I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Like millions of other Americans, Al Arena of the International Association of Chiefs of Police watched the video of University of Florida student, Andrew Meyer, being shocked by police as he was removed from a John Kerry event this week. Arena is not a typical observer. He is the author of “Electro-Muscular Disruption: A Nine-Step Strategy for Effective Deployment,” one of the few proposals for police stun gun operation not written by a gun manufacturer. His reaction to the Florida incident?
“Many police have authorization to use the Taser in that situation.”
Over 10,000 police departments officially use high-voltage electro-muscular disruption devices also known as “Tasers” or “stun guns.” These guns are promoted as a less-than-lethal alternative to firearms, but Amnesty International claims that around 200 people have died as a result of stun gun shocks in the past six years and that they are becoming, “routine instruments of force.”
Continued -Each department sets their own policies about how to use the weapons, Arena said, and though the guns electronically store information about their use, there is no comprehensive public database of information about stun gun use.
The Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards has responsibility for ensuring standard police practices statewide but has not issued any directives as to where stun gun use should fall on the use-of-force continuum. The agency allows police to decide how to use the weapons based on materials they get from gun manufacturers.
This is a bad plan according to Detroit attorney, John Philo, who represents the family of a Livingston County man who died after being repeatedly shocked by police.
“The problem is, you have a company that has marketed the project as safe and harmless, but the company has not done serious testing at all,” Philo said, “The Michigan State Police should issue a uniform policy as to where [stun guns] fit on the use-of force continuum and it should not be at the lower end.”
Tom Hendrickson, executive director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police, said that Michigan police departments are using stun guns more and more despite the fact that at five to eight hundred dollars each they are relatively expensive.
“The overall perception is that it has caused fewer injuries to officers and fewer injuries to persons being subdued because they don’t come into contact with each other,” he said, “I guess an individual would rather be subjected to Taser than a firearm.”
With six hundred police agencies in Michigan, monitoring how they use stun guns would be an overwhelming task, said Hendrickson, “There could’ve been a monitoring provision written into the law when stun guns were re-approved,” he said, “but to my knowledge there was not.”
Michigan Taser Distributing did not return a call for comment.
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