? 5/4/20 Dear Members of the Board of Supervisors: A growing body of evidence suggests that Tasers are much more dangerous then previously thought. The death toll is now well over a thousand people who have died after being shot with a Taser. Almost all of the dead have been unarmed individuals. The great majority of those who have died are people of color, the mentally ill, those under the influence of drugs and alcohol and those with a wide variety of undisclosed medical vulnerabilities. After many Taser deaths the police and the municipalities who employee them are successfully sued for “break the budget” large sums. Victim’s families who sue no longer bother to sue the manufacture (Axon, previously Taser International) because the manufacture’s 4500 hundred word warning explicitly advises against using the Taser to shot someone in the face, eyes, chest, groin, the mentally ill, those under the influence, and numerous other circumstances, making the Taser extremely challenging for police to use within the parameters of the warnings. The practical reality is that police departments that are properly trained rarely use the Taser in the field. On the other hand, departments that failure to abide by the warnings are repeatedly being sued. Ed Davis the former police chief in Boston from 2006-2013, in ultimately declining to purchase Tasers for his department, said the following: “ The warnings made the weapon impractical to use, and it gave a lot of us the impression that we weren’t getting the full story. I didn’t want to take the risk. The potential litigation costs absolutely were a factor.” The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors should think long and hard before spending nearly a million dollars on a weapon that is rarely used and invites litigation when it is. Sincerely, Aram James Palo Alto, CA 415-370-5056 abjpd1_at_(domainremoved) Received on Mon May 04 2020 - 14:26:36 PDT
