Verifying the Truth of Statements About Police Electroshock Gun Safety: What Do We Know About Taser and Is It True or False?
Verifying the Truth of Statements About Police Electroshock Gun Safety: What Do We Know About Taser and Is It True or False?

Summary/Abstract: The public´s view of the police and their used practices could be negatively affected by biased media coverage of some cases of police use of force, including the use of controversial means such as the electronic control device (taser), which may be one of the causes of the phenomenon of declining public´s trust (confidence) in the police. The main aim of this article is to present and verify the truth of 12 identified, most frequent controversial statements of taser safety and its effect for law enforcement in modern police, which could affect shaping the risk perception process of electroshock-based technology for temporarily incapacitating the subject as a target. The paper is based on the results of previous research and uses a systematic search method for criteria-compliant publications in available scientific databases and the theory of propositional logic to put data in the truthtable of propositional formulas to confirm or deny the final conclusion about the taser safety. The finding of this article is that thetaser seems to be a partially safe technological device, when 4 out of 12 statements (33,3 %) about the taser safety were found to be true. The result is limited by the own limitation of collected data used from publications as well as by the methodology chosen in this paper. It was concluded that for a more objective future study of the database, it is necessary to improve the system for monitoring and recording the risks associated with the use of the electroshock gun in actual situations of use of force by the police.

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