It was with quiet satisfaction that I read this week that Metropolitan Police Officer PC Liam Newman, who tasered a man who then fell from a garage roof and sustained life-changing injuries, has been charged with GBH.
The criminal courts will determine culpability in this case, arising from an incident which occurred in April 2022, and I have long been calling for much more of this type of scrutiny of Police violence i.e through the lens of the very criminal law which it is the Police’s crucial duty to enforce. The enforcers cannot be allowed to be exempt from enforcement themselves, although all too often in practice this is what occurs.
Taser weapons are an arsenal which as a society we should watch over with great concern and caution so that their use does not become routine, and they are deployed only in the most appropriate of circumstances. Let them not become the instruments of a ‘mission creep’ which sees the UK’s inherently ‘unarmed’ Police Forces evolve into ‘every cop has a gun’ miniature armies, in the style of American law enforcement. In my opinion, there is a great danger inherent in the fact that these weapons have the potential to be lethal or cause catastrophic injuries, and yet at the same time are viewed by many Officers as ‘low level’ stun guns – increasing the likelihood of ‘accidental’ discharges, or trigger fingers twitching in anger or even in laziness, rather than only in circumstances where the use of a 50,000 volt electrocution device is essential and justified.
Read here some of the previous blogs written by myself and my colleagues about compensation awards which we have won for the victims of Police taser misuse-
- £22,000 for man tasered in the back
- £70,000 damages for innocent man tasered and beaten by the Police
- Taser Misuse against Children.
You must be logged in to post a comment.