Abstract
Conducted Energy Weapons (widely termed Tasers or CEWs) have been used by police in Australia for well over a decade, although we know very little about usage patterns by comparison to other jurisdictions. While police in New Zealand and the United Kingdom are required to publish details of the nature and frequency of deployment of CEWs by police, in the Australian context such data are difficult or impossible to access and are released only on an ad hoc basis. Yet, there are no formal public reporting requirements in any Australian state or territory to allow for independent monitoring and evaluation of CEW use. This chapter will examine what we currently know about the frequency and nature of CEW use in these jurisdictions and the circumstances under which such information is made publicly available. We will highlight the importance of independent analysis and review of data on CEW use for police relationships with the communities they serve. Specifically, we focus on the issue of the need for data to track ‘mission creep’ and racial bias in the use of CEWs by police against members of the Australian public, and the impact of this on public perceptions of police legitimacy. The discussion considers the impact of CEW use on relationships between police in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in particular.
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Notes
- 1.
The ‘Air Taser’ was introduced into Western Australia’s Tactical Response Group in March 2000. See Ryan (2012) for a detailed account of the introduction of CEWs into Australia.
- 2.
In this mode, a red laser light is projected from the CEW handset onto a person’s body, usually the largest body mass such as the chest. This type of ‘use’ also assists with aiming the weapon’s barbs if it is then used in deployment or ‘probe’ mode.
- 3.
This mode causes the infamous neuro-muscular incapacitation (NMI) that disables the target by distributing an electrical circuit running at a particular frequency which drops them to the ground.
- 4.
Use in ‘drive-stun’ mode will not cause NMI. However, it can be used to complete an electrical circuit through a person’s body sufficient to produce NMI if applied to a subject’s skin in circumstances where only one barb attaches (such as after a faulty ‘probe mode’ deployment). When used without any attached probes, drive-stun mode is considered as purely a pain-compliance technique.
- 5.
There is also a growing body of scholarly knowledge on the excessive use of CEWs on persons with a mental illness. This is outside the scope of our discussion but see for example Hallett et al. (2021).
- 6.
This is evident in police and public statements in the media. For a detailed discussion of the discourse surrounding the introduction of CEWs in Australia, see Ryan (2012).
- 7.
For example, the March 2012 death of Roberto Laudisio Curti where the coroner, Mary Jerram, found that police ‘“threw themselves” into the confrontation “like schoolboys in Lord of the Flies”’ (McNally 2014). Note: This record from the Coroner’s Court of New South Wales is no longer publicly available according to a search of the website (search conducted on 25 February 2021).
- 8.
The use of force for non-CEW equipped officers also increased during the study, but only by 19% (Ariel et al., 2020).
- 9.
CEWs carry lower rates of injury when compared to batons and police dogs. However, there is no persuasive evidence to date that they reduce either fatalities or the use of firearms (see, for example Ba and Grogger, 2018).
- 10.
We exclude CEW usage rates in the United States for two reasons. First, the large number of policing agencies in the US (almost 18,000) with concomitant differences in reporting cultures, policies and processes, would make practical comparison difficult. Second, and more importantly, in the United States the right to bear arms, the rapidly escalating civil conflict in recent years and the long-standing militarisation of the police results in an entirely different operational environment form those jurisdictions which are the focus of this discussion. We focus instead on countries where firearms carriage by citizens is limited and highly regulated.
- 11.
Note that the weapon is termed a Conducted Energy Device (CED) in the reporting.
- 12.
Since the analysis conducted for this chapter occurred, the figures have been further represented in a statistical bulletin capturing selected, summarised data. The tables we drew on to create Fig. 7.2 present the data in more specific detail.
- 13.
Data was not provided by Victoria, Tasmania or the Northern Territory.
- 14.
Since renamed the Crime and Corruption Commission.
- 15.
The other 11% of deployments were either in drive-stun mode or involved multiple or continuous deployments.
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Ryan, E., Bedford, L. (2023). Reporting Police Use of Conducted Energy Weapons to the Public: A Cross-Jurisdictional Comparison. In: Albrecht, J.F., den Heyer, G. (eds) Police Use of Force. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22705-9_7
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