Taser use by police rises by 36% in a year possibly due to more officers carrying the weapons

Tasers were used by police in 32,000 incidents last year, rocketing by more than a third on the year before.

In the year to March, the stun guns were deployed 88 times a day on average in England and Wales, Home Office figures reveal – up 36.7 per cent from 23,451 deployments the previous year.

The Home Office did not provide an explanation for the rapid rise, but it is thought to be due to the growing number of officers carrying the weapons.

In September last year the Government announced a £10million ring-fenced fund to significantly increase the number of officers with Tasers.

The figures come after Home Secretary Priti Patel approved use of a new, more painful model of Taser in August which Government scientists say could lead to more suspects suffering internal injuries and broken bones.

The Taser, first introduced in Britain in 2003, incapacitates its target by firing probes which deliver a high voltage electric pulse, causing involuntary muscle spasms.

An official breakdown of Taser incidents during the year shows they were drawn by officers in more than 7,000 incidents, aimed at suspects in more than 3,000, and there were nearly 17,000 incidents in which the weapon’s ‘red dot’ targeting device was used.

More seriously, they were discharged 3,334 times, including 58 occasions where Tasers were used as an electro stun weapon to deliver a shock at close quarters.

Other figures published by the Home Office yesterday showed force was used 715,000 times by police during the year in 492,000 separate incidents.

The most common were restraint tactics, such as handcuffing, used 452,000 times.

Firearms were used 4,800 times.

And ‘unarmed skills’ including joint locks, pressure points and ‘distraction strikes’ with hands and feet were used 164,000 times.

Ethnic minorities were disproportionately affected by police use of force.

Outside London, black people were in involved in police incidents including use of force at a rate five times higher than white people. In the Metropolitan police, it was four times the rate.

In August Miss Patel gave police the go-ahead to deploy a ‘more painful’ version of the Taser stun gun which could cause more serious injuries. 

For the first time, innocent passers-by also face the risk of being hit by probes which deliver the electric shock, Government scientists said, because the new model has a feature which allows them to detach from the gun after being fired.

The Taser 7’s probes are more powerful than in previous models, according to official documents published by the Scientific Advisory Committee on the Medical Implications of Less-Lethal Weapons (SACMILL).

‘The electrical output of the Taser 7, together with the way in which it is delivered, imply that the new device may be more effective than the [earlier] Taser X2 at inducing neuromuscular incapacitation and may be more painful for the subject,’ they said.

They added that ‘free-flying probes… present a hazard to bystanders and officers located down-range of the subject in the event of a probe miss’.

Suspects shocked by the Taser 7 may have ‘an elevated risk of internal injury’, the assessment went on.

The Taser 7 is said by its manufacturers to be faster and more accurate than previous models.

When armed it also makes a louder ‘arc’ noise – a kind of electric crackling – before being fired, which is designed to deter violent suspects and make them back down.