Tasers enter anticrime arsenal

07/10/2007

William Kaempffer , Register Staff

NEW HAVEN — The 50 Tasers purchased by the Police Department four months ago now will be deployed to officers. The department will begin issuing the stun guns as soon as this week. They were shipped to the department in late February and officers were trained, but they were not put into use as the city and police union negotiated guidelines and policies for the less-than-lethal weapons.

The union and the city recently signed off on a new Police Department General Order, which appears to be the final hurdle in getting the stun guns into use.

Police Chief Francisco Ortiz Jr. said the city planned to make a formal announcement, but confirmed that an agreement had been reached.

"We've been batting around the General Order for the last couple of weeks," he said. "The only hang-up was to get some language settled on one or two things."

He said he would provide the document to the city's police commissioners and members of the Lethal Force Task Force. The task force was empaneled by the Board of Aldermen to explore nonlethal weapons and tactics after police in 2004 fatally shot a mentally disturbed man who had menaced officers with a 13-inch kitchen knife outside his Legion Avenue group home. A series of police-involved shootings — all of which were later determined to be justified — was the catalyst for examining Tasers.

The city ultimately plans to equip the entire department, although no timetable has been set, Ortiz said.

Initially, 50 cops will be outfitted with the Tasers, which are equipped with video and audio technology that starts recording when the device is activated. The footage can then be downloaded and stored, so it can be reviewed later.

The last sticking point, the General Order, covers a wide range of topics regarding the weapons, everything down to who is responsible for removing the electrodes from a suspect shocked with a burst of 50,000 volts.

The low-current electrical discharge temporarily disables the body's muscle-triggering mechanisms, incapacitating a suspect.

While many in law enforcement view the weapon as an effective alternative to lethal force, critics deride it as inhumane and dangerous, and point to a number of deaths associated with the device.

Sgt. Louis Cavaliere, the union president, said it's not uncommon for police and suspects to be injured in violent struggles, and the Tasers should help minimize such incidents.

One key item for the union was officers' ability to download and view footage taken by the Taser to reconcile it with their memories of the incident before writing a sworn report. If, for whatever reason, the footage can't be downloaded, Cavaliere said, an officer can include a boilerplate paragraph in the initial report indicating an addendum might be filed after review of the footage.

That would be an important aspect for police, given a case in Hartford in which a police officer there was arrested and charged with first-degree assault, falsifying a police report and fabricating evidence after his sworn police report about a police-involved shooting was contradicted by footage from a camera mounted inside a police cruiser at the scene.

Robert Murtha shot a suspected car thief in Jan. 26, 2003. After the shooting, Murtha said the suspect had tried to run him over, but an internal police investigation concluded a videotape from a cruiser-mounted camera showed Murtha fired without provocation. He was fired, but later found not guilty by a jury.

Also in 2003 in New Haven, a police officer was charged with making a false report after a police report she wrote about an altercation between a prisoner and judicial marshals in the lock-up didn't correspond with a video recording of it. She applied for a special form of probation that would leave her with a clean record and remains on the job.

Cavaliere said he didn't believe any officers would intentionally lie on a report, but said, "but when you're in a combat situation, you're going to write a report like we all would — of what you believed happened."

"You can capture things in the video that you can't capture in your memory, two or three hours later," he said. "I don't want some cop to write a report and then have someone later review the video and come back later and say, ‘You lied in your report.'"

The Tasers cost about $1,200 each, not counting extra cartridges, holsters, warranties and other accessories, police said.