Page 5131 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 27 October 2010
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… The man noticed the police officer and his body language became aggressive towards the police officer.
The police officer drew his Taser weapon and shouted “police, don’t move”. The police officer ordered the man to show his hands. The man raised his hands and shouted abuse at the police officer. The police officer ordered the man to turn around and face the wall, and then get to his knees and place his hands on his head … The police officer … radioed for priority backup.
The police officer took hold of one of the man’s hands to place handcuffs on him … The man pulled his arm from his head and twisted in an attempt to stand up.
The police officer deployed his Taser weapon into the man’s upper right shoulder … and the police officer supported him as he dropped sideways to the ground.
This is a factual account from the inquiry and a practical demonstration, I believe, of the escalating effect a taser can have. I think this is an interesting case study. We had an unarmed man, who was, from the report, conducting himself in an offensive manner, but it is interesting to see how quickly the situation escalated to the use of a taser device.
In further highlighting why this is an issue that I believe warrants Assembly debate, I would also like to quote from an article in the Australian on 6 October which was titled “Shock tactics on deadly display”. The article reads:
WRITHING and roaring in agony, the unarmed man is shot unrelentingly at close range with a stun gun as nine policemen stand watching.
“Stop f . . king around!” one of them commands, as the Aboriginal man—who had objected to a strip-search in the foyer of a Perth watchhouse—is stunned 13 times with a police-issue Taser.
“Do you want to go again?” an officer yells before sending a 50,000-volt shock through the man’s contorted body.
“Wanna go again?”
This is an incident that has received national media exposure in recent weeks. I think it is one that most members of this place, and most members of the public, would find incredibly distasteful, but it is an incident that has highlighted the potentially overzealous use of these devices.
There was another incident reported in that same article, and I will again quote the article:
In what Queensland’s Crime and Misconduct Commission decried as “poor policing”, a 16-year-old girl was held down and stunned by police in an inner-city Brisbane park last year after she defied an order to “move on”. She had been waiting for an ambulance to treat her sick friend.
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