Vancouver Police buy more Tasers

More than 100 Vancouver police officers will be assigned their own Taser guns in the new year after the Vancouver Police Department purchased 70 of the guns to add to its arsenal of 50.

Supt. Steve Schnitzer made the announcement at Wednesday's Vancouver Police Board meeting.

Schnitzer didn't comment on the RCMP Taser incident but said the VPD continues to use the Taser and is updating the department's policy on the use of the weapon. Its officers sign out Tasers from a pool of the 50,000 volt guns. The new policy, which is expected to go before the police board next month, will see each of the department's 120 qualified Taser operators get their own gun. This way, Schnitzer said, it erases the "ambiguity" of the Taser's use. "At the end of the day, they were just being put back into the locker room awaiting the armourer to pick them up. So how can you prove that nobody else has tampered with them or touched them? So it just eliminates all doubt by doing that."

Taser guns resemble handguns and can fire two thin insulated copper wires up to 21 feet, releasing 50,000 volts of electricity through two metal probes into clothing or skin. The impact normally leaves a small puncture in the skin and the equivalent of a bad sunburn.

 
Last August, the VPD released statistics that showed there were 52 use-of-force incidents related to the Taser. The numbers reflected when the Taser was deployed and when it was simply used to gain compliance, but not fired.

 
Police used the Taser mostly in the Granville strip area and Downtown Eastside to subdue suspects involved in large fights, armed with knives and weapons or barricading themselves. They are also used in arrests involving mentally ill people.