The Political Framing of Tasers

To contribute to the discussion on Taser’s and other “less lethal” or “less than lethal” weaponry, I wanted to contribute a letter I sent to the NY Times back in July 2007, regarding an editorial

“Last weeks editorial on Tasers (6/

Taser

24/08) is problematic. Citing Amnesty International’s report, it asserts that 300 people have died around the world from the use of the Taser. But what is the statistical significance of this number? Citing the number “300” does little to inform the reader of the relative risk of death or injury from the Taser since we don’t know how many people have been Tasered, under what conditions, and with what consequences. It may well be that more have died from batons, police officers using there hands and feet, or the “dog pilling” that used to restrain violent persons. Any risk analysis of the Taser must situate the Taser within the universe of force options available to the police and the risk of any police-citizen encounter. We also need to know whether injuries and deaths, over all, are increased or reduced by the introduction of Taser. More to the point, Amnesty’s report does not represent a consensus within the scientific, medical or law enforcement community.

Scientific debates aside, it is worth reflecting on the representation of what is normal police work for police in the editorial. The Author writes, “[Tasers] might make sense as a last-resort alternative to lethal force, but it would be folly to allow them to be used in more routine situations like crowd control or policing political demonstrations” (italics mine). It is common knowledge to law enforcement, sociologists and criminologists who study the police, that “crowd control or political demonstrations” are not part of routine police work. They are rare exceptions and typically limited to large urban departments. As such articulating Taser debates in terms of political demonstrations and crowd control is not useful.

It is worth inquiring why the Taser has so captured the imagination of the public and the media. Ultimately it has become a fetishized object for debating the very legitimacy of the police. As the epitome of rationalized and technological state control of the unruly, it is a powerful metaphor for the left to think the police within the neoliberal age. But metaphors also can limit our understandings. The fact is police are primarily negotiators, beings who talk their way through conflicts rather then resorting to violence. This has been substantiated by 30 years of sociological research, which time and time show that police ultimately are best understood as supervisors of “volatile working groups.”

Yet misperceptions of what is “normal” police behaviors fetshizes the Taser at the expense of a cogent examination of routine police behaviors that do endanger the public. For example, recently within the law enforcement community there has been introspection regarding pursuit and emergency driving. Routine police driving behaviors put citizen’s lives and property in danger on a scale greater than that posed by the Taser. According to NHTSA, in 2006 alone, there were 404 pursuit related fatalities, 133 (33%) were innocent bystanders. Between 1983 and 2006 there were at total of 8139 fatalities. I cite these statistics to put the danger presented by the Taser into perspective.

The attention attracted by the Taser also distracts from the social contexts that incubate situations in which police officers typically use Tasers. Officers tend to use force on people who are under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or experiencing mental health crises. These persons typically are more resistant to negotiation and verbal commands, behave erratically, and don’t respond to hands-on police tactics. These are also disproportionally the economically and socially dispossessed. Police are called in as a last resort when individuals and groups have exhausted their local resources. Unfortunately the vertiginous withdrawal of government from providing basic social, health, and mental health services and under funding of drug and alcohol treatment programs, means that police officers respond only after problems have been left to fester . By the time police become involved the situation has deteriorated to the point that force is likely needed to resolve a situation through arrest.

If we want to reduce deaths in situations involving Tasers we would do better to eliminate causes of poverty, help raise the standards of living of vulnerable populations, and cease using the police as an answer to the decline of welfare institutions.”

Commentary & Forums

Search and Seizure of Students at Public Schools

While at Cafe Pergolesi, yesterday, I overheard an extended discussion between two UCSC students discussing the legality of searches and seizures at schools. Being a deputy, I am somewhat familiar with Juveniles and the law. But I find that it is often unclear how deputies are supposed to deal with minors on school grounds. I have heard some deputies say that they need have only reasonable suspicion to conduct a search of a student on school grounds. That is flat out wrong!

Case Law has made several things clear:

1.) The Supreme Court has affirmed that minors have 4th amendment protections

2.) Schools, especially public schools, are not “special places” where the 4th amendment does not apply. The Court stated in Tinker v. Des Moines Ind. School District, 393 US 503, 506 (1969), “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights of freedom of speech or expression at the school house gate.”

3.) Per New Jersey v. T.L.O. 469 US 325 (1984), Public school employees are “creatures” of the State, and therefore they are subject to the 4th Amendments restrictions on search and siezure. If you are a student at a private school you are SOL, and your reasonable expectations to privacy are diminished and, further, private school employees are not “the State” and therefore the fruits of their search, so long as not coerced by law enforcement, are not subject to 4th amendment restrictions.

4.) Public school employees do not need search warrants to conduct searches of students

5.) Lockers and other jointly possessed spaces and property are searchable and seizable by public school employees as students do not have a reasonable expectation to privacy.

6.) The needs to maintain order, discipline, and safety in schools lowers the bar for searches. In most cases, teachers and administrators will only need reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred to initiate a search (outlined in New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985) and public safety searches have been upheld in several lower court rulings, Williams,
1991; Widener, 1992; Cornfield, 1992; Dukes, 1992). In re Alexander B. (1990), allows for group suspicion to legitimate searches where public safety is at risk. In this case, “someone” in a group was alleged to have a gun on school grounds. This justified a search of the whole group to locate the gun, even though no individualized suspicion existed.
Because schools have the need to maintain order in their setting, school officials need not obtain a warrant before searching a student. They also need not be held to the “probable cause” requirement to search. The legality of a student search should depend on reasonableness. Determining the reasonableness of any search involves determining whether or not the search was justified. There needs to be reasonable evidence that the student is, or will be violating school rules, or the law.
The bottom line is the “Gault Rule” which states that the rights of one bow to the safety of the group.

7.) Searches by public school employees are limited in their scope. They must be reasonable and congruent with the reasonable suspicion that led to the search, unless, in the course of a reasonable search, new evidence comes to light.

8.) Per Essex (2003), when public school officials are acting “in loco parentis” they may search even when only reasonable suspicion exists.

9.) When LAW ENFORCEMENT is involved in a search the PROBABLE CAUSE standard MUST be used. School Resources Officers are POLICE and not Public School Employees. Therefore the 4th Amendment demand for probable cause fully applies.

10.) Public School Employees do not need to Mirandize students. Miranda applies only when law enforcement is conducting interrogations in custodial environments. If a police officer is present during a public school employees interview or interrogation and is an observer ONLY, Miranda does not apply.

11.) A point of clarificaiton, according to the North Carolina Court of Appeals, In the Matter of D.D., 554 S.E. 2d 346 (North Carolina 2001), when the police work in conjunction with a school investigation, and are not conducting their own independent investigation, the case law from T.L.O. applies,

” [a] police investigation that includes the search of a public school student, when the search is initiated by the police and conducted by police, usually lacks the commonality of interests existing between teachers and students. But when school officials, who are responsible for the welfare and education of all the students within the campus, initiate an investigation and conduct it on school grounds in conjunction with the police, the school has brought the police into the school-student relationship.”

Of course, all of this begs the question of why we conceptualize a different legal theory at all for children? Why should children be treated any differently than adults? Why make the distinction, law, between children and adults, for without this distinction, it is unlikely that there would be any case law at all regulating search and seizure at schools. Invariably, we have to look to the early 20th century when new categories of “childhood” and attendant concepts such as “dependence,” “neglect,” and “delinquency” came into being. Similarly, compulsory education and other progressive institutions of the time, are pat of the story as well that leads to the development of a separate “juvenile justice system” (e.g. in CA, youth probation and the California Youth Authority).

DragNet

Anthropoliteia Around the Web 7/16/09

Bits and pieces from around the web:

“I’m not using excessive force, you’re excessively excited!”

This is a bit old, but NPR has an interesting series of reports on tasers and “death by excited delirium,” which is not a medically recognized condition. You can listen to them here and here.

(thanks to Peter Moskos’ blog Cop In the Hood, and to Meg for pointing out how “dope” the site is)

“It’s not a deadly weapon, you’re just using it wrong… and by ‘you’ I mean lots of you, again and again, in a systematic manner”

Speaking of the use of non-lethal force, there’s been another in a series of incidents concerning the improper use of the French non-lethal police tool called the Flash-ball, this time in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil. Francophones can read a commentary by Georges Moréas, who thinks the problem is not with the arm but with the rules for its utilization, at the Le Monde-affiliated blog “Police et cetera” here. It’s worth looking at, if only for the cool impact photos of the various types of ammunition which, Moréas reminds us, has the stopping power of a .38 Special (the weapon, not the Southern rock band).

Training is mostly B.S.

Also from Cop in the Hood, Moskos comments on a piece in The Oregonian which details changes in the amount of time, and schedule for, police recruits spending time in the field during their training. “Of my six months in the academy. I’d say that one month was wasted by sitting in an empty room or getting yelled at. Another 2 months were all but wasted with B.S. “classes” where nothing was really learned. That leaves three months of training that was actually productive. And I think I’m being generous,” estimates Moskos.

Book Reviews

The Liberal Way of War, The Liberal Way of Policing?

Tim Dunne, professor of international relations and head of humanities and social sciences, University of Exeter, reviewing the new book The Liberal Way of War:Killing to Make Life Live in Times Higher Education:

In the West, the thawing of the Cold War coincided with a revival in liberal internationalist ideas about the importance of regime type. Leading American thinkers including Michael Doyle and Francis Fukuyama seized on a claim initially articulated by Kant about the peaceful character of democracies. From Reagan onwards, every US President has endorsed the mantra that democracies are more peaceful than authoritarian regimes.

In The Liberal Way of War this hubris is dramatically punctured. Kant appears not as an exponent of a separate peace forged among republican states but as a philosopher of biohumanity. The consequence of the emergence of the human species as a referent for security is that war “becomes war without end”. On this logic, liberals are pushed closer and closer to the realist position that war is necessarily a recurrent feature of politics.

via Times Higher Education – The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live. (emphasis added)

If the argument is that once the referent for security becomes “the human” that the result is a temporally indefinate state of affairs best described as “a war without end,” what do we make of the anagolously indefinate state of policing?

My first impression is that there are least two issues at stake here:

What is/are the object(s) of contemporary policing? What, exactly, is being “policed” in each of our projects? In my own fieldwork, the answer to this question certainly varied–was a point of considerable debate, actually, but in a daily sense it was certainly not “the human species” itself. yet the temporality of “security” seems the same (perhaps)…
In a more tangential manner–though key to understanding what, exactly, we’re up to here in this blog–is the question of police vs. military, or quotidian policing vs. war (even the variety “without end”). Certainly there exists a now almost overwhelming amount of social science, anthropology being one of the key contributors, on war and its aftermaths. Oftentimes the instinct is to take the insights garnered from this material and apply it to the kind of situations that we study, leading to descriptions of police as a broadly “paramilitary” exercise. Again, I know form my own work that this is only partly true, at best. how to articulate the difference?

Announcements

Welcome to Anthropoliteia!

Welcome to Anthropoliteia! Our site is still very much under construction, but we hope you bear with us and check back soon.

We get our name from the Ancient Greek words anthropos (human) and politeia (the business of running the polis, The City or politics; from which we get the word “police”).

Once we’re fully rolling, we will be an interdisciplinary (political science, sociology, anthropology) group blog focused on the study of police, policing and security from a holistic and global perspective. In addition to irreglar posts from our contributors, we’re planning a bunch of cool features including: “Reports from the Field” and “Policing in the News” as well as a number of resources (bibliographies, useful sites, etc.)