Police data sheds light on Taser use

Officers don’t limit the duration or number of shocks to be used

Const. James Forcillo’s trial this fall in the death of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim, shot on a streetcar in 2013, raised questions anew about whether giving more street officers ready access to Tasers might prevent such fatalities.

Documents obtained by the Toronto Star offer some insight into how officers actually use force when confronting troubled suspects, particularly when using Tasers.

Shocks from police Tasers typically last five seconds each, but Toronto officers, once they decide to fire the device, frequently override this default, opting for lengthy — and sometimes repeated — deployments, according to records obtained through freedom of information requests.

Experts say the potential health impacts of Taser shocks, including repeated and lengthy ones, are not well understood.

The Star obtained all conducted energy weapon (CEW) use reports completed between January and June of 2014. These reports, required any time an officer deploys his or her Taser, contain information about the emotional state of the suspect at the time and whether the suspect was armed.

The Star also obtained printouts of data stored on the weapons, indicating how many times and for how long the weapons were deployed.

The Star requested data downloads for 43 of the 45 CEW use reports submitted between January and June 2014. The TPS released 41 data printouts, claiming in a letter that in the two missing cases no download reports were filed.

Twenty-one printouts describe multiple deployments, ranging from one to 24 seconds each. Officers sometimes fired multiple times against a single suspect. Eleven reports describe three or more deployments from a single weapon.

The data doesn’t indicate whether the Taser was making consistent contact — shocking the suspect — throughout a deployment. Officers sometimes indicated in their reports that a Taser dart had missed its target.

Single shots were often sufficient, with 19 data printouts showing single deployments ranging from three to six seconds.

A public report from Toronto police indicates that Tasers were fired for a single cycle in 44 incidents in 2014 and for multiple cycles in 43 incidents.

The Toronto Police Service doesn’t place limits on the length or number of deployments, but Deputy Chief Mike Federico said Taser use is carefully constrained and reviewed.

“The mere fact that you even displayed the device for the purpose of gaining compliance requires you to submit a report,” Federico said.

Policies on Taser use vary among police forces. In a review of police interactions “with people in crisis,” written after the Yatim shooting, retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci highlighted restrictions placed on Taser use by various police forces.

The Topeka Police Department, Iacobucci wrote, “generally limited” Taser use to three deployments.

Lt. Colleen Stuart, of the Topeka police, said additional cycles could be used in emergency situations, such as when a solo officer confronts a suspect demonstrating “assaultive behaviour.”

While the Toronto police maintain that the weapons are a valuable tool for gaining control of suspects, experts say potential health impacts of lengthy and repeated Taser blasts are not fully understood.

“The issue is not whether (a) Taser can cause cardiac arrest,” said Douglas Zipes, distinguished professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

“The issue is how often it can cause cardiac arrest.”

Zipes could not put a firm cap on the number of times police could safely deploy a Taser against a suspect.

“There’s nothing that’s hard and fast. It’s not really been studied, except in animals,” Zipes said.

Company spokesman Steve Tuttle criticized Zipes, who has served as a paid plaintiff’s expert in lawsuits against Taser and defended the weapons.

“I would never rule anything out,” Tuttle said, referring to the possibility of the weapons causing cardiac arrest. “It just doesn’t happen in the field.”

The location of the Taser’s darts is crucial, according to both Zipes and John G. Webster, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“As far as causing cardiac arrest and death . . . the important thing is where the Taser darts land — near the heart or not — rather than the length of time (the device is deployed),” Webster said.

“A single five-second blast will do it if it’s dead over the heart.”

A 2012 report in the Journal of Emergency Medicine examined 1,201Taser uses and concluded, “fatal cardiac dysrhythmias are unlikely to occur when (Tasers) are deployed on human subjects in real-life situations” — even if the probes land across the heart.

The Toronto police use the weapons most often as a “demonstrated force presence,” simply displaying the Taser to control a suspect.

The precise health impacts of the controversial weapons are not entirely clear, according to a 2013 report published by the Council of Canadian Academies and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

“A small number of human cases have found a temporal relationship between (conducted energy weapons) and fatal cardiac arrhythmias, but available evidence does not allow for confirmation or exclusion of a causal link,” the paper stated. “If a causal link does exist, the likelihood of a fatal cardiac arrhythmia occurring would be low.”

The Toronto police are resolved that studies on the effects of Tasers do not show that the weapon causes harm.

“While the Service recognizes the value of continual research, it remains satisfied that the current med- ical research has found no persuasive evidence of risk to vulnerable persons,” the police said in a response to the Iacobucci report.

“The officers are aware that . . . either repeated or long-term application is not recommended, but the circumstances may still dictate that that’s the only available response a police officer has,” Federico said. “People are expressing some caution about a potential outcome that hasn’t actually been established by any of the evidence so far.”

Zian Tseng, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said Tasers can “capture” a suspect’s heart if at least one of the barbs lands close to a suspect’s heart.

The rapid pulses emitted by the Taser overtake the heart’s natural beat, leading to “chaotic, unco-ordinated rhythm” and no blood pumping, according to Tseng, who said this is rare.

“If the Taser itself captures the heart, then a five-second overtaking of the rhythm is not as bad as a 20second overtaking of the rhythm,” Tseng said.

“I would say there is pretty good reasoning to . . . avoid lengthy shocks.”

He agreed with Zipes on the issue of what we know, or don’t know, about repeated and lengthy Taser blasts.

Tseng said he recognizes that the decion to use force is a difficult one, but underscored the need to emphasize their lethal potential.