How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Taser

Remember “don’t taze me, bro“? Good times. Over the years, we’ve watched cops deploy their Tasers and, on occasion, people die. It got so bad that Taser International had to revive a debunked cause of death to explain it. Tasers characterization was changed from “non-lethal” to “less-than-lethal,” because while they weren’t as deadly as guns, they weren’t undeadly either.

It got so bad that Taser International had to change its name to Axiom.

But now, Tasers aren’t deadly anymore, and Taser has Rayshard Brooks to thank.

A taser is not a deadly weapon. A gun is.

Adrenaline and irritation are not the same as mortal fear.

Running away should not be punishable by death.

Public safety must mean the public is safe. All of us.#BlackLivesMatter #AtlantaShooting #RayshardBrooks https://t.co/44ReSLU4Ev

— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) June 13, 2020

It’s not that a Taser is a deadly weapon. It’s that it isn’t an undeadly weapon. It’s not that a Taser is as deadly as a gun. It’s not. But it’s not incapable of causing death or serious bodily injury. What it is, however, is that we’ve just flipped the narrative because this time, this one time as opposed to all the other times, the Taser was taken from the cop and, while Brooks fled, fired at the cop. The cop shot him. The cop killed him. The cop had a gun. Brooks had the cop’s Taser. And now a Taser is not a deadly weapon.

Graham v. Connor controls the use of deadly force by a police officer, giving rise to the “Reasonably Scared Cop Rule.” The fear is just one of death, but serious injury. Can a Taser cause serious injury? If it can cause death, then it would not seem much of a downward stretch to conclude that serious injury can occur as well. Even if a Taser isn’t a deadly weapon, that doesn’t mean it falls outside the scope of the Rule.

Still, there are significant doubts as to the legitimacy of shooting Rayshard Books, whose identity was know to the police. Let him run, catch him later. No, it’s troubling that some would expect a cop to take a potential taze from a stolen Taser, and the less passionate might recognize that the expectation that cops would let a fleeing defendant taze him without taking action is unrealistic. What’s a cop to do?

Then again, a tazing might hurt, even kill, but shooting a guy three times in the back is surely a more definitive use of deadly force. Once the Taser was fired and the cop wasn’t harmed, was there still a need to fire? There might have been a second set of prongs in the Taser, with 50,000 volts of their own, but if he stayed out of range, any potential harm would have been avoided. There are a lot of moving pieces to what happened, and there is a very strong argument to be made that killing Rayshard Books wasn’t justified.

But in the process, we learned that the Taser was no big thing. Why did we spend all those years, all those words, all those lives, thinking it was a bad compliance tool and one that could very well kill people only to learn that it was no big deal?