Investigations into the actions of Northumbria police in the hours before the death of Raoul Moat are concentrating on two Taser shots fired at the fugitive before he killed himself.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission will ask if the 50,000-volt charges from the stun gun prompted the former bouncer to fire his shotgun on himself after a six-hour confrontation with police.
The IPCC announced an official inquiry into the final moments of the standoff between armed officers and Britain's most wanted man within hours of Moat's death.
[...]As the inquiry got under way, Northumbria police's acting chief constable Sue Sim admitted that a Taser stun gun was fired at the 37-year-old, but "did not prevent his death". Later, the IPCC also said Taser stun guns were discharged during the police standoff.
Although Tasers are designed to incapacitate criminals, medical experts say they can trigger involuntary muscle spasms in people. [No kidding??? ed]
Moat had spent most of the confrontation holding his sawn-off shot gun to his head and neck, before squeezing the trigger at 1.15am. This followed hours of gentle persuasion by police negotiators to give himself up in an attempt to bring to an end one of Britain's most extraordinary manhunts.
I'm not even sure that this would be investigated in the US at this point.
There is something about the taser that makes police lose their common sense. They apparently come to see it as a magic weapon that simply makes people decide to comply rather than a torture device that causes their bodies to convulse in horrible pain and, if standing, lose muscle control and drop to the ground. Apparently, the authorities either don't know that, or forget, and use it willy nilly on 87 year old ladies with Alzheimers and suicidal mental patients along with anyone else they perceive to be refusing to respond properly to their orders, regardless of the reasons.
There should be a place for the taser in the policeman's arsenal. But they have shown that they cannot be trusted to use them. They make their lives easier so they have become a tool of torture and abuse --- and death --- upon the citizenry rather than a weapon used in place of a gun. It's clear that this is an experiment that has failed.
Update: This post is by digby --- I had to use Dennis Hartley's account for technical reasons.