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Taser use by Philly cops has tripled — while gun use, instead of decreasing, is up.
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
Taser use by Philly cops has tripled — while gun use, instead of decreasing, is up.
Filed Under: News | Philadelphia Police
One of the policy changes touted by Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey since he took office in January 2008 is the use of Tasers by police officers to offset the need for using lethal weapons in certain situations, especially when dealing with the mentally ill. A year ago, the Department purchased 1,000 new Tasers.
But police statistics obtained by CP indicate that increased Taser use does not appear to be offsetting use of firearms by Philadelphia police officers.
Since 2008, Taser use has tripled; incidents involving police using guns, however, have stayed at relatively the same level (and the number of shots fired by police per incident has actually increased).
Here's a homemade chart of gun use incidents, gunshots and Taser use incidents (complete data for individual Taser discharges wasn't available, but those numbers tend to be close to the number of incidents):
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| Isaiah Thompson, City Paper |
| Taser use has more than tripled, but police gun use hasn't dropped correspondingly. (numbers represent totals through October of each year) |
For more perspective, you might want to check out this graph, too, showing the same stats (where available) for the last four years. They show Taser use climbing fairly steadily, but also a significant decline in overall gun use since 2008 (Ramsey's first year). Click either chart to enlarge it.
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| Isaiah Thompson, City Paper |
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Philly City Paper and IsaiahThompson, Philly News Now. Philly News Now said: Taser use by Philly cops has tripled — while gun use, instead of decreasing, is up.: One of the policy changes t... http://bit.ly/dFqeLf [...]
How about violent crime rate, number of officers on the force, arrests made, etc.? If the crime rate went down, and the number of officers and arrests went up, then the city could technically say the increased number of Taser/gun incidents was warranted. And if the opposite were true, well then this would look even worse than it does. Any insights on those numbers? Might help to create a fuller picture of the situation. Also: Why are Tasers blue in the chart, then yellow in the graph? Perhaps you should consider leaving illustrations to the experts ;)
Raymond Luxury-Yacht: Great points, and I don't disagree that those are important questions. This is new, unpublished data and I thought I'd publish it — but you're certainly right that there are a lot more statistics at play than are contained in my humble charts. The number of officers on the force, it seems to me, isn't so relevant as the number of Tasers issued, since (unlike guns), Tasers aren't issued to all officers. Right now, about 750 Tasers have been issued. There is no question that a rise in Taser-use has correlated with the number of Tasers issued — but correlation is not, of course, causation. As for crime rate, while I agree more stats might shed new light on the situation, I think the number of incidents in which officers had to use guns provides at least some baseline for evaluating the other statistics, but I agree that it would be interesting to compare gun use (which seems to have remained stable) with the city-wide violent crime rate for the last few years. These are composite figures, representing yearly totals; I do have some month-by-month data and will try to get that up as well. As for the colors, good catch! I'll try to fix it tomorrow. Thanks for your comment. - Isaiah
I really think the TASER scrutiny has gone a little overboard. I did a little research myself and put together some (slightly better) charts that you can find here: http://www.stungunmall.com/taser-death-statistics.html As you can see that there are about 48 TASER related deaths per year. For each death, there are 1,750 articles on the web. But for avoidable medical errors - which kills approximately 195,000 Americans each year - there are only .38 articles on the web per death. It's funny how we make mountains out of molehills and completely ignore things that are more likely do us in.
If you intend to put this in proper perspective you will also need to look at other force options being used by the police to see if they have dropped proportionate to the increase in TASER usage. Then you would need to determine if the overall injuries to suspects and police officers has remained the same, gone up, or gone down as officers use TASER as a force option instead of other traditional tools and tactics. A good example would be what happened in Houston Texas. They went to full deployment of TASERs and the next year had an drastic increase in the number of police involved shootings. Looking at that stat alone makes it look somehow realted to the adoption of TASERs. But the same time frame Houston had a 75% increase in violent crime (due mostly to the number of visitors after Katrina) and in spite of this had a reduction in suspect injuries and injuries to officers. BTW, "TASER death" is misleading, the phrase "TASER related death" is much more accurate as there has yet to be a proven death directly caused by being hit with a TASER. Contributing cause, yes. Direct cause, no.
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