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UK: The Police Have Used Tasers on Children Hundreds of Times

25 April 2016

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"On Thursday, the small but robust police-monitoring group Stop Watch released a report that makes concerning reading if you're the kind of bleeding-heart liberal who thinks it's bad for the police to electrocute minors.

The cornerstone of the report, a formal submission to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, was the responses to a series of FOI requests on the police use of Tasers against children. Tasers have been deployed – which could mean anything from drawn, aimed or fired – by the Metropolitan Police 185 times against children during the period Jan 2014-Nov 2015, and 16 of those times against children 14 years old or younger. Tasers were fired against children by the Met ten times, including once at a 13-year-old child. In the rest of England and Wales, 28 of the 43 forces that responded to the FOI request (excluding the Met), deployed Taser guns against minors more than 407 times, including 57 times against those 14 or under. Among these deployments, Tasers were fired 34 times.

As is often the case with FOI responses, the information provided is not complete – some forces found ways to avoid or delay replying. But at the very least, we know that 2014 and 2015 saw the police in England and Wales actually fire Tasers at children a minimum of 44 times."

See the article: The Police Have Used Tasers on Children Hundreds of Times (Vice, link)

See also: StopWatch: UN Submission: The Policing of Children in England and Wales and International Human Rights Standards (link) and The Policing of Children in England and Wales and International Human Rights Standards - Submission to Committee on the Rights of the Child from StopWatch (pdf)

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