“Sorry, but I don’t see any fatalities in any of these reports. My single issue is whether or not there is reason to believe that the electrical discharge from an ECD (Taser specifically) can contribute to death. I argue that the scientific and applications evidence overwhelmingly shows it does not.“

Wow. It’s difficult to believe that someone that purports to be “an expert” in ‘non-lethal’ (sic) weapons would be so divorced from the ‘recent‘ (December 2006 and December 2008) information.

Obviously he reads only from the information provided by the ‘helpful‘ folks at The Church of Taser. That’s a mistake. A huge mistake. One should choose one’s friends very carefully.

Here’s some information from TWO other sources:

1) FACT: In 37 of the 98 autopsy reports plus two inquest transcripts reviewed by Amnesty International, medical examiners listed the use of a Taser as a cause or contributory factor in the death. Medical examiners or coroners reportedly made similar findings in at least 13 other cases where Amnesty International did not have the autopsy reports. [LINK]

That’s running 37% of the 100 cases studied. Extrapolate it and you’re looking at 37% of about 400, or approaching 150. But even 50 is much greater than zero. [LINK]

In case you don’t like AI (why?), then try this one…

2) Use of a Taser was considered a potential or contributory cause of death in 27% [of the autopsy reports reviewed during this study]. [LINK]

Authors: Jared Strote, Division of Emergency Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle, WA; and H. Range Hutson, Department of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.

37% [LINK] or 27%. With all the downward pressure on coroners and medical examiners over the years, these sorts of numbers can only be low ball ratios.

But this sort of fraction (about a third, as it stands today) can almost certainly be extrapolated to the entire List Of The Dead [LINK]. Adds up to 130 to 150 or so. And that’s with today’s low ball fraction. These numbers can only increase with time. Yikes. [LINK]

For obvious reasons, autopsy reports are not easily available on-line. Google doesn’t have an Autopsy tab. It takes a lot of effort to gather the reports and review them. In these two reviews, involving a huge effort, the results were ‘about one-third’ of the cases reviewed.

ABOUT A THIRD. Multiply by 400+. Do the math.

Hint – it’s not zero.

So Mr. Alexander…

At this point do you acknowledge that you’re being provided with ‘incomplete’ information from your ‘friends’ at The Church of Taser?

It’s your reputation. Do with it what you will.

Don’t blame the messenger. Blame your ‘friends’.

Alexander is a former US army colonel and long time advocate of “non-lethal” (sic) weapons. For the record, he has stated that he has no connection to Taser International.

This is his third appearance on this blog. Previously [LINK][LINK]

His letter to ‘Coast to Coast AM’ (Fair Use claimed):

There is no doubt that people die after the use of Taser. People die after reading newspapers, watching TV, or just breathing, but that does not infer a causal relationship. A few coroners have listed Taser as a possible contributing cause, but most of those have lost out in court.

People also die just before reading newspaper, and just before watching TV. That randomness in time correlation appears to be missing with almost all taser-associated deaths.

See [LINK] for more details of this bizarre asymmetry in the typical taser-associated death time line. There’s a detail there about taser-display reporting requirements that will address the most-obvious attempt at rebuttal. Leaving only the bizarre asymmetry…

Bottom line, despite the claims of Amnesty International (AI), there is zero probability that Taser has caused any death, and exceedingly small probability that Taser was a contributory cause of death in any case. AI simply lists every case in which death follows the use of Taser. At times, those deaths have been days later…

For every rare taser-associated death listed where the death followed ‘days later‘, there are many more incidents where healthy young victims were tasered-and-died in quick succession. There is no alternate, and reasonable, explanation for many of these deaths.

Tasers have, not one, but TWO candidate death mechanisms:

1. Cardiac effects [LINK][LINK][LINK]
2. Blood pH: [LINK]

It’s one of the worst lies to claim that there’s ‘no science‘ to support these candidate taser-death mechanisms. That’s actually one of the ugliest damn lies. There are many fine scientists that have made significant findings that are impossible to explain away. [LINK] [LINK]

So Taser International plugs their ears and sings loudly, “La la la la… I can’t hear you…“

The common factor in all deaths following the use of a Taser was the behavior of the suspect that led them to interact with police. The two leading issues are drug use and exertion from fighting with police. Excited delirium is an established cause of death and there are a few people who are unaware that they have potential heart problems.

Wrong. Robert Dziekanski did not fight with police. Robert Dzikanski did not have any drugs in his system. Robert Dziekanski was tasered, fell down, and died. The most significant thing that happened to him at that time was that he was tasered. The other police actions pale in comparison to the obvious impact of the mutiple taser hits lasting the final 31 seconds of his life.

That’s just one counter-example.

The only common factor in taser-associated deaths is the taser. That may sound circular, but since most taser incidents have their own built-in experimental control (the time just before the taser is fired [ibid]), it’s actually a very significant observation.

There is also the oft repeated figure of “50,000 volts” shot through their bodies. This number is specious and totally irrelevant. Volts don’t kill, amps do. See how many stories report the amperage, or in Taser’s case, milliamps. The amps are 0.0026. That is far less than what one would receive from a Christmas Tree light bulb, which runs about one amp…

The “Average” versus RMS current has been fully explored here [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]. Short version is that the electrical industry uses RMS bacause “averages” can be so misleading. M26 and X26 tasers are about 150-160 mA RMS.

And we also have a damn fine argument in our back pocket as to what Kroll forgot about on this particular topic. [LINK] It’s a good one, but might have been somewhat eclipse by the outstanding work of Prof Savard et al [LINK] and others.

We do have a control group that can be measured. Now over 750,000 people have been exposed to Taser voluntarily, and when they were not involved in illegal or aberrant activities, there have been ZERO (0) deaths in that group. IF Taser were even a contributory cause of death, there would be some small number of death anticipated. BTW: contrary to opponents comments, all of these volunteers were not medically screened healthy young males.

Taser hits to the BACKS of taser trainees are called FAKE. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] etc. etc. etc. etc. …

Do you think that this is just a coincidence that these idiots are only ever tasered in the BACK, and almost NEVER the chest?

What? You didn’t notice? Really? Feeling sheepish now that I’ve pointed it out? Seems obvious once it has been pointed out.

Taser International has ignored my challenge to turn the trainees around. [LINK] They’re too frightened to even consider the possibility of having the training standard demand a full 5-second (or more) taser hit with the clips attached at the very upper left chest and somewhere below the sternum to force the current into the cardiac risk area. Do that first, and then (after a couple years) you can claim these training hits as evidence of anything.

Reviewing the daily taser news appears to indicate an “unexpected” preponderance of taser hits to the upper left chest in those healthy young men (not particularly agitated) that are tasered-and-die in quick succession. [LINK] The statistics of this obvious correlation are well buried. As are the victims. [LINK]

To date, Taser has been held “partially responsible” as a cause of death in one of the about 80 cases that has gone to court. That bizarre finding held that Taser was 15 percent responsible, and that the victim’s voluntary use of illegal drugs was 85 percent responsible. In 41 states, Taser could not have been held responsible when the irrational behavior of an individual was the primary cause. That California case is not over yet, but the jury’s award for punitive damages were thrown out…

Already addressed [LINK]. Punitive damages were canceled on a minor point of law (a legal ‘technicality’). The ‘Blood pH’ taser-death mechanism is the main point, and is one of Taser International’s worst nightmares. The original judgment wiped about $50M off TASR’s market capitalization, and the smug smiles from their faces, virtually overnight.

Tasers save lives!

Perhaps once in a while. But considering that they actually used about ONE HUNDRED TIMES as often as the police have historically and generally-acceptably used their guns, then the actual ‘save’ rate is many times less than claimed.

The Solicitor General of Alberta actually claimed that tasers had saved thousands of lives in the Canadian province of Alberta. [LINK] This claim is insanity-in-a-can. It implies that the police in Alberta would have become the largest band of mass murderers in Canadian history, except we were saved by the taser. Well, thank goodness… {ROLLS-EYES}

And it’s very bad morals to randomly exposed people that did nothing to deserve lethal force to all the risks of tasers. You only have to follow the news to know that the argument that tasers replace guns is the original taser lie. [LINK]

And the real world (large study) the results weren’t anywhere as good as the carefully selected cities that Taser International reports. [LINK]

John Alexander

This is exactly why I started this blog. All these sorts of pro-taser arguments have already been fully examined and systematically shredded.

All I had to do to completely shred Mr. Alexander’s letter is go through it, paragraph-by-paragraph, search up the applicable previous posts, and paste them into some context language so that everyone can follow.

In other words: Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Yawn…

The tattered carcasses of the pro-taser arguments are left hanging on the gates of the Excited-Delirium blog for all to see.

I’m still waiting for a new round of pro-taser arguments.

Anyone, anywhere, can win any taser-debate against any pro-taser foe. The 1000+ posts on the Excited-Delirium.com (do not forget the dash!!) cover all the arguments-to-date.

And along the way, we’ve uncovered some other very interesting findings… …see the blog.

[Hat tip to TR]

Coast to Coast AM: Last week’s guest with George Knapp, John Alexander, [a fan of] ‘non-lethal‘ (sic) weapons, claimed that no one has ever been killed by a taser. George received a number of emails to the contrary… [LINK]

We’ve met John Alexander before [LINK]. It’s obvious that he would certainly benefit from a good long cover-to-cover read of the Excited-Delirium.com blog. His statements are out-of-date and past their best-before date.

For example, his claim that “…no one has ever been killed by a taser…” is demonstrably false.

In the Pikes case [LINK] multiple coroners agreed that the taser CAUSED the death. [LINK] But Taser International points out that they forgot to include the words “directly” (and perhaps the word “pomegranate“, for the next go-round) in their findings.

Also, the ‘Blood pH’ taser-death mechanism is common sense medically, and is now legally established. The 15% – 85% ratio on that case was not a statement of causality, only of assigned legal responsibility. And the $5+M ‘refund’ was on a small point of law, not about the facts of the case.

See the ‘Blood pH’ topic on this very blog: [LINK]. We made some very good progress over the past few weeks in figuring out some of the arguments.

So, in response to these two crystal-clear taser-deaths, the official cue-card wording (for those that have up-to-date cue cards) has been changed to limit the scope of the safety claims as follows:

“…the use of a taser by a police officers in the lawful execution of their duty has [never] been found to have been the direct cause of a fatality.” [LINK]

In other words, the claim of taser safety is now (newly-) limited to so-called “lawful” deployments, but not “awful” deployments. I wonder how the interactions of body chemistry and electrons knows what is lawful, and what is not? Smells like an exclusion based on happenstance and hindsight, not logic.

It seems clear that John Alexander didn’t get the (secret?) memo about the new, more limited, claims.

He’s not alone in this regard. Taser International is a bit careful about who they keep informed of the latest, more-limited, carefully-worded, claims. They’re happy to let the more ill-informed fan-boys spout-off old obsolete nonsense. So it’s best to wipe the spittle off John, because you’re being played like a trumpet.

Don’t feel bad. Chief Kaye, VP of CACP [LINK] didn’t get the memo either, and he read from an obsolete cue-card. It wasn’t until OPP Commish Fantino actually looked down and carefully read the new wording. [LINK] I’d love to have an excuse to subpoena the communication records surrounding that pro-taser news conference.

It’s been a source of entertainment to the taser-critical bloggers to track the changes in the claims from Taser International over the past few years. Their claims of “no deaths” are slowly being spiraled down in scope and geographical coverage. [LINK] [LINK] The more recent claims are positively adjective-laden with language that subtracts from the broad claims previously made (in the time before we started to figure the issue out).

I’ll fully address Mr. Alexander’s recent letter to ‘Coast to Coast AM’ in another post.

An interesting hit on the blog about two hours ago:

1) Seattle, Washington arrived directly on post titled “Taser Director Kroll invokes U.L.” [LINK]

U.L.’s head office appears to be in Washington state.

“Someone” is going to have a very interesting Monday.

Free advice: When you’re standing under ‘a ton of bricks’ that are ‘hanging by a thread’, don’t poke at it.

Has there EVER been any reports of people falling over dead after the taser had been drawn and displayed, but BEFORE it had actually been fired? Many jurisdictions actually do require written reports when the taser is even pulled from the holster. So logically, there should be plenty (hundreds) of reports where the taser was drawn and displayed, and the subject fell over dead BEFORE the taser was fired.

Did the four RCMP officiers arrive on the scene and find that Mr. Dziekanski had already died, just moments BEFORE they arrived? Did Mr. Dziekanski look like he was about to die, in that half-minute BEFORE he was tasered?

When did Brian Cardell die? Did the police arrive and find him already dead? Did he fall over in the (reported) minute or so after the police arrived, and just BEFORE he was tasered?

If the taser hits have no causal relationship to the subsequent death, then basic logic would dictate that you would expect to see roughly as many people falling over dead just BEFORE being tasered, as just AFTER being tasered.

Feel free to normalize each incident on a ‘per unit time’ basis (it won’t make any difference). But you should include the total duration of the incident timeline.

Virtually every taser incident that results in a death has its very own, built-in experimental control. The experimental control is the time BEFORE the taser hit.

An asymmetrical distribution would seem to provide clear-cut evidence of causality.

If the asymmetry is extreme, then the argument is over.

(The following graphic is for illustrative purposes only and is not based on anything more than my recollection of the many news reports of taser-associated deaths, and the fact that Taser International isn’t proudly showing off a thick stack of reports of the hundreds of people that died just BEFORE being tasered. Actual data may vary. The ball is in Taser International’s court to explain-away this very simple observation.)

Upon further reflection it seems obvious that it is not feasible to reproduce the characteristics of the ‘acutely agitated individuals’ in a controlled environment.

Having someone perform some voluntary exercise until they consciously report that they’re feeling a bit tired, and then tasering them to see if they die – although it is perhaps moving along the same ‘Blood pH’ axis, the magnitude of the parameter probably isn’t even close (*).

(* Remember that, for example, 70% is ten times further away from 100% than is 97%. You need to measure the gap from ‘the far end’ of the scale. It’s a common and despicable debating trick to measure the factor from the uninteresting ‘zero’ end of the scale to make the difference look much smaller.)

I don’t think that any “studies” along these lines carry any weight whatsoever. The real world results cannot be reproduced in a lab environment – at least not in any civilized county.

“The X26 taser satisfies the Underwriters Laboratory electric fence standards…” [LINK]

According to reports, tasers have NEVER been certified by the Underwriters Laboratory [LINK] [LINK]. And if it hasn’t been tested by an approved laboratory (certified by U.L.), then this claim is essentially false.

It seems apparent that tasers would not, and could not, actually pass U.L.’s scrutiny. If they could, they would have already – and Taser International would be proudly claiming the fact (instead of leaving the false impression).

Kroll has been informed that the electric fence standards DO NOT APPLY to tasers for several very good reasons. Differences include application, waveform, duty cycle, frequency spectrum, and probably even build quality. He knows all this, and yet he chooses to ignore it.

Furthermore, the specified output from the X26 taser is 100 microcoulombs (100 uC). And yet the published X26 waveform graph clearly shows that “100 uC” is a significant understatement [LINK]. So even playing Kroll’s semantic games, it’s still not clear that the basic facts are exactly as he claims.

Taser International has reportedly had their wrist slapped before for falsely invoking the U.L. trademarks [ibed]. And here they go again…

It’s like cleaning up after a pigeon. It only takes him about five seconds to emit the crap,but it takes us twenty minutes to clean it up.

[HT: CM & TNT]

1) Washington, DC arrived directly on post titled “Dr. Mark Kroll’s arguments torn to shreds (call the SEC)” [LINK].

2) Washington, DC left via sltrib.com [LINK].

So are NASDEQ-listed companies permitted to have their Directors go out and foist one-sided propaganda onto the unwitting public, while that Director is holding 36,000 TASR stock options, potentially worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars?

I’m not an expert in SEC rules, but I know that they have a lot of rules. I can’t believe that a stock-option-laden Company Director would be allowed to issue Letters to the Editor without having them go through proper corporate channels to include the usual disclaimers.

It’s not the first time he’s done this sort of thing. I can provide pointers to previous examples; my blog e-mail address is near the top of the right hand column.

Maybe this sort of corporate / Director behavior is allowed. But if so, then it shouldn’t be.

Disclaimer: Me? I hold no financial interest in the stun gun market, or even anything even remotely related. Zero. Not paid by Amnesty International either. Nothing similar either. This blog is simply intended to address my desire to provide my input into the very important public policy taser debate, on both sides of the 49th parallel.

This is one of those times:

From the post Blood pH – which direction would be good? [LINK]

…And significantly, the taser totally bypasses any built-in survival mechanisms that might naturally keep the subject from actually (i.e. in the real world) killing themselves through over-exertion.

That’s a key difference – between what the subject might be ALMOST doing to themselves (naturally limited by built-in survival mechanisms), and what boundary the taser can push them right through and beyond.

The taser lacks any such natural limiting feed-back signals. It just stupidly and blindly locks-up the muscles (a massive form of over-exertion).

The taser could probably lock-up the muscles on a fresh corpse.

The point here is that humans have who-knows-how-many? built-in feedback loops. These ‘negative feedback’ (self-limiting) mechanisms would include: conscious awareness, discomfort, fatigue, pain, and so on – right down to utter collapse (loss of consciousness).

These feedback signals, which exist in multiple layers at every possible level of the human-machine, almost always prevent people from killing themselves through over-exertion.

Where a person is operating under their own command (even if acting ‘insane‘), they will eventually reach their limits. If they exceed those limits, there’s a very good chance that they’ll become unconscious and thereby avoid death by some margin.

My assumption here is that there exists a margin (possibly a small margin) between the point where a person would become unconscious (thereby providing life-saving rest), and the point where they’re destined to die. I believe that this is a reasonable assumption. If you disagree with this argument, then you need to disprove this assumption, because everything else flows logically from it.

The taser simply bypasses many of these natural self-preservation limits. Even if the person has a Blood pH level (for example) which has rendered them unconscious, the taser keeps going and going and going. It will not stop.

The taser respects no ultimate limits within the subject.

There’s no feedback loop (except the operator, possible defectively-trained).

And there’s not necessarily any safety in being unconscious, especially if the taser makes the victim’s muscles continue to twitch in a “fighting” and “threatening” manner.

This lack of feedback and lack of respect for the subject’s ultimate limits perfectly explains the significant difference in the real-world outcomes between the subject just over-exerting themselves, versus them also being given a good solid tasering.

This simple hypothesis bridges the ‘taser-science’ (sic) knowledge gap surrounding “excited delirium” (the arguably-mythical condition), and trying to explain all those many “excited delirium deaths” (the all-too-convenient excuse for a ‘taser-associated’ death).

If ‘excited delirium’ is a problem, then the taser is not the right solution. In fact, it seems to be the worst possible approach.

It’s as if the subject is walking along the edge of a cliff, and the suggested solution is to push them over the edge.

Even the RCMP acknowledged this plain fact: “The RCMP’s revised [Taser] policy underscores that there are risks associated with the deployment of the device and emphasizes that those risks include the risk of death, particularly for acutely agitated individuals.” [LINK]

Behavior that some people call “Excited Delirium” is a clear-cut indicator to put away the taser.

PS: Scientific American reference: [LINK] (Thanks Critical Mass)

Meanwhile, there’s also the ‘cardiac effects’ taser death mechanism. This one is considered by some to still be in dispute. Taser (meaning Kroll et al) think it’s impossible. But those holding this warped worldview are forced to ignore the cases where healthy young people were tasered across the heart and died either immediately, or after a few minutes. The non-VF explanation that bridges the ‘taser-science’ (sic) knowledge gap is covered here: [LINK][LINK]

Not included in the above list-of-two is the issue of defective tasers which can lead to an unnecessary escalation in the violence and spiral into a death-by-gunfire. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]

UPDATE: Make it three…

Comment on [LINK] ‘Critical Mass’ wrote:

One factor often present during the restraining of a detainee is “positional asphyxia”, at a time when the detainees need for oxygen is great.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_asphyxia

The reason we need an aqualung with pressurized air, to be able to breathe in as little as a depth of 2 to 3 feet under water, is that the muscles which expand the chest to allow for the intake of air, are some of the weakest muscles in our body. You can’t breathe while 2 feet underwater, through a garden hose, because the weight of the water can’t be overcome by the chest cavity muscles.

Imagine a long distance runner crossing the finish line of a race, immediately being placed in any restraint where his/her ability to fully expand and contract their chest cavity was reduced by a factor of 50% or greater. The result might be fatal.

When I see videos of arrestees being restrained on the ground with several law enforcement officers on their neck or their back, I’m not surprised at the number who die during “restraint”.

If stun guns affect those fairly weak chest muscles, by rapidly exercising them to the point of exhaustion, it may explain why their victims often complain of not being able to breathe after being tasered.

We focus on stun guns somehow affecting the heart, while it is possible that tasers may induce “positional asphyxia” symptoms, without putting any weight on the chest. The chest muscles are simply unable to do their job due to being depleted by the taser shocks.

If you agree, you may have to add a third death mechanism ~ “Induced Positional Asphyxia”, besides blood Ph and cardiac effects.

Good luck.

July 1, 2009

An excellent point.