In my recent comments about the now infamous UF incident, I argued that it could partially be explained as a back lash response of over anxious campus police in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre. Now I’d like to pose a hypothesis concerning the rise of tasering as a law enforcement technique in general. To put it breifly, I am prone to believe that the rise in the use of tasers (after and aside from their technological innovation) is correlated with an increase in the amount of female police officers.
Guns are a great equalizer of physical force. When people live in a diverse world, where some are strong and others are weak, the weak are at a great exploitable disadvantage compared to the strong. At any time the strong can simply take all they want from the weak. But with cheap and accessible hand guns, even the scrawniest of midgets armed with a Smith and Wesson can put up a good fight against the surliest of giants. Thus the costs and potential rewards of violent crime radically changes in the presence of fire arms.
Tasers and non-lethal weaponry was innovated to minimaize police liability when confronting unarmed civilians. Often times civilians are unarmed because of gun regulations and prohibitions. The typical argument in favor of non-lethal weapons is that they are non-lethal, i.e. preferable to lethal weapons. If confronted with the choice to be tasered or shot with a normal gun, I’d rather be tased — seems obvious. But the trends of tasing and police shootings don’t seem to support this argument. Rather than tasers being used as an alternative to traditional firearms, rates of police shootings with traditional firearms has remained constant since the innovation of tasers, while the use of tasers has steadily increased.
It seems like the alternative to tasing is physical force rather than traditional firepower. Using a taser has similarly non-invasive consequences as physical force but it’s much easier to apply and use. The costs of imposing physical force are dependent upon the available resource of force at the disposal of an officer. Big guys can use force cheaply and easily, scrawny officers face a bigger challenge in tackling and physically detaining suspects.
Through human history criminal populations have been mostly men compared to women. Some explanations concern, IQ, socio-biological predilections to violence, and opportunity costs. This trend has weakened significantly since the rise of the drug war. Criminality is no longer defined along margins that parse in favor of women. The difference in drug use between men and women is far smaller than the difference in committing violent crime or property crime. Also prosecuting wives and girlfriends of drug lords has served a useful bargaining device in bringing male drug offenders to trial and conviction.
Police forces attempt to diversify their officer populations to be more responsive to the communities they service. It’s a big help to have an officer who speaks Spanish in a dominantly Hispanic neighborhood. Maybe the same is true for female officers dealing with female suspects. With the rise in female criminality from the drug war, there has been a push for and subsequent rise in female officer hirings. If on average, women are physically smaller and weaker than their male counterparts then is it reasonable to assume that female officers will use tasers more often? The UF student was tased by a female officer.