Tasers Across the United States: Watch Your Asses in the Windy City

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Portland’s recent audit examining how—and how often—our city’s police officers use their Tasers. And while my story aired some of the questions that police-accountability advocates had about the report’s findings, the audit did, at least, include some calls for tightening controls on when cops can zap people with 50,000 volts of electricity.

But then I saw this story out of Chicago (the whole world’s watching!) this morning. There, because the city is giving the stun guns to patrol officers for the first time—Portland has been arming its officers since 2005—Taser use has skyrocketed. And that’s bad news for oversight:

A new report shows that Chicago police used Tasers to subdue nearly 700 offenders over 12 recent months, a dramatic increase that reflects the department’s decision earlier this year to expand its use of the weapons.

In a wide-ranging annual report issued Monday, the Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates serious accusations of police misconduct, said the increased use of the sometimes-controversial electrical devices has not generated many complaints, however.

As a result, the agency said it has decided against investigating every time an officer uses a Taser, saying the hundreds of incidents were “overwhelming” its resources. Instead, it will do so only if allegations of misconduct are made, serious injury or death resulted, or a minor or senior citizen was targeted.

Chicago cops used Tasers 683 times in the 12-month period ending September 30—up from 197 a year before and 163 before that, the report says. But since March, the number of Tasers in the hands of cops increased from 280 to 660.

In an explanation that should ring familiar around these parts, Chicago cops say the Tasers have helped defuse situations that otherwise might have turned deadly. But the central question with Taser use shouldn’t whether it avoids a shooting, but whether that same outcome could’ve been achieved without any weapon—lethal or not—being deployed at all. Otherwise the stun guns become a tool of compliance, not de-escalation.

Gawker, it seems, sums it up best: “So basically the only way for a police taser incident to be investigated in Chicago is if someone dies, or if children or old people are fried by a trigger happy cop. At this rate, pretty soon they’ll be tasering people for jaywalking.”