Tasers and Torture in the City of Saint Paul

Saint Paul Police are asking for tasers!

“Tasing” is invisible torture. It’s as brutal and pain-inflicting as kicking someone in the teeth, or burning their skin with hot brands, or hanging them up the wrists when their arms are bound behind their backs. It’s as terror-inducing as water-boarding. Only because its agony is inflicted invisibly upon the human beings who are their victims are Tasers misperceived to be anything but morally abhorrent.

This is the conclusion of Darius Rejali, the recent author of the most comprehensive and exhaustive study on torture yet to be completed, Torture and Democracy. This is why the St. Paul City Council should resoundingly reject the chilling request by St Paul Police to supply them with Tasers, just in time to help suppress the demonstrations that are sure to flourish when the Republican National Convention comes to town.

The connection between the St. Paul Police’s request for devices that torture invisibly and the grassroots democracy that is sure to flower in protest of the Republican Party is not accidental, according to Rejali. Democracies have been the primary drivers of instruments of torture that “don’t leave a mark,” during the last century. Visible torture leaves marks and leads to protest and the legal sanctions of the torturers in democracies. Invisible torture leads to … nothing. Furthermore, the main innovators of invisible torture in democracies have not been intelligence agencies, Rejali observes; they’ve been police. Police in cities.

But are tasers really instruments of torture? Rejali believes so. He not only includes tasers in a list of “electrotortures,” he begins his book with an illustration that features tasers: the beating of Rodney King by the LA police officers. Rejali points out that it was the vicious, visceral display of the beatings that outraged America, and that no one noticed, except for the police officers who were beating King, that the Taser they used on him caused so much pain to King that he was, in the words of one offending officer, “writhing” and “shouting incoherently from the pain of the taser.”

A taser delivers pulses just short of 50,000 volts through the body of the victim for as many as eight to fifteen seconds. Rejali, torture expert, is convinced that a taser is no different in terms of the physical pain and psychological trauma than needles under fingernails, or hands crushed in a vice. It just hides the marks.

What the Saint Paul Police are asking for are instruments of torture that they can freely use against American citizens in plain sight. Saint Paul Police spokesman Tim Walsh defended tasers as being short of deadly force. And so they are. But so are hooking someone up to a car battery, or shoving broken glass into a person’s sexual organ. The lame excuse of “non-lethality” is no excuse for torture. Not in the cells of Guantanamo. Not in the jungles of Vietnam. Not in the streets of Saint Paul.

The Saint Paul Police can do better than to use torture to pacify those whom they think may be dangerous, judgments that nearly always err on the side of pre-empting the innocent citizen rather than reacting to the guilty.

The Saint Paul Police and the City of Saint Paul can do better than use torture. Period.