Taser-gun confusion: 16 shootings in 10 years after officers mistake the the two
CINCINNATI (WKRC) - The death of Daunte Wright has law enforcement agencies around the country re-evaluating how they handle Taser devices.
We do not know for certain that the Minnesota officer mistook her handgun for her Taser, but initial evidence certainly points to that, and it's not as rare as you might think.
“There have been about 16 documented cases in the last 10 years,” said Sgt. Betsy Smith, the spokesperson for the National Police Association.
She classifies what happened in Minnesota as a “slip in capture” incident that could be attributed to motor programming in the brain that only more training can help.
“What are you going to do to keep this from happening here?” Local 12 asked Hamilton County Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey.
“I promise you every law enforcement agency in the nation is having that conversation right now,” she answered.
“But what are you going to do?” we pressed.
“And I had that conversation -- talking to our training staff and getting everybody refreshed,” she said.
McGuffey says her deputies train once a year with their Tasers. She plans to double that. The man in charge of that training is Deputy Sheriff Berlin Austin.
“We spend most of our time going hands-on, drawing out of our holster, and we try to put them in as high a stress situation as we can,” said Austin.
He says, like most agencies, he trains his officers to keep their Tasers on the opposite side of their belts from their firearms. But it's undeniable: The pistol grip of a Taser is similar to the pistol grip of a handgun.
Wrap Technologies manufactures the BolaWrap, a device that deploys a small rope with barbs at the end that wrap around a suspect, immobilizing them. Unlike a the Taser though, the BolaWrap device is shaped like a TV remote.
“It’s less likely to be mistaken by the officer, isn’t that true?” we asked Tom Smith, president and CEO of Wrap Technologies.
“Well, certainly, if anything is a different shape -- pepper spray is a different shape, a baton is a different shape, ours is a different shape, so we do give tactile feel that it’s different than a potentially lethal response,” he said.
The CEO of Wrap Technologies actually invented the Taser. He says it was police who wanted him to make it with a pistol grip so suspects couldn't wrestle it out of their hands.
The spokesperson for the National Police Association says often the confusion between weapons occurs when there's a transition -- holstering a firearm, pulling out a Taser, then reholstering the firearm. Under stress, that confusion is amplified.
While 16 shooting incidents mistaking Tasers for handguns seems like a lot, the National Police Association says when compared to 50 million police interactions a year, it’s very rare.
