We need to take guns off police

Today's IPCA report of police criminality: a police officer unalwfully tasered a fleeing suspect who posed no threat to anyone:

The police watchdog has found an officer unlawfully tasered an Auckland man who broke his ankle jumping off a balcony to escape arrest.

[...]

To avoid arrest, the man jumped over his apartment balcony's railing onto the concrete about four metres below and broke his ankle, the IPCA said.

The arresting officer fired his taser at him twice, missing the first time, unaware the man had broken his ankle, it said.

The authority has ruled it was unlawful of the officer to use the taser to carry out the arrest or prevent the man's escape.

"The Authority is not satisfied that the officer fired the Taser to defend himself or others, because the man had just run away from the officers and his partner, removing any imminent threat the officer believed he posed to them.

"Nor did the man pose an immediate danger to anyone else after he jumped from the balcony. Additionally, the officer was not justified in using the Taser to prevent the man's escape."

There's the obvious question here: why isn't this cop in court for assault with a weapon? Because if you or I did anything like this, that's where we'd be, and the law surely must apply to those who enforce it as well as those it is enforced upon. But also, its a perfect demonstration of why we need to take guns off police except for specialist units: because they clearly cannot be trusted to use them appropriately or lawfully. Instead, they're behaving like Americans. It is time to take their toys away.

Finally

The police have finally charged one of their own for illegally using a taser. Which regardless of the eventual outcome ought to provide a powerful incentive for police officers to be cautious and obey the law when using these things, rather than simply threatening to electricly torture people to "induce compliance". And hopefully it also signals a shift by police to enforcing the law neutrally, rather than turning a blind eye to criminality among their own. At the same time, given that they've previously repeatedly ignored IPCA findings of outright criminal behaviour involving tasers, you really have to wonder how bad this case must be to have got their attention...

The police should not be above the law

The IPCA has found yet another case of unjustified taser use by police. But was the officer prosecuted? Of course not:

A police officer was not justified in using a taser on a prisoner in custody at Hamilton District Court, an independent inquiry has found.

[...]

[Waikato district commander Superintendent Bruce] Bird agreed that the officer's use of the taser was contrary to policy and not justified.

"Our staff face an array of challenges when dealing with aggressive members of the public and policing prisoners in court cells can be very challenging.

"It is important that when under pressure, our officers make the right decisions regarding how best to respond.

"We have discussed this incident thoroughly with the officer involved and learnt from the mistake that was made," Bird said.

If you or I used a lethal weapon in this way, we would be charged with assault with a weapon and prosecuted. But no matter how many times the IPCA finds the police acted unlawfully, there are never charges. Its almost as if police are abusing their prosecutorial discretion to protect their own or something. But by doing so, they undermine respect for the police, and for the law itself.

Either the law applies to all, or it is meaningless. This officer should be prosecuted. The police should not be above the law.

The same question

Another day, another case of unjustified taser use:

The police watchdog has found that a sergeant's use of a Taser on a young man in south Auckland was "excessive and unjustified".

[...]

"Police policy clearly states that a Taser must only be used on a person who is assaultive," said IPCA chair, Judge Sir David Carruthers.

​"The young man was being restrained by two officers at the time he was Tasered. Although he managed to spit in the sergeant's direction twice, the sergeant's use of the Taser was excessive and unjustified."

The IPCA also found that while the sergeant's arrest of the young man was lawful, his decision was "ill-considered and premature," and his decision to arrest the young man had unnecessarily escalated the situation.

Again its a classic case of "compliance policing": of electrically torturing someone for the convenience and ego of the police rather than because they were a threat to public safety. And as in other cases, it's the same question: Will this officer be prosecuted? Because ont he face of it, they appear to have committed an assault with a weapon, and arguably torture. If any of us did this, we'd be in jail, and rightly so. So, does the law apply to the police, or not?

This constant stream of taser abuse cases also shows why we can never allow an armed police force. It is clear that these weapons are constantly abused and that police lack judgement around use of force. We're lucky that so far no-one has died as a result. If they were using guns, I'd undoubtedly be asking that question about murder, not just assault.

The same question

Another month, another formal finding from the Independent Police Conduct Authority that a police officer unjustifiably used a taser to "induce compliance" (torture someone into obeying them):

A police officer's second use of a Taser on a Christchurch man was unjustified, the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) has found.

[...]

The IPCA found the officer's first use of the Taser was justified, but that the weapon could not be used on an uncooperative, non-aggressive person to induce compliance.

Authority chairman Judge Sir David Carruthers said the second Taser use "when the man was on the ground and clearly still affected by the first use" was unjustified.

"While the man did not immediately roll over, there was no immediate threat of harm to anybody.

"The second use of the Taser was for compliance and should not have been used. It amounted to a breach of police policy, was disproportionate in the circumstances and an unjustified use of force."

There's a name for "unjustified use of force": assault (in this case, with a weapon). And I'm left asking the same question as I was last month: will this officer be prosecuted? And if not, why not?

Will they be prosecuted?

The Independent Police Conduct Authority has found that a police officer unlawfully used a taser:

A Counties Manukau police sergeant's use of a taser on a mentally unwell man while he was held down was "excessive and unjustified", the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) has found.

The IPCA said the tasering of the man while he was in a small cubicle at the Counties Manukau Police station was contrary to policy, which said that a taser must only be used on a person who is assaultive.

[...]

At the station, he refused to be strip-searched and was in a tear-resistant gown, so police attempted to cut his clothes off him.

During this attempt, a sergeant entered the cubicle and used his taser twice on the man while he was being held down by two officers and had his back turned to the sergeant.

IPCA chair Judge Sir David Carruthers said the man's behaviour had not met the threshold needed for use of a taser.

"There were other, less violent, options available to the officers. They could have continued communicating with the man or have asked the officers who were outside the cubicle for assistance," Sir David said.

Police are allowed to use reasonable force to make an arrest or to search someone on arrest. But this force was unreasonable, which makes it assault (with a weapon, no less). Which leads to the obvious question: will the police officer who needlessly assaulted someone with an electrical torture device be prosecuted?

Sadly, I think we all know the answer.

Another case for Graham McCready

Back in 2011, a Whakatane police officer attempted to arrest a man who had fled from a traffic stop. When he resisted, he was pepper sprayed and beaten, after which the officer retrieved a taser from his vehicle and tasered him twice while he was lying on the ground.

Today, the Independent Police Conduct Authority released its report into the incident, finding that the police officer used excessive force by beating and tasering the man. Despite this, they recommend that merely that he face disciplinary proceedings. If you or I had done the same, we'd be looking at prosecution, and five years imprisonment for assault with a weapon.

But what really takes the cake is the police's response to the report: basically a "fuck you". They are "satisfied his actions were not the result of any ill will or malicious intent" and claim that they "initiated remedial action through the employment process some time ago" and as a result they can't do anything more. That "remedial action"? Extra taser training. Break the law, bring the police into disrepute, and they protect you and teach you how to do it better.

Once again, its clear that the police cannot hold their own to account, and that the IPCA won't do it either. Which means that if we want justice and equality under the law, we're left with Graham McCready's solution: private prosecution.

Tasers: Torturing the mentally ill

When Tasers were first introduced to New Zealand, people warned that they would be disproportionately used against the mentally ill. They were right:

Since the nationwide rollout of Tasers in March 2010, they have been drawn by police officers 1320 times and discharged 212 times.

The battery-powered stun guns fire electric barbs, which penetrate a person's skin and deliver a shock of up to 50,000 volts.

Numbers released under the Official Information Act show nearly a third of those hit were considered by police to have mental health issues.

Mental Health Foundation chief executive Judi Clements said they had always feared those with mental health problems would be a target for officers using Tasers and the figures confirmed that.

There are two ugly trends exposed here. One is the move by police from "policing by consent" to "compliance policing", where the public are made to obey by the constant threat of force. The second is pure laziness, with police dealing with troublesome cases by reaching for their electric torture device rather than their brains. Neither is acceptable.

An interesting opinion

Part of the Ombudsman's website makeover is putting more opinions on-line, as recommended by the Law Commission. And there's an interesting one there dating from June, about access to police taser-cam footage [PDF]. Every taser contains a camera, which is automatically activated when the weapon is used to provide a record. So what happens when a journalist requests footage of a controversial incident in which a taser was used? The police refuse on privacy grounds, of course, even though the requester had obtained the consent of the taser victims.

Digging deeper, the police were concerned about whether the consent forms were real or forgeries (this seems to be about as credible as their sudden concern about the eligibility of FYI requesters who make controversial requests - i.e. driven by a desire for secrecy rather than a real concern with the law). But they also though that the footage should be withheld to protect privacy for the victims' own good, even when the victims had said otherwise. And then there's this bit;

Further, Police officers involved in the incident with Mr [A] advised that they did not want the information to be made available to TVNZ

...which is hardly surprising, given that it shows (or rather, doesn't, because they "accidentally" covered the camera) them tasering a mentally-ill man.

But it gets better. The Police, it turns out, have some rather unusual and utterly self-serving interpretations of the law:

From the Police submissions in this case, and the previous case, it is clear that Police concerns about release of taser camera footage extend beyond the issue of privacy of the individuals captured in the footage. Police have expressed the view that release of such footage will inevitably lead to adverse publicity thereby undermining public trust and confidence in the Police. In this regard, Police argued that section 6(c) would be a reason to refuse a request regardless of whether court proceedings were in train.

So, in the police's view, adverse publicity stemming from the public learning of their actions is a threat to the maintenance of the law. I guess "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" only applies to peasants, not to them.

The good news is that the Ombudsman told the police where to go on all of the above. Police do not, as a general rule, have privacy interests when performing their public functions, especially when those functions are being recorded specifically to provide accountability (there are some cases where they do have privacy interests in such recordings, but none apply here). Informed consent from subjects effectively waives their privacy interest, though the Ombudsman is interested in making sure that those subjects know what they are getting into (they did, and imposed conditions on the journalist over use of the footage, which is perfectly appropriate). And of course, the danger of adverse publicity is not a reason to withhold anything.

So, a victory for transparency - and not just for the request. Publishing this opinion has helped expose the police's attitude to the law - which is the first step to changing that attitude.

Police: Racists with tasers

A press release has pointed me at a study in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry on Use of Tasers on people with mental illness: A New Zealand database study [log in for PDF]. Using the publicly published data from the police's one-year taser trial, a team from the University of Auckland investigated the police's use of tasers, with a specific eye on people suffering from mental illness. The results were disturbing. People suffering from mental illness were twice as likely to be tasered than criminals. Police have also used tasers inside mental health facilities, explicitly threatening to torture patients in order to "induce compliance". Neither is acceptable.

But that wasn't the only disturbing thing the study found.

Maori (the indigenous people of New Zealand) and Pacific (people with Pacific Island ethnicities) were over-represented among subjects where ethnicity was recorded (127 of 141: missing data=14). Twenty-eight percent of the sample was Maori and 25% Pacific compared with 14.6% Maori and 6.9% Pacific in the national population (Statistics New Zealand, 2007). Europeans were underrepresented with 31% of all subjects compared to the New Zealand European population of 67.6%.

So, if you're brown, the police will pull a taser on you. If you're white, they won't. It looks like racism is alive and well in our police force.

Mission creep

When the police were trialling tasers, their opponents (including myself) warned that their introduction would inevitably result in "mission creep", from being used as a "less than lethal" option in dealing with violent suspects to being used casually to induce compliance for the police's convenience. It gives me no pleasure to be able to say I told you so:

The man at the centre of a stand-off with police in Hamilton this morning has given himself up after police pointed tasers at him.

[...]

The bare-chested man kept police at bay for close to three hours as he waved sticks in the air.

He occasionally used the sticks to beat on the ground and slash at surrounding bush.

Think about that for a moment: faced with a violent, but contained and not immediately threatening suspect, police threatened him with electrical torture purely for their own convenience. They couldn't be bothered waiting around for a few more hours while they talked the suspect down, so out with the tasers.

This is not how we were told tasers would be used. When they forced them on our society, the police said they would only be used to deal with violent offenders in immediately threatening conditions, and that they would be subject to the same restrictions as firearms. They would not have dreamed of threatening this man with a gun. Therefore they shouldn't have threatened him with a taser. It is that simple.

The taser experiment has failed. It is producing a shift from "policing by consent" to US-style "compliance policing", where the police routinely threaten force against the population in order to ensure their obedience. And that is not the sort of police force or the sort of society that New Zealander's want.

The police need to have their electric torture toys taken off them. And the officers who threatened to use them today in circumstances where they clearly amounted to unreasonable force should be prosecuted for assault.

Escaping the Winston bubble

While the NZ media and political blogosphere has been focusing on the drama of the Winston Peters bustup, other things have been happening:

• The police have decided they want tasers, so they can "induce compliance" by routinely threatening members of the public with electric torture-weapons.
• The government signed an FTA with ASEAN, which includes Burma. So, we rightly isolate Fiji for being a dictatorship, while we sign up to trade with an even worse dictatorship, murderous regime which massacres its own people (to the extent that they use chemical weapons against rebels). So much for consistent (let alone moral) foreign policy.
• Former All Black coach Brian Lochore reminded everyone of why we should hate rugby thug culture
• Barack Obama was officially nominated as Democratic candidate for President, showing that the American dream does still mean something.
• And finally, John McCain picked Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running-mate, so whichever way the election goes it will result in a historic first. I'm tempted to snark about how it has only taken the Republicans 24 years to catch up to the Democrats on this, but that would gloss over a deeper failure: while the Democrats were indeed the first major US party to nominate a woman for the Vice-Presidency, it a) took too long, and b) was a one-off - every Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidate since then has been a man. I'm hoping Palin's candidacy will change that (in the same way I'm hoping Obama's will usher in greater equality on race) - but given that US politics is so overwhelmingly white, male, and aristocratic, it may be expecting too much.

Update: Added Brian Lochore's little outburst.

No limits

On Labour Day in 2006, four police officers repeatedly assaulted a mentally ill man in a cell at Whakatane police station. After beating him about the head with batons, they locked him in a cell, and sprayed pepper spray into it for ten minutes - treatment which certain constitutes cruel and inhuman treatment, and may constitute torture under New Zealand international law.

A Tauranga jury just found all four of them not guilty on all charges.

The upshot? There are no limits on the police's use of force in New Zealand. "Reasonable force" means "whatever seems reasonable to a power-crazed authoritarian thug at the time", and includes prolonged beating and even torture. The jury made a terrible mistake today, and we will all bear the consequences for it.

Given this decision, one thing is clear: if these are the ground rules, we can never allow the police to use tasers. Given the complete lack of oversight, the risks are simply too great.

Why the police shouldn't be allowed tasers

Because of incidents like this:

The Crown alleges Parsons, who has a 25-year police service record, pepper-sprayed Mr Falwasser in the face two or three times after the latter refused to be fingerprinted or photographed.

Busby then allegedly struck Mr Falwasser from behind on the hand and wrist with separate blows as he put his hands up to protect his face.

As Mr Falwasser made movements towards the door, Busby allegedly struck him on the head, causing bleeding.

Mr Pilditch said that over the next 10 minutes Mr Falwasser remained in the cell, which was shrouded in pepper spray, making it "intolerable for police officers".

Later, Laing and Mills continued to pepper-spray Mr Falwasser's cell as he remained there, squirting the spray through vents over a 10- to 15-minute period.

And that's just with batons and pepper spray; just imagine what this pack of sadists would have done if armed with electric torture devices.

The officers involved are currently being prosecuted for assault. That's putting it mildly. Pepper spray causes unbearable pain to the eyes. Locking someone in a confined space and then filling it with pepper spray for 10-15 minutes at minimum constitutes cruel and degrading treatment, and may meet the threshold for torture (severe physical or mental pain and suffering inflicted to obtain information or as punishment or coercion) under New Zealand and international law. Yes, worse things happen in shitty third world dictatorships, but that's no excuse to refuse to call the crime by its name or turn a blind eye to it in New Zealand.

Sanitised

For the past two years, the police have been pushing to add tasers to their armoury. Between September 2006 and September 2007, they ran a trial, with use restricted to certain areas of Wellington and Auckland to see whether they were effective (for what?). The results of the trial were published on the web, including reports on every incident in which they were used.

Now it turns out those reports were sanitised. At least, that is the view of the Chief Ombudsman, who in a scathing review [PDF] takes the police to task for their refusal to release full incident reports. The police had claimed that this would, among other things, infringe the privacy of individual police officers even if their names were removed; as the Ombudsman points out, the logical extension of this is that the privacy exemption applies to every document produced by a public servant. The police also attempted to claim that any release would prejudice the maintenance of law and order, and prevent police officers from properly filling in their paperwork - claims the Ombudsman similarly dismissed as nonsensical. As for the public interest, the Ombudsman is quite clear about where it lies:

Given that the decision on whether to equip Police with Tasers is an executive one, with no provision for Parliamentary oversight, Cabinet approval, or Ministerial sign off, I consider that there is a particularly strong public interest in the accountability and transparency of the Commissioner’s decision-making on this issue. In my view the best way to ensure this, is for the process to be as open and transparent as possible.

The Police have argued that the proactive release of the Taser summaries on the Police website has already met this public interest consideration. I disagree.

The trial has been run by the Police, the summaries have been written by Police, and the refusal to release any of the “raw data” from the pilot to outside parties has meant that there does not appear to have been any external review of how the Police have conducted the pilot. The production of these reports therefore seems inadequate to address the principle of accountability.

Secondly, I have read the summaries and compared them with the tactical options report accounts. In my view, many of the summaries are extremely brief, and have the effect of “sanitising” the original reports.

These are strong words for an Ombudsman - she is essentially accusing the police of lying to the public and feeding us shit in order to push through a decision without any public oversight. They should not be allowed to get away with that in a democracy - and when the full information is released, hopefully they won't.

Our police cannot be trusted with tasers

One of the hallmarks of a civilised society is strong limits on law enforcement agencies' use of force. In New Zealand, our police cannot beat or shoot you simply because they feel like it. Rather, they can only use force which is reasonable to achieve a lawful purpose, and they have to comply with internal guidelines when doing so. Exceeding those limits is a crime (usually assault), and should result in prosecution.

According to a study by the Campaign Against the Taser, police exceeded the guidelines for the use of tasers in 40% of cases in the recent trial. They are supposed to use them (or threaten to use them) only in cases where suspects are "assaultive" - meaning using or credibly threatening to use physical force. But in 27 of 69 cases where tasers were drawn or used, the victims did not meet that threshold. In 11 of those cases, they were in fact complying with police demands. For their pains, they were threatened with electrocution and torture (three of the 27 were in fact tasered, though it is unclear whether they were "compliant", "passively resisting", or running away. It does not matter; either way, it was outside the guidelines, and an unlawful use of force).

The Crimes Act is very clear: threatening to apply force is assault. The police officers responsible should be facing charges, just like anyone else who threatened to electrocute someone would. They should also be evicted from the force. There should be no place in our police force for thugs who violate the public's trust by using force unlawfully, any more than there should be for rapists.

But apart from the question of holding the police to account, this also makes it clear that our police cannot possibly be entrusted with tasers. The availability of a non-lethal option makes it easy and painless for the police to threaten force, leading to inevitable mission creep and a shift to American-style compliance policing (where the police order people about, and threaten to shoot/beat/tase/pepper spray them if they refuse or do not comply fast enough). And this is not something any of us should want to see in New Zealand. If we want to keep our police under control, and prevent the slide into a swaggering, gun-toting, US-style of policing, then we must scrap the taser.

Tasers are torture

It's official: tasers are a form of torture. That's the ruling of the Committee Against Torture, the monitoring body for the Convention Against Torture, when discussing the use of tasers by Portugese police:

"The use of TaserX26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and that in certain cases it could also cause death, as shown by several reliable studies and by certain cases that had happened after practical use," the committee said in a statement.

It goes without saying that I think this is a very good reason not to deploy such weapons in New Zealand. They may have a limited use as a replacement for firearms in certain circumstances, but certainly not as a replacement for pepper spray and hence a routine part of the police arsenal.

But if that's not enough, there's a broader reason to oppose the deployment of tasers or other "nonlethal" weapons, and that is in order to avoid a shift in the nature of our policing and interactions between the police and citizens. At the moment, our police operate under a principle known as "policing by consent", which basically means they focus on actually talking to people, workign with communities, de-esclating conflicts, and minimising the use of force. Increasing the force available for routine use by individual officers runs the risk of shifting this to the American model of "compliance policing", where the police simply order people about, and threaten to shoot/beat/tase/pepper spray them if they refuse. Many of the deaths attributable to tasers are all the more shocking because they are products of that sort of police culture, where police went straight for weapons rather than seeking to reduce conflict, and we've had some disturbing incidents in New Zealand which suggest that the availability of pepper-spray is creating this sort of mindset. And that is a disease I really don't want to see spread. If our police start behaving like Americans, swaggering around with a taser on their hip and their hand hovering near it whenever they talk to people (as Greg O'Connor and Ron Mark seem to think they should), then they will have become more of a threat to ordinary New Zealanders than the people they are supoosedly protecting us from.

Tasering for convenience

One of the major concerns about the introduction of tasers has been the fear that they will lower the barrier for the police use of force from defending against violent offenders to "inducing compliance" to police commands. And now it seems to be happening; this morning's Herald has a story about a youth who was tasered by police after intervening in a fight. Their reason?

Senior Sergeant Garth Stockley, asked earlier by the Herald, said no officer had been assaulted.

He said the 17-year-old was Tasered because police couldn't bring him under control after the arrest.

"We were in the middle of the road and it was only a matter of time before somebody was going to get run over."

But looking at a cellphone video of the incident on the Three News site shows no traffic and no risk of anyone being run over. Instead, they seem to have done it simply for convenience - they wanted to shut up the person they were arresting, and get the job over and done with. And that is not simply a good enough reason for the police to use force.

Screaming for Jesus

In Jerseyville, Illinois, a disturbed 17-year-old was standing in the street with a Bible, screaming "I want Jesus". When the police showed up, he wouldn't do what they told him, even after he had been handcuffed - so they tasered him, and he died.

The death disturbs me, but what disturbs me more is the policing style that caused it. The victim was clearly mentally disturbed. He was not violent, or a threat to anyone (not even, apparently, himself). When faced with someone screaming for Jesus, but doing no harm, should the response of the police really be to electrocute him into submission?

The problem here is convenience policing. It's easier for the police to taser someone in this situation than to do the real work of, say, getting hold of a counsellor and paramedics and ensuring that the person gets the help they need. And tasers (and other "less-than-lethal" weapons) encourage this. It is so much easier to subdue than talk. It is so much more convenient. After all, what's 50,000 volts between friends? It's not as if it does any lasting harm...

This is why I don't want tasers in common use in New Zealand. The police attitudes they encourage are just to dangerous to us, the people the police are supposed to be protecting. And if you disagree, consider this for a moment: if it was you screaming for Jesus, would you rather be helped? Or would you rather be zapped so the cops could end their shift on time?

And they expect us to trust them with tasers?

At the moment, the New Zealand police are trialing the use of tasers as a "less than lethal" response to aggressive behaviour. Meanwhile, there's yet another story of the abuse of pepper spray to "induce compliance". A police constable is currently on trial for assault for using pepper spray on a person at a party. According to another officer present,

Constable Donna Olliver said yesterday that she was outside Mr Viane's [the victim's] house with the constable.

She saw them talking and heard Mr Viane say he wanted to go and see his girlfriend. At one point, the constable had put up his hand as if to tell Mr Viane to stop talking.

Mr Viane did not have anything in his hands, was not aggressive and seemed submissive.

He was not confrontational, but he was not listening to what the constable asked him.

Ms Olliver said Mr Viane went to take a step, to bypass the constable who got out his pepper spray and used it in his face. Mr Viane fell to the ground holding his face in his hands.

She said the constable turned and said: "I'm sick of f. . . . . . telling him."

Ms Olliver said she did not hear the constable tell Mr Viane he was under arrest.

So, disagree with a policeman, and get pepper sprayed. That's not what this weapon is for. And they expect us to trust them with tasers?