Study: Police Use of Tasers Causes Few Injuries

Media coverage tends to be biased against tasers. Here are the facts:

The use of Taser stun weapons by U.S. police forces inflicts very few serious injuries, researchers said on Monday[...]

[...]Researchers tracked police Taser use on 962 people in six jurisdictions around the country from July 2005 to June of this year. The study was funded by the U.S. Justice Department.

Three of these people sustained moderate or severe nonfatal injuries requiring hospital admission, the study found.

[...]Of the rest, 216 people sustained mild injuries like abrasions, contusions and minor cuts requiring outpatient medical treatment, and 743 suffered no injury, the study found.

Two who were shocked with the weapon died, but the researchers said investigations and autopsies determined the deaths to have been unrelated to the Taser.

"The data that we've got supports the safety of these devices, in that 99.7 percent of the people on the receiving end in the real world had either no injury or mild injury," Dr. William Bozeman, an emergency medicine specialist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina who led the study, said in a telephone interview.