Police Use of Stun Guns May Increase
The New York City Police Department could expand greatly its use of electric stun guns, as Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday he is prepared to accept recommendations from a new report spurred by the 2006 Sean Bell shooting.
The report, by a nonpartisan, California-based think tank, RAND Corp., was commissioned last year by Mr. Kelly to examine police firearms training.
Although mostly laudatory, the report listed more than 100 recommendations for improvements, including more hands-on instruction and stricter standards for how police are taught to handle their weapons.
The most prominent — and most likely to rile police critics — was a recommendation that the department launch a pilot study to examine whether its more than 27,000 uniformed officers on patrol should be armed with stun guns.
Of 455 police shootings examined for the report, researchers found 25 — three of them fatal — where a stun gun may have diffused the situation
"The expansion of the use of Tasers may well be in order," the report's lead author, Bernard Rostker, said at a news conference yesterday announcing the findings.
The police department had already announced it is deploying 500 Tasers to sergeants on patrol starting tomorrow, and Mr. Kelly said he was open to expanding the program.
Yet the commissioner also noted that the use of Tasers in New York has been limited in the past because they have been known to cause deaths.
"They're controversial," he said.
The guns shoot out metal barbs that lodge in the skin of suspects and the
models used by the police department have the capacity to transmit 5,000
volts of electricity into the human body, according to Taser spokesman Steve Tuttle.
In its other main recommendation, the report called for rolling enrollment for the police academy, instead of the current system of two large classes of recruits a year, so that recruits can have more chances to practice firearms training.
Police officials said a new police academy due to open in the next few years would allow the police department to apply many of the report's training recommendations.
The report was originally billed as a six-month study of the NYPD's firearms training that would include a look at "contagious shooting" after Bell, an unarmed black man, was killed in a hail of 50 police bullets.
But on the subject of contagious firing — when police officers fire reflexively, often in response to the sounds of guns going off around them — the report said it had been nearly impossible to tabulate whether incidents had risen or fallen in recent years.
"It's a very rare event," Mr. Rostker said.
The associate legal director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, Chris Dunn, criticized the report's treatment of contagious shootings as cursory, and also questioned its lack of a systematic analysis of the ethnic makeup of shooting victims and firing officers.
"It's really silent on the issues that the Bell shooting raised," Mr. Dunn said.
Mr. Rostker called the omission of race and ethnicity "an oversight," adding that he was "sorry about that."
Mr. Kelly said the issue of race was not in the purview of the report.
"This was study was focused on what we could do. It was not a panacea; it wasn't going to solve all issues," he said.
