Vice News reports on a study from the SLS Criminal Justice Center on the effectiveness of the use of Tasers by law enforcement. 

The City Council of Berkeley, California, is currently considering a request by the city’s police department to allow officers to carry and use Tasers, a practice adopted by more than 12,000 police departments across the country in recent years that has quickly made the electronic weapon a source of controversy.

The council asked Stanford Law School’s Criminal Justice Center to study the effectiveness and safety of Tasers and other “electronic control weapons” ahead of their decision, resulting in a report released this week that questions many of the claims that have bolstered the popularity of such shock devices in recent years, including their ability to minimize the use of lethal force by officers.

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Akiva Freidlin, one of the report’s co-authors, said that Berkeley officials asked the team to help analyze the evidence they could find to determine whether Tasers really were effective and safe. The report does not make specific recommendations for the city, but it amounts to a cautious warning about their adoption.

“The way I would sum up the conclusion now is that there are so many gray areas,” he remarked. “I kind of see it as there’s nothing in the research that’s going to make it an obvious yes or no, but the way we read that the research has been done really undercuts or complicates the case in favor of adopting them.”

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“So, okay, that doesn’t mean people are dying left and right from these — though that happens, particularly when it intersects with populations who get in confrontations with police officers, like those using drugs and alcohol and with mental and physical issues,” Freidlin said. “But what we’re saying after looking at all this is that the claim that this reduces risk to suspects is hand-waving away what to most people would be considered some kind of injury.”

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Freidlin and his fellow researchers largely relied on that study in their report. He said that the key phrase is “healthy adults,” pointing out that the study found no high risk of injury or death in “healthy, non-stressed, non-intoxicated” individuals — which aren’t typically the people on which police use their Tasers. The Stanford report refers to a comprehensive review published in 2011 which found that “the majority of subjects exposed to a Taser were under the influence of alcohol or illicit drugs or had psychiatric comorbidities.”

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