Less Lethal Weapons-- Taserama

Ypsilanti police said officers stopped a vehicle for excessive noise and used a Taser on the driver, who police said was trying to assault officers.

Now, the City Council and others who viewed the police surveillance video are wondering if police used improper force.

Police said the man resisted arrest and officers were forced to use the Taser on him.

Dr. Doug Smith is a retired professor of pathology. He said he requested to see the video because he is convinced there is more to the story.

"I became interested because there were two deaths last summer of people who were tasered," Smith said.

Smith said he did not see any evidence on the video of the man trying to assault officers.

"You can see his feet in the video, and there is no evidence that he is kicking at anyone," Smith said. "Even if you give police credit for the first tasering, but the second, the third, he has hand cuffs on the second time. He is on the ground, not struggling"

Smith said police need to realize that a Taser is not a nondeadly weapon, it is just less deadly than a gun.

"Tasers are not a non-lethal weapon, they're a less-lethal weapon, " Smith said. "Police have to respect them."

A Dallas police officer has filed the latest in a string of lawsuits around the country that claim jolts of electricity received during Taser training caused fractured backs and other severe injuries.

The makers of the popular stun gun, however, say that their products are safe and credit them with saving lives by providing officers with a nonlethal option to guns when confronting unruly criminals.

Dallas police Officer Andrew Butler’s lawsuit, filed Jan. 6 against Taser International, is thought to be the first of its kind in Texas. He alleges Taser did not fully disclose the risks associated with being shot with the device in the academy to his police trainers. The city of Dallas is not a defendant.

“I love my department. I love being a cop. But I dodged a bullet,” said Butler, who was able to return to patrol after he had surgery to replace a fractured vertebra. “I can’t live with having knowledge that this can harm an officer and not do something.”

The dangers of Tasers have been known for years. In Dallas, the deaths of at least two drug-addled suspects who were stunned during arrests have been connected in part to shocks from the devices.

But in recent years, police officers around the country have begun filing lawsuits claiming they were hurt when taking a Taser shot. The stun guns are regularly used on recruits in training at many police academies.

“That has been the secret injury that Taser doesn’t like to talk about,” said Robert Haslam, a Fort Worth attorney who is chairman of the American Association for Justice’s Taser Litigation Group.

Several dozen lawsuits by police officers have been filed, but only one has gone to trial. Taser prevailed in that 2005 Arizona case because the officer had a pre-existing back condition, said John Dillingham, the Phoenix attorney who represented the injured former Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy.

Dillingham said the half-dozen other cases of injured officers which he’s handled have been dismissed, but he declined to talk about settlement agreements.

“There’s no reason for an officer to take a hit in training,” Dillingham said. “The only reason to demonstrate it is that it works and it’s safe. You don’t need to get shocked to know that.”