Taser safety warnings are posted in cop stationhouses
After accidental Taser firings inside police stationhouses surged in 2020, a new safety warning has finally gone up in commands around the city, the Daily News has learned.
“Caution. Ensure your CEW is unloaded before testing!” blares the warning now posted in NYPD commands. CEW is the abbreviation for a conducted electrical weapon.
The new warnings come after The News first disclosed in January that accidental Taser firings by cops jumped 35% in 2020 — to 328 incidents
compared with 243 in 2019. The advice also follows the opening of a probe by the state Public Employee Safety and Health Bureau into an NYPD sergeant’s complaint that requiring Taser testing in high-traffic areas of the stationhouse was unsafe.
“This procedure is dangerous,” Sgt. Harold Gates wrote in a complaint filed in November and obtained by The News. “The front desk is the most heavily trafficked area of the command.”
The NYPD said in a departmentwide memo in March 2020 that sloppy storage of the plastic cartridges led to “a high amount of damaged cartridges.”
“In order to avoid damaged CEW cartridges and accidental discharges, cartridges are not to be stored loosely,” the memo said.
The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
A police official said in January of the 328 accidental firings in 2020, some 322 were from spark tests — a minuscule number considering the roughly 6.3 million spark tests conducted that year.