Palo Alto Police Postpone Taser Plans

Palo Alto police are indefinitely postponing plans to arm each officer with Taser electroshock weapons. According to an Oct. 27 article in the Palo Alto Daily News, Police Chief Lynne Johnson said: "We don't have funding and we are doing some more research. We need some time to educate the public...I think there is a lot of misinformation in the media about Tasers".

The article reveals that Johnson has been avoiding asking the City Council for funds - presumably to avoid having to justify the expense to the elected representatives of the uneducated public in Palo Alto (home of Stanford University). Johnson said she will still eventually buy the Tasers once more research is conducted and money becomes available. In other words, the decision has been made and the outcome of the research will have no bearing on that decision.

Meanwhile, since Johnson first announced the department's decision to purchase Tasers on July 15 of this year, a group of concerned residents have been educating the public to the "misinformation in the media about Tasers" from the police and the weapon's manufacturer. Former public defender Aram James led an email campaign to city officials and spoke out at City Council meetings, while Nat Fisher and others wrote letters to the local newspaper, and I worked with a group distributing leaflets to the community. Although the police chief did not openly acknowledge the public's influence on her decision, we can't help but note that other police departments continue to purchase Tasers - despite the ongoing publicized controversy. That's why we urge other communities to continue to organize resistance to the spread of the hand-held electric chairs called "Tasers". Tasers are just one aspect of the police state machinery that we must change, but it is a critical one because it provides the police with a torturous means to more easily suppress our ability to change anything at all.