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400 Michael D. White and Jessica Saunders 22. Vilke and Chan, “Less Lethal Technology.” 23. Vilke and Chan, “Less Lethal Technology,” p. 349. 24. There are other questions surrounding appropriate use against vulnerable persons, such as children, pregnant women, and the elderly. 25. International Association of Chiefs of Police, Electro-Muscular Disruption Technology (EMDT); Police Executive Research Forum, PERF Conducted Energy Device Policy and Training Guidelines for Consideration. 26. Jenkinson et al., “The Relative Risk of Police Use-of-Force Options”; Smith et al., “The Impact of Conducted Energy Devices and Other Types of Force and Resistance on Officer and Suspect Injuries.” 27. See, for example, Seattle Police Department, Seattle Police Department TASER Use and Deployment Fact Sheet; TASER International, TASER Non-lethal Weapons. 28. White and Ready, “The Impact of the TASER on Suspect Resistance.” 29. See Vilke and Chan, “Less Lethal Technology” for a complete review of this research. 30. Vilke and Chan, “Less Lethal Technology,” p. 353. 31. Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Two suspects died, but neither death occurred as a result of the TASER. 32. National Institute of Justice, Study of Deaths Following Electro Muscular Disruption, p. 3. 33. White and Ready, “The TASER as a Less-Lethal Force Alternative”; “The Impact of the TASER on Suspect Resistance”; Ready et al., “Shock Value.” 34. Smith et al., “The Impact of Conducted Energy Devices and Other Types of Force and Resistance on Officer and Suspect Injuries.” 35. There is growing body of literature that has examined the physiological side effects of the TASER, particularly whether it increases the risk of death. This literature includes reviews of coroner reports, biomedical studies with animals and healthy human volunteers, and reviews of available research. Though many of these studies have been conducted by independent researchers, this literature is outside the scope of this study—with its focus on race—and is not reviewed here. See Vilke and Chan, “Less Lethal Technology,” for a succinct review of this body of research. 36. Originally, nearly seven hundred articles were located, but several categories of articles were limited. First, the focus of this study is on police use of the device, so articles describing other aspects of the device or company (e.g., stock and business reports) were eliminated. Duplicate cases were also excluded to prevent certain articles from being over-represented in the comparative analysis. Duplicate cases were defined as any news reports that contained the same information as another report (typically published on the same date) describing a specific incident in which police used the TASER on a suspect. The duplicates were identified by cross-referencing the articles using the author or suspect’s name and the newspaper in which the article was published. Researchers also removed news reports in which the TASER was referred to incidentally but was not the primary focus of the narrative. A portion of these data were also used in previous work by Ready et al., “Shock Value.” 37. Smith et al., “Excessive Force, Civil Liability, and the TASER in the Nation’s Courts.” 38. A third study by Ready et al., “Shock Value,” compared NYPD data to media data drawn from LexisNexis and TimesSelect. 39. White and Ready, “The TASER as a Less-Lethal Force Alternative.” Notably, suspects began active resistance again at some later point in about 20 percent of cases, highlighting the temporary effect of the TASER. 40. White and Ready, “The Impact of the TASER on Suspect Resistance.” Weapon effectiveness was measured as terminating suspect resistance and officer satisfaction with the device. Race, Bias, and Police Use of the TASER 401 41. White and Ready, “The Impact of the TASER on Suspect Resistance.” 42. RAND, Do NYPD’s Pedestrian Stop Data Indicate Racial Bias? 43. RAND, Do NYPD’s Pedestrian Stop Data Indicate Racial Bias? 44. Lawton, in “Levels of Non-lethal Force,” examines all uses of non-lethal force by Philadelphia police officers in 2002. While he found that 30 percent of incidents involved OC spray or the TASER, there is no independent analysis of TASER incidents. Lawton does report overrepresentation of African Americans among use of force victims, but again, there is no specific discussion of TASER events. He also finds that citizen race is unrelated to type of force used. 45. Smith et al., “The Impact of Conducted Energy Devices and Other Types of Force and Resistance on Officer and Suspect Injuries.” 46. Smith et al., “The Impact of Conducted Energy Devices and Other Types of Force...

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