The taser debate
The disturbing footage from a Perth detention facility of an Aboriginal man being blasted by a taser gun repeatedly and agonisingly has drawn near universal condemnation. The man had refused to submit to a strip search and was hit 13 times by a 50,000-volt shock, eight times on camera and five times off it.
"Do you want to go again?" yelled one of the nine officers from the who surrounded the man. "Wanna go again?"
As the taser is fired over and over, the video shows the man writhing on the floor, his body contorted in pain.
Filmed two years ago, the footage was released as part of a report into the use of taser guns by the Western Australia Police. It found that there was a growing tendency to use them in place of other methods of negotiation and physical restraint, even though they were introduced originally to provide officers with an alternative to hand guns in more extreme confrontations.
Whereas batons and capsicum spray might have been used in the past on difficult and violent offenders, now the preference is for taser stun guns. In the three years that they have been issued to beat police officers in Australia, they have apparently become the weapon of choice.
The release of the report coincided with the death of a man in his twenties in Sydney who was zapped by a taser gun after allegedly brandishing two knives at the police. The police say he was breaking into a house, and argue that the use of the taser may have prevented the deaths of two officers. The incident has become part of a much wider debate about the increased reliance on tasers.
"Police are far too trigger happy," says Terry O'Gorman, the president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties. "The evidence shows that tasers can kill. We support the use of tasers in a life-or-death situation or a violent situation where there is no alternative, but they're being used willy-nilly."
But the defends their use. It notes that in New South Wales assaults against the police dropped by 24% after tasers were deployed.
Even before the release of the video footage from Western Australia and the latest taser incident in Sydney, the issue of over-aggressive policing had been in the news after the death of a man who had been sprayed with capsicum spray by police and hit with a baton at St George Leagues Club in Sydney, where fans had been celebrating their victory in Saturday's rugby league grand final.
Not that it has any bearing on what happened at the Leagues Club, I watched the game at Sydney's Olympic Stadium and was taken aback afterwards at the scale of the police operation. Vehicles from the riot squad patrolled the surrounding plaza. Police dog handlers were out in force. As is the norm at sports stadiums in New South Wales, the police wore boiler suits, while even the officer helping to herd people onto the trains was wearing a bullet-proof vest.
But the style of policing seemed out of kilter with the mood of the game, at which fans from the and the had mingled happily in the stands and exchanged congratulations and commiserations afterwards. Fans are not segregated at Australian sporting events, and, curiously, the only times I have reported on crowd trouble at Australian sporting events have been at the - two years running.
Nobody doubts that the police do an extraordinarily tough job in the most trying of circumstances. You only have to be out in one of the major cities late on a Friday or Saturday night to witness the challenge confronting them. But from the increased reliance on tasers to the forceful policing of sports fixtures, do they themselves need to show more restraint?
PS Euroloo, yes I did get soaked.
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