HMP Britain

Since December 2008, Chief Constables can deploy Tasers with regular front-line police officers. Prior to this, only authorised firearms officers were authorised to use these devices. This, of course, has lead to more instances of apparent misuse.

Current Statistics

The Home Office publish quarterly statistics about the use of Tasers by police forces in England and Wales. Published statistics are cumulative over time, and so not broken down by year or month. This makes it difficult to establish a trend in their usage over time.

There are further problems: they do not provide a ‘base’ to compare Taser use across forces— for example, 100 Taser discharges by the Metropolitan Police and 100 discharges by Northumbria Police are very different figures given the number of officers and the population each serve.

Constructing New Tables

Using the Taser and demographic statistics from the Home Office it is possible to standardise Taser use to ‘Usage per 1,000 Officers’ and ‘Usage per 1m of Population served.

In the chart above, for example, there were 171 total uses and 29 discharges (electrocutions) per 1000 police officers.

In both graphs you can see the usual suspects of Police Forces with both Northumbria and North Wales scoring highly. Do note the huge variation between forces in Taser use, and also the variation in the proportion of discharges to total use.

HMP Britain Awards for Tasering

A set of long-life Duracell Batteries goes to the following winners:

The winners of HMP Britain’s Most-Zap-Happy-Police-Force award must go to Northumbria. Their figure for discharges per officer is 228% above average.

The winner of HMP Britain’s ‘Wow we’ve got a cool new toy to play with’-award also goes to Northumbria. Their figure for total use of Tasers per citizen served was 510% above average.

Notes

1. Sources and dataset used is here.
2. City of London police has been removed as there are no reliable population statistics available.
3. ‘Average’ in post refers to the median.
4. Asterisked police forces in graphs refers to whether the force took part in the Taser liberalisation pilot. It is probably these forces’ statistics are higher since officers would already be trained to use these devices as part of the pilot.
5. ‘Total Use’ refers to all uses of Tasers (even getting it out the holster and pointing it at an individual), discharges refer to where probes were fired and an electrical current was discharged. A full list is available from ACPO Ltd’s ‘ACPO taser operational guidance’ document.

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