NONLETHAL WEAPONS: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE (police)

Compared to the number of arrests made by police officers, violent altercations are relatively few in number. Many police use-of-force situations are sudden close-contact situations, requiring immediate, instinctive response. Other situations begin as stand-off situations (with time for planning and maneuvering) but change to immediate-response situations if officers do not take aggressive actions to control the suspect before the stand-off situation deteriorates.

The term ”nonlethal weapons” is used generically to identify devices that may be used to aggressively take control of a deteriorating tactical situation prior to the time when control holds, batons, or deadly force may become necessary, when it is unsafe for an officer to move to within contact range of the suspect, and when attempts by officers to control the suspect by conventional means will likely result in serious injury to officers, suspects, or both (Meyer et al. 1981).

Research and Testing

In 1979 and 1980, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) researched more than a dozen innovative devices that attempt to control violent people (especially those under the influence of PCP) in a way that reduces injuries to suspects and officers. In 1981, the LAPD adopted Taser and chemical irritant sprays of the CS and CN types. The Taser and chemical irritant sprays had the advantage of being handheld, one-officer operations that allowed the officer to stay six to fifteen feet away from the suspect. The other devices required setup and application by trained teams to operate.

Practical Scenarios

During the 1970s, many officers around the country received major incapacitating injuries while attempting to take into custody persons under the influence of PCP, an animal tranquilizer known for giving human users ”superhuman” strength. It was not unusual for the most aggressive efforts of five or six officers to be inadequate to control a single PCP suspect without serious injury to several of the involved parties.

It was in this context that the LAPD believed that any weapon was worth looking into if it could stop incidents from escalating to a point where deadly force may have to be used. Time (sudden attack versus a standoff situation) and distance between the officer and the suspect are the crucial factors in determining whether nonlethal weapons are appropriate for a situation. During the past twelve years, the Taser and chemical irritant sprays have been used in thousands of standoff situations. Such situations frequently deteriorate into immediate-response, deadly force situations if the suspect attacks with a knife or a club (or other dangerous implement amounting to less than a firearm) and if the suspect is not quickly controlled.

The vast majority of nonlethal weapon incidents involve unarmed suspects who exhibit resistive, violent, or bizarre behavior, thus presenting a significant safety threat to themselves, others, and the officers whose job it is to intervene.

Critique of the Literature

In 1980, the supervising physician of the Medical Services Division, Los Angeles City Personnel Department, wrote that the Taser was ”reasonable and feasible and presents no undue risk to the recipient.” In 1985, after the LAPD had used the Taser hundreds of times, a medical journal article concluded that ”major injuries, either primary to the [electrical] current or secondary to [falling down], have not been reported” (Koscove 1985). The need for effective nonlethal weapons is also demonstrated by expensive litigation, which results from injuries produced by conventional tactics. Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, a Chicago-based legal and law enforcement educational association, has documented a number of out-of-court settlements and jury awards in amounts ranging from tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars to compensate people for injuries they received from conventional tactics such as batons and flashlights.

In a landmark nonlethal weapons case in 1988 (Michenfelder v. Sumner, 860 F.2nd 328), a federal appellate court found the following:

… authorities believe the Taser is the preferred method for controlling prisoners because it is the ”least confrontational” when compared to the use of physical restraint, billy clubs, mace, or [beanbag] guns … . When contrasted to alternative methods for physically controlling inmates, some of which can have serious after-effects, the Taser compared favorably.

The Meyer Study

LAPD records show that 1,160 of the reports for the first half of 1989 documented incidents in which officers attempted to control suspects by causing them to fall to the ground. A stratified sampling procedure yielded 395 reports in which any of six conventional force types (baton, kick, punch, flashlight, swarm technique, or miscellaneous bodily force) was documented as the effective force that controlled the situation; eighty-eight reports where Taser was the effective force; and nineteen reports where chemical irritant spray was the effective force. Thus, a total of 502 reports were subjected to analysis. Sixty-six of these documented more than one force type that fit the research scenario (that is, listed at least one force type that was ineffective in addition to the force type that succeeded), and care was taken to avoid double counting.

Variables from each of the 502 reports in the sample were coded and the data were entered into Stata, a statistical computer program, and subjected to analysis. Selected pairs of variables were cross-tabulated and subjected to chi-square testing to determine if statistically significant relationships existed. The purpose of such testing was to rule out as much as possible the hypothesis that the relationships that appeared to exist between tested variables were due to chance, that is, that there was no actual relationship. All of the relationships were of such significance that there was not one chance in two thousand that the relationships were due to chance.

Meyer created the injury classification scheme depicted in Table 1.

Table 1 Injury reporting designators used in this study

“Officer placed off duty or on light (nonfield) duty; suspect usually hospitalized.

Findings

Table 2 reports injuries to suspects from the effective force types (that is, the force type that brought the incident to a conclusion).

Table 3 reports the number of injuries to officers that resulted from each effective force type.

Table 4 shows the varying success rates (that is, the percentage of incidents for which a given weapon or tactic was the effective force type) achieved by different force types, along with corresponding injury rates to officers and suspects.

The data clearly demonstrate that the Taser electronic weapon and chemical irritant spray caused fewer and less severe injuries than conventional force types. The data did not suggest any other rival hypotheses that might account for the results.

In police confrontations that cannot be controlled by verbalization, nonlethal weapons should be used early and aggressively to bring the situation to a conclusion as quickly as possible before it deteriorates into a confrontation requiring a greater level of force. This concept is the key to significantly reducing injuries to officers and suspects. Moral and legal constraints require officers to use the minimum amount of reasonable and necessary force

to control a confrontation. It hardly needs to be noted that those force types that are effective and result in the least severe injuries to officers and suspects are more reasonable than those that result in greater injuries.

Table 2 Injuries to suspects by effective force type

^aTaser/gas means effects of Taser or chemical irritant spray only. ^Defined in Table 1.

Table 3 Injuries to officers by effective force type

^a Taser/gas means effects of Taser or chemical irritant spray only. ^b Defined in Table 1.

Table 4 Success rates of force types, with corresponding injury rates

a Includes effective and ineffective force types. b Percentage of injuries, regardless of whether force was effective.