Odd this day
It is, today, the 18th anniversary of a domestic incident in New Zealand, which gave rise to the following police report:
Sunday 1 October — at 3.30 am police were called to a sixteen floor apartment building in central Auckland where a male, in breach of a protection order, had assaulted his wife and was threatening to throw her off the balcony. A police officer encountered the male, with two other family members in the basement car park with no means to exit the area because of a security system.
The offender became aggressive and the others obstructive. The officer became concerned for his safety and laser painted the aggressor. The officer continued to communicate with the offender for several minutes before having to resort to discharging the taser and using OC spray. Eventually the offender was contained with assistance from one of the family members present. There were no injuries.
Well, this all seems relatively (if depressingly) normal: a domestic incident in which the man is the aggressor (statistically more likely than any of the alternatives); which happened in the early hours (doesn’t seem altogether untypical); but, on a happier note, was resolved.
Well… except that, six weeks later, the New Zealand Herald was telling a slightly different version.
Yes, it appears that there were five attempts to hit the paterfamilias, none of which altogether succeeded in incapacitating him. Largely because none of them made even the smallest contact with him. The officer in question, however, did succeed in tasering the suspect’s 16-year-old son.
At some point, he also — having used it — needed to reload the weapon, at which point I think we should turn to the marvellously deadpan comment from Detective Inspector Bernie Hollewand of Auckland City police:
The constable did remove one of the cartridges before a five-second discharge cycle was complete and he did feel in his hand that the device was arcing 50,000 volts.
After five goes at the taser — three times while loaded with cartridges, fact fans, and “twice in ‘contact’ mode, where it is used like a cattle prod” — he moved on to pepper spray.
And hit the man’s 21-year-old daughter.
The man eventually gave himself up.
The newspaper report does not say, however, whether he’d just decided enough was enough as far as injured children were concerned.
To be fair to the officer, this was just a month into a year-long trial of tasers, which had only just been introduced. He had been trained, and I’m not blessed with the expertise to say whether the training or the officer was more at fault. I do know that the incident was one of several which made the Human Rights Foundation of New Zealand’s 2009
5th periodic report of the New Zealand Government under the International Convention Against Torture
…which notes that the training course lasted two days, calling this an “inadequate qualification”.
The idea of a taser, of course, is that it will be used in situations where otherwise more deadly force (i.e. a gun) might be employed. The fact is, though, rightly or wrongly, that a less lethal weapon will inevitably be used more than one of the deadlier variety. It seems unlikely, for example, that an officer would pull a gun in a domestic situation with a minor present — or at least less likely.
There has since been an academic assessment of the use of tasers in NZ, which said:
Reasons for the increase in use of the TASER by New Zealand Police officers are hard to identify. There was a decrease in the level of crime during the research period, but an increase in the number of serious assaults on police officers. There was also an increase in the number of emergency events attended … These factors could mean that individual police officers may have perceived that they were attending an ever-increasing number of emergency events and that there was an increased probability of being seriously assaulted, which resulted in their resorting to using the TASER in preference to other tactical options.
Now, you may wish to suggest that this is altogether too much detail to go into in the telling of a frankly silly story about an inexperienced junior police officer tasering everyone but the suspect and still somehow managing to apprehend someone, when I should be emphasising the comedy. And you’d probably be right.
Going back to that academic paper, though, it notes
an increase in TASER use between 2010 and 2017 … Māori make up the largest number of subjects compared with other ethnicities. The percentage of Māori subjected to the TASER increased during that period from 50% to 56%. … Māori comprise 16.5% of the total New Zealand population.
The NZ Herald report may quote a police media officer Jon Neilson suggesting that
the fact a Taser had been fired more than once in a single incident was not ‘relevant’
…but that last statistic may be pertinent to any discussion of police methodology, regardless of the jurisdiction in question.
