“..Another accessory which the Police Federation advocates is the Taser.
In June it wrote to the prime minister asking for the number of Tasers to be trebled – so that every frontline officer could have one.
“They need to have the proper equipment to do the job,” says Paul Davis, secretary of the Federation’s operational policing subcommittee.
And officers certainly seem to be getting a lot of use out of them.
Just last week, a policeman Tasered an elderly blind man as part of an operation to check whether his white stick was a samurai sword.
It wasn’t.
Of course, anyone might get rattled by a semi-paralysed blind man slowly tapping his way with a stick towards you.
Apart from anything else – it’s so spooky.
Those are the high-pressure moments when you need the training to kick in.
According to guidelines, officers are permitted to use Tasers when they “would be facing violence or threats of violence of such severity that they would need to use force to protect the public, themselves and/ or the subject”-
- and this moment is surely eerie enough to qualify.
The whole event would barely be worthy of note if it weren’t for the fact that they shot him in the back.
But then the gentleman is quite old and has suffered two strokes in the last few years –
- so the comparatively slow rate at which he was fleeing was probably taken as provocation..”
(cont..)
go to source/story>>>
If you give the police more Tasers, don’t be shocked by the result | Comment is free | The Observer.
