Since tasers were introduced in the late 1990s, they have become commonplace among law enforcement officers nationwide.
Well upwards of 90 percent of all law enforcement agencies in the U.S. are equipped with tasers. The promise that attracted them was that these were weapons that could reduce officer-involved shootings and reduce the need for officers to get in physical altercations with suspects.
Peter Eisler is a journalist with Reuters who’s behind a new project that digs into the reality of tasers and if they’re actually as safe as they were promised to be.
Eisler and a team of reporters dug into police reports, court records and coroner’s reports nationwide, and found more than 1,000 incidents since 2000 where people died after they were hit by police with a taser.
And, when I talked with Eisler more about this project, we started by talking about how tasers actually work and why some people end up dying when they’re hit with them.
