https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5627-4746
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ABSTRACT
Police use of Taser in England and Wales has received little academic attention, despite being the topic of much public controversy. Much of our knowledge comes from the United States of America, but these findings are based on a small number of data sets and little testing has been done to see whether such findings apply internationally. This article uses a novel dataset from a police agency in England and Wales, and pilots new covariates, to conduct a multivariate analysis of factors associated with Taser use: the first time such analysis has been conducted outside of North America. This analysis also provides an ideal opportunity to test long-standing theoretical debates about whether police use of force is affected by ‘who the citizen is’, as the conflict approach would predict, or ‘what the citizen does’, in keeping with the consensus tradition. Variables from both the former (namely gender and mental health issues) and the latter category (including presence or use of a weapon) were found to be statistically significant after the inclusion of controls. The results highlight limitations to the application of the American based literature internationally and demonstrate stronger support for consensus than conflict theories. They also highlight that, under certain conditions, it may be appropriate for officers to take civilian characteristics into account when making use of force decisions.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Professor Susan Banducci, and the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on this article. Any mistakes made are the authors’ own.
Disclosure statement
The author received travel costs from Taser International (now AXON) between the 2nd and 8th November 2014 to present her research to their Senior Management Team at the company headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, and to attend the Annual Conference of the Institute for the Prevention of In Custody Deaths.
Data access statement
Further information on the dataset used and findings of this study may available on request from the corresponding author, A.D. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.
Notes
1 The term Taser, Taser X26 and Taser X2 are trademarks of Axon (previously TASER International, Inc.), some of which are registered in the US and in other countries. All rights reserved.
2 The data aggregation methods used were as follows. Force options were coded as being used if this had been stated by at least one officer. Citizen characteristics (e.g. whether the citizen had taken drugs) were similarly considered to be present if this had been stated by at least one officer in the incident. Where different values were given for incident characteristics, values were selected that reflected the extent of the danger faced by officers, citizens and bystanders. Thus the most aggressive interpretation of the citizen’s conduct was recorded. Force was recorded as having been used to protect officers, the citizen or others (as opposed to other reasons) if at least one officer had so indicated. The longest duration of time since an officer had received PST was included. In terms of officer characteristics, in cases where multiple officers were attending, the longest length of service was captured, in order to be able to reflect the expertise available at the scene. Where different values were given for the number of officers and citizens present, the largest numbers given were used. Response officers, firearm-trained officers (ARVs) and traffic officers were coded as being present if one officer with this role description was present.
3 Assessed using the penalised maximum likelihood estimation, via the application of firthlogit in STATA. As an additional check, the relogit routines in STATA was also used.
4 It is recognised that (officer assessed) citizen mental health could arguably be included in either category (i.e. in ‘what the citizen is’ or ‘what the citizen does’). Previous work (Johnson Citation2011, Terril and Mastrofski Citation2002) has tended to put mental health in the former category, and that decision is replicated here. Yet it is acknowledged that mental health may vary between different incidents in ways that gender and ethnicity often do not. Moreover, while officer determinants of gender and ethnicity may remain fixed throughout an incident, the decision whether or not to label someone as having mental health issues may change as an incident unfolds.
5 Namely attempting escape, making threats or spitting.
6 Percentages add up to more than 100% as some incidents involve the use of multiple force techniques.
7 Percentages are higher than 100 as different officers can be present at the same incident.