Tasers are failing N.J. cops. The cost? Lives, futures, careers. (2024)

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Suicidal thoughts and behaviors can be reduced. If you are in crisis, call the National 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 9-8-8 or visiting 988lifeline.org.This story was updated Dec. 18, 2023 to reflect information received through a public records request after publication.

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Our methodology:The dataNJ Advance Media has been compiling a database of Taser uses reported by police since 2018. The starting point was obtaining conducted energy device (CED) deployment reports for all Taser uses beginning in 2012 from the Attorney General’s Division of Criminal Justice. Until the end of 2020, an officer was required to fill out a deployment report for every Taser use. Officers checked boxes to answer questions — like whether the probes hit their target or if the officer or subject was injured — and then completed a narrative. Frequently, the officers' narratives were missing or too brief to clearly explain how the Taser was used, the number of shocks delivered, their perceived results and whether the weapon ended the threat or allowed the person to be handcuffed. We requested additional reports from the county or local law enforcement agencies, and if those requests were denied or the reports heavily redacted, also sought court records and police video footage to determine how the Taser was used and its effect. We also requested and reviewed some correspondence between county prosecutor’s offices and the Division of Criminal Justice regarding whether some Taser deployments complied with the Attorney General’s policies.After CED deployment reports were no longer required to be submitted to the Division of Criminal Justice in 2021, we used the Attorney General’s use-of-force database to find reported Taser uses for 2021 and 2022. Because the use-of-force database does not include a narrative, we requested police reports on the incidents from county prosecutors and local departments to glean more details. In total, NJ Advance Media was able to obtain records that included a narrative for 464 reported uses out of 518. We did not include in our database times officers used the Taser as “constructive authority,” meaning they pointed it at someone, or when they did a “spark display” to encourage a person to comply, because the former is not required to be reported as a use of force, and the latter was not consistently reported to the state as a use-of-force prior to 2021. We did include five cases where officers tased dogs who were attacking or charging.Overall analysisStudies of Taser effectiveness have used different standards. When looking at deployments in New Jersey, we sought to answer the question: How well did Tasers help officers safely end dangerous situations? We wanted to determine how successful officers were each time they chose to use their Taser in the field to try to resolve a situation, whether that meant keeping them safe from a violent subject or stopping someone from hurting themself or others.We were able to glean enough information to determine whether the Taser successfully ended the dangerous situation in 436 of the 518 reported uses.This analysis is not based on incidents or individual deployments, but on each time an officer reported using his or her Taser, whether that included one trigger-pull or several shocks. Most incidents involved only one officer using a Taser, but in some cases, more than one officer tased a subject — or even less frequently, multiple subjects — in a single police call. We considered a Taser use to have successfully resolved an incident if the result was the subject ceased major resistance (like actively fighting) or self-harming, so that they could quickly be placed under control, which usually meant being handcuffed. Among the uses we deemed successful were a handful when police reported someone surrendered as a result of a deployment, even if the Taser probes missed them.Individual deploymentsAfter reading Charles Mesloh’s 2008 study, which looked at the effect of first and second Taser deployments, we analyzed the information we collected to determine the success of first and second attempts in New Jersey. Mesloh defined a first deployment as successful “if after a five-second application a suspect became immediately compliant.”We considered a first or second deployment successful if that trigger-pull or drive-stun ended the subject’s resistance or at least the immediate threat, even if their muscles didn’t lock up for five seconds. For instance, if it stopped a person from attacking a cop, or caused someone who was self-harming to drop their weapon.We chose not to look simply at whether five seconds of neuromuscular incapacitation occurred, because we wanted to use a standard that reflected what is most important to officers in the field: whether the deployment stopped the threat or danger. For instance, officers may find that a Taser deployment was useful even if the person wasn’t incapacitated — such as a 2017 call when an emergency room patient was startled and dropped the box cutter he was holding even though the prongs hit a chair. In contrast, a deployment may appear to work, but for various reasons, does not stop the immediate threat to officers, as in a number of incidents when subjects were knocked down by Taser shocks but didn’t drop their weapons.We were able to determine whether first deployments ended resistance or the immediate threat in 430 reported uses out of the 464 in which we could obtain police narratives. We found 51% of those deployments did stop the threat to police, subjects, victims or bystanders.Since some incidents were resolved with one deployment, or an officer chose not to redeploy for another reason, there are fewer times when officers used their Taser a second time in a single police call. We were able to determine that an officer tased a subject two or more times in 145 reported uses (the real number is likely higher, because the number of tasing attempts was clear in only 419 of the 518 total reported uses). Of the 142 second deployments where we could determine the success, 53% ended resistance or the immediate threat.Axon responseDespite multiple requests over several months, Axon declined to make a company spokesperson or executive available for an interview. Spokeswoman Corinne Clark did answer some of our written questions. She said in a statement that effectiveness rates can vary or be inaccurate depending on the definition of effective, whether the person judging it considers constructive authority uses and if a reason is provided for why a deployment was unsuccessful, since deployments that miss with one or both probes cannot be successful.“An energy weapon’s potential to create (neuromuscular incapacitation) depends on whether certain conditions are met. These required conditions include a completed circuit and sufficient muscle mass (probe spread). If there is no completed circuit (one or two missed probes) or insufficient muscle mass, there is no potential for NMI without taking additional steps. During pre-release testing of TASER energy weapons, NMI was achieved at or near 100% of the time when these conditions were met,” Clark said.However, she did acknowledge that while officers are trained in the conditions, “they are often confronted with circ*mstances that may prevent these conditions from being met.”Clark also said Tasers can gain compliance just from officers drawing them or doing a spark display, without needing to deploy them. A 2018 U.K. government study found that officers there didn’t deploy their Tasers in 80-85% of the times they unholstered them.Axon estimates that 292,506 lives have been saved by Tasers over the years. The figure is extrapolated from a 2009 study estimating the number of uses in the field (from the number of weapons and frequency of use), plus a finding from a 2008 study of 492 Taser uses in Dallas that found the weapon prevented the use of deadly force in 5.4% of uses.

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