reuters has contacted 14 police departments, counties and cities that saw a Taser-related death or other serious Taser-related incident in Of those, five are reviewing their Taser policies; three had conducted reviews and made no changes; and five declined comment because investigations into the incidents were still ongoing.

Reuters now has documented a total of at least 1, U. In many of those cases, the Taser, which fires a pair of barbed darts that deliver a paralyzing electrical charge, was combined with other force, such as hand strikes or restraint holds. The company behind the best-known and most widely used conducted-energy weapon sold its first Taser to police in Florida in The technology had been around for more than 20 years by then but was slow to catch on because the original version used darts propelled by gunpowder, so the weapon was treated like a firearm under the law.

Jack Cover, an aerospace scientist working with Taser International Inc. That same year, New Jersey became the last state to authorize the use of Taser-like weapons for law enforcement. They are now legal to sell and own in at least 46 states and Puerto Rico.

But Taser training is too often cursory, use-of-force experts said. Taser training primarily focuses on how to operate the weapon, which is not good enough, said Lon Bartel, a Taser master trainer and director of training and curriculum for VirTra, an Arizona-based company that uses virtual reality to replicate real-life scenarios for law enforcement officers.

Fewer than 1 in 3 officers have been trained in how to switch from a Taser to a firearm and vice versa as the situation changes, Bartel said.

As early as , the Police Executive Research Forum, a national nonprofit policy organization, issued 52 guidelines calling for tighter restrictions on the use of Taser-like devices, including barring use on passive or fleeing subjects, barring use by multiple officers on a single person, and requiring mandatory safety training.

Four instances ended in death, including Daunte Wright. The city's police chief, Tim Gannon, said in a news conference this month that Potter was trained to carry her sidearm on the right side of her duty belt and her Taser on the left.

Axon also has issued warnings since at least that repeated Taser hits increase the risk for serious injury and death. But a lawsuit claims those warnings were ignored by the Wilson, Oklahoma, Police Department, whose use-of-force policy did not prohibit repeated Taser strikes when two officers killed year-old Jared Lakey in July The officers fired their Tasers 53 times over nine minutes at the unarmed and naked man as he lay on the ground, according to the lawsuit.

Lakey died two days later. The former officers face charges of second-degree murder. In California, Taser training is not mandated as part of minimum police cadet training requirements. Without a comprehensive approach, proficiency with the weapon, like any practical skill, rapidly deteriorates, said Von Kleim, a use-of-force trainer and spokesman for the Force Science Institute in Minnesota.

In New Hope, Pennsylvania, police officers fired Tasers six times between and On one of those occasions, a year veteran officer shot and seriously injured a year-old man during a scuffle in a department holding cell after confusing his Taser with his service weapon. The New Hope officer, Cpl.