A Recipe for Disaster: School Cops Are Being Armed with 50,000-Volt Tasers

"A total of 43 children were directly and indirectly shocked by electric stun guns during simultaneous Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day events gone wrong at three state prisons last month," reported the St. Petersburg Times on May 16th. "One was a warden's daughter."

Their ages ranged from five to 17. Fourteen of the kids were "directly shocked." The other 29 were "indirectly exposed when they held hands with a person who was shocked. With the kids circled together, the electricity could flow from one child's hands to the next."

Walt McNeil, Secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections told the Times, "I can't imagine what these officers were thinking to administer this device to children, nor can I imagine why any parent would allow them to do so. This must not happen again."

The bizarre rash of student electrocutions might have been an aberration on Florida prison grounds, but the guards — three of whom were fired and two of who resigned — might be forgiven for assuming that such devices are somehow safe for kids. Even as news outlets across the country report episode after episode where police officers tase and use stun guns on unlikely people — take the pregnant woman tased at a baptism in Virginia or the 72-year-old woman tased in a Texas traffic stop — more and more police officers are being given tasers to carry into schools.

And not just college campuses; middle and high schools across the country are inviting Taser-toting cops on school grounds.

This comes at a time when Tasers have claimed the lives of hundreds of people, including three teenagers this year alone. While heightened security might be a necessity in an age where kids smuggle deadly weapons to school, this fact alone should give parents and school officials pause. Even as school administrators and local law enforcement accept and incorporate Tasers as disciplinary measures, deploying them on school grounds is putting students at risk.

Is Breaking School Rules A Crime?

Last September, police officers in Hawthorne, CA tased an autistic 12-year-old boy at his middle school after he became "violent," launching a misconduct investigation by the police department. In June, at Penn Hills High School in Pennsylvania, a student was tased in the hallway after ignoring a police officer's orders to put away his cell phone. ("The kid refused to listen," Penn Hills Police Chief Howard Burton explained, saying the student then "pushed the officer.")

In 2006, an 11th grader named Angel Debnam was tased at her high school in Bunn, North Carolina, just outside Raleigh. "Something sticks in you, and it's like a wire," Debnam described to local ABC affiliate WTVD. ("When I was on the ground crying and shaking, he asked me, 'Was that enough? Are you calmed down now?' and he did it again.")

In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that "the number of law enforcement agencies that have given Tasers to officers who work on school campuses has grown to well over 4,000," according to Steve Tuttle, Vice President of Communications at Taser International. That's up from 1,700 in 2005.

In an e-mail to AlterNet last week, Tuttle said that this estimate remains accurate, noting that it "includes municipal law enforcement agencies that have School Resource Officers (SROs) for elementary and high schools, as well campus police for colleges and universities." But Tuttle took issue with the notion that Tasers are used "'for unruly students' as the LA Times article inferred."

"They are used to protect students and faculties," he said, as well as police officers hired to patrol school grounds.

Just weeks into the 2009/2010 school year, at least one report has surfaced of a student being tased on school grounds. In Topeka, Kansas, a teenager at Capital City School was sent to the hospital after being tased, reportedly after "attacking" a school police officer while a Topeka police officer handcuffed him. (According to local media, the student "was being suspended for violating school rules.")

"Our premier law enforcement electronic control device"

Last fall, police officers patrolling Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Fl joined the ranks of school security officers who carry Tasers on campus. The decision followed years of controversy over the measure, which was first announced in 2005.

That January, local press reports revealed that the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office (JSO) had signed a $1.8 million contract with Taser International to buy 1,800 Taser guns for city police officers over the next two years, some of which would be used by school security officers. The timing was at least partly motivated by Superbowl XXXIX, which was held at Jacksonville Municipal Stadium that February.

According to the Associated Press, "some school officials [were] surprised by the action, saying they were never told by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office that it planned to issue stun guns to the officers assigned to most middle and high schools."

But plans to deploy the Tasers were put on hold shortly after. In late February 2005, Sheriff John Rutherford imposed a blanket moratorium on Taser use by the JSO after it came under fire for the repeated tasing of a 13-year-old, 65 lb girl who was in handcuffed inside a patrol car.

Llahsmin Lynn Kallead had reportedly kicked the inside of the police car when she was shocked multiple times by her arresting officer.

"I saw her jump from one side of the police car to the other" from the shock, her mother, Rosie Vaughan, told reporters. "She shook."

It was surely a PR nightmare for Sheriff Rutherford, who had gone to great lengths to prove the safety and usefulness of the devices, holding town hall meetings across the county on the topic. The stocky 52-year-old had even volunteered to be tased himself, on camera, to demonstrate. ("Rutherford took a hit in the back and fell to the floor as other officers held his arms," according to Jacksonville's News 4. "He bounced back up almost immediately, saying, 'There you have it.'"

In a conversation with AlterNet, the sheriff's office preferred to refer to Tasers by the name the company gives them: "Electronic Control Devices" or ECDs. An JSO employee told AlterNet, "we were, obviously, very thorough and deliberative in making sure that they fit in our use-of-force matrices."

For the JSO, the main value of the Taser is that "it enables the officer to bring someone under control."

This apparently includes students and other hard-to-handle populations. Not only are the devices deployed in all the middle and senior high schools in Jacksonville, according to the Sheriff's office, "we've also had many incidents where a mentally impaired person was brought under control through the use of the ECD."

The model used in Jacksonville schools is the TASER X26, which, unlike those used by the police officer who tased the kids on "Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day" can be fired remotely, hitting targets as far as 35 feet away with 50,000 volts of electricity. Taser International describes the X26 model as "our premier law enforcement electronic control device."