Blacks hit with Tasers far more than whites

The police call came in for an “emotionally disturbed person” who had poured spaghetti sauce in an apartment stairwell. With emergency responders at hand, a City of Newburgh officer urged the woman, 53, to go to a hospital.

“You honky!” she shouted. “Go back to Mars!”

The woman — “enraged,” the police report states — ran to the kitchen for a knife, was tackled, bit the officer and, finally, was shocked twice with a stun gun, commonly called a Taser.

The woman was black — by no means the reason she was stunned given the circumstances. But race clearly plays a role in Taser incidents locally, perhaps, as the woman’s comment suggests, on the side of both those stunned and those who stun.

Blacks are subjected to painful electric shocks from stun guns far more than whites, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal study of 467 Taser use reports from 19 local police agencies.

Among Taser cases of City of Newburgh police, blacks comprised 78 percent of those shocked, and they made up 61 and 53 percent of stun-gun subjects in the cities of Poughkeepsie and Kingston. That’s almost four times the proportion of blacks in the Kingston population, more than double their proportion in Newburgh and just under twice that in Poughkeepsie, according to census figures. The biggest imbalance was in the Town of Newburgh, where five times the proportion of blacks were shocked as there are blacks in the town.

Police say they do not target blacks and that they try to use the stun device only when necessary to control and arrest suspects. The large share of blacks stunned aligns with the over-representation of people of color in the criminal justice system, an outgrowth, experts say, of complex social and economic factors.

As with the Journal’s analysis, a 2011 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union also found disproportionate use of stun guns on minorities, who represented 58 percent of cases from eight New York police forces. The phenomenon “echoes consistent and disturbing practices of over-policing in communities of color,” the study said.

Source:  www.poughkeepsiejournal.com