Cons Teaching Cons How to Defeat Tasers by Dave Workman
Senior Editor

A Columbus, OH, police department officer safety memo, obtained by Gun Week, is raising alarms in law enforcement circles that criminals may be teaching one another how to defeat being shot by Tasers.

The memorandum was written after a July 15 incident in which a female Columbus officer confronted a stabbing suspect. After the suspect ignored repeated verbal commands, the officer shot the suspect with the Taser twice, and both probes made skin contact about 16 inches apart.

However, according to the memo, the suspect dropped to the ground and rolled. In the process, he broke both Taser wires, and thus broke the contact with the weapon, which stopped the electric charge. He then jumped up and ran away with the two probes still in his chest, according to the memo.

Gun Week contacted Sgt. Brian Bruce with the Columbus Police Division of Defensive Tactics Unit, who confirmed that the memo is authentic. While he did not write the original memorandum, he did circulate it to other law enforcement sources. He said the suspect in the July 15 incident was captured a short time later and that the female officer involved was not hurt.

He also said that police examined the suspect and found two contact wounds where the Taser probes had entered his skin. According to the memo, the suspect “stated that he learned from talking to other inmates at the jail that to defeat the Taser one merely needs to roll away from the Taser, which will cause the probes to fall out or the wires to break.”

Police departments across the country have been issuing Tasers to their patrol officers for some time. In Columbus, according to Bruce, each patrol officer has been trained with the device, and there is one in each patrol vehicle.

Tasers were developed as a non-lethal weapon designed to deliver a charge of 50,000 volts to someone in order to incapacitate them. The devices have been in the news over the past several months because in a few instances, people have died after being shot with Tasers. The causes of those deaths have been found to sometimes relate to other conditions, such as drugs in a suspect’s system, or poor health, both conditions that officers on the scene of an incident may have no way of knowing about when they deploy the devices on resistant subjects.

After he was apprehended, the stabbing suspect in Columbus told police that he pulled the Taser darts from his chest as he ran away. Then, according to the memo, “the suspect made it obvious that this method of defeating the Taser was common knowledge at the jail.”

Gun Week’s call to Taser International, which manufactures the device, had not been returned by press time.

Gun Week also obtained a copy of a report, written by Bruce to Columbus Police Chief James Jackson just 10 days prior to the July 15 incident. This was a report on the success of Tasers during their first six months of full deployment with the Columbus department. The devices were first fully deployed in October of last year, the report says. Prior to that, they were in use for six months beginning on Apr. 1, 2004, but apparently not in full deployment.

In that report, Bruce stated that there were 172 “Action-Response to Resistance Reports” filed during the first six months of full deployment. Taser probes were actually deployed 140 times, and there were 132 uses of the Taser in a “drive-stun” mode, in which the unit is used more like a contact weapon.

Of the 140 times that Taser probes were deployed, they were effective 76.4% of the time. Some of the shots missed. Of the 120 shots that actually hit the mark, Bruce reported, 89.2% were effective. The ineffective hits were blamed on bulky clothing in 12 cases, and there was one miss.

There was one other notable statistic in Bruce’s report. Since Columbus implemented Tasers, citizen complaints declined 23.8% and excessive use of force complaints declined 25.3%.