Tasers, Canine &
Less-Lethal Force

A less-lethal file holds several records of the same event, made by different people and systems for different purposes. The analysis reads them against each other: it identifies the records the agency's own policy called for once the tool was used, establishes which of them exist, and states where they agree with the video and the officer's account and where they part from them. Retained as a Taser expert witness, Professor Gilbertson applies that reading to the electronic control device, a tool that may keep a record of its own.

That device record is requested as the agency keeps it, not as a summary prepared after the claim, and where it is produced it is read beside the body-worn and dash video and the officer's report. These are separate accounts of the same activations: the device record carries what the device logged, the video carries what the cameras saw and heard, and the report carries what the officer says was done and why. The officer's training on the device is a further record, read as described in what training records reveal, and it shows what the officer had been taught about the device before the encounter.

The device record, the video and the report are first merged into the record chronology, and the comparison then runs entry by entry. A logged activation that no report mentions, an application the report describes that the device record does not carry, a sequence the video shows in a different order from the report: each is entered as a record finding and cited to the sources that disagree.

The finding is the difference, not an explanation of it: the finder of fact decides what to make of a divergence, and legal conclusions remain counsel's, including whether one matters to any claim or defense. The device record is never read as a statement of what the officer knew; the encounter is read whole, on what was known at the time, without hindsight. Technical questions about what a logged entry means, and medical questions about what an activation did to the person, are deferred to qualified experts in those disciplines.

Chemical agents, less-lethal projectiles and impact weapons are read through the force report, measured against use-of-force reporting standards, and through the aftercare records the agency's policy required. Depending on the tool and the policy, they can cover decontamination, a medical evaluation and photographs of any injury. The policy questions these tools raise are defined in the use-of-force lexicon, and the choice among them is read in terms of force options and decision models; the records answer what was done and what followed.

Each aftercare record is read for whether it exists and whether it agrees with the video and the report. Decontamination the report places at the scene is looked for in the recording of the minutes that followed, or in paperwork that puts it somewhere else. A medical evaluation the report says was requested is looked for in the dispatch record and the booking paperwork. Photographs are read for when they were taken and whether they match the report's account of the force, and any medical reading of them belongs to qualified experts.

Some aftercare records come from other hands. Where a medical provider, a supervisor or the staff who booked the person made the entry, it is a separate record of what followed the force, made for its own purpose, and the report is read against it as against any other source.

A Taser expert witness on police practices reads how each tool was used and the records it left. Where aid itself is disputed, the questions move to failure to intervene and render aid, and where the person was in crisis, that side of the encounter is treated at mental-health and crisis encounters.