Word: tasers
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Which brings us to the matter of the police. Under Daryl Gates, the Los Angeles Police Department became an army, not a police force. With its battering rams and paramilitary uniforms, its choke holds and Taser guns, it set the hard-nosed, Magnum Force, make-my-day standard for urban law enforcement through the '70s and '80s. In the process, it became so muscle- bound and senseless that it was unable to cope rationally with a traffic hazard named Rodney King, let alone with rioters and looters. Here too L.A. takes us into a Blade Runner future...
...began with wailing police cars chasing a motorist through the night, cornering his car in a Los Angeles suburb and surrounding the driver as he stepped into the street. A sergeant fired a 50,000-volt Taser stun gun at the unarmed black man, then three officers took turns kicking him and smashing him in the head, neck, kidneys and legs with their truncheons. A hovering helicopter bathed the scene in a floodlight as 11 other policemen looked on. When the beating was over, Rodney King, 25, an unemployed construction worker, had suffered 11 fractures in his skull, a crushed...
...chief competition is the bulkier, higher-priced ($325 to $400) Taser, a ten-year-old apparatus that shoots two wire-trailing darts into its victims, then passes an electric current through the wires. The Taser dart shooter is favored by many police, who would rather keep their distance from violent drunks, drug users and mental patients. Taser says that more than 400 police departments have bought the devices...
...Taser is considered a firearm (because it shoots darts), and its sale is somewhat restricted by federal law, while a handful of states have tougher rules that ban both Tasers and Novas, or limit them to police. Many civil libertarians are cautious supporters of stun guns on the ground that police are more likely to injure suspects with a gun or a nightstick. But the new charges of stun-gun abuse have sharpened their concerns. "The risks are the same as the advantages," answers Greg Thomas, a Washington police researcher. "It all comes back to the judgment and discretion...
...Week. Advanced Chemical Technology, the Los Angeles County firm that makes the $199.50 Taser, reports that all sales thus far have been to private citizens bent on self-protection. Currently 200 Tasers a week are coming off the production line, and more than 1,000 have been sold since March. The company has been urging its salesmen to do their best to sell the Taser refill cartridge ($10 each) only to legitimate customers, but with the Miami robbery, another weapon has entered the arsenal of both sides in the crime...