Taser use is ‘to remain limited to some officers’
TASER use in Guernsey will continue to be limited to only some officers, Guernsey Police has confirmed.
The comments come following Jersey’s move to allow all officers there to carry Tasers, once they had been trained.
Jersey’s Home Affairs minister Gregory Guida said the police force needed to have the correct tools to do their job and keep everyone safe.
But Guernsey will not be going down the same route.
A Guernsey Police spokesman said about 32 officers were trained and accredited to carry Tasers. Guernsey Police had 145 officers according to its 2020 annual report.
‘Guernsey Police is not currently intending to roll out Taser training to all officers,’ he said.
‘The training is currently targeted at areas of the organisation that will make the most use of it, and the number of officers with Taser capabilities meets our needs to a sufficient standard.’
Tasers are conducted energy devices, which temporarily incapacitate a subject with an electrical current. There were 33 calls for the possible use of a Taser last year, 32 of them being spontaneous incidents, however Tasers were only discharged once.
The previous year there were 43 calls and the Taser was not discharged at all.
Guernsey Police Taser training is voluntary for officers, and mirrors the national training used by police forces around the country, in line with the National College of Policing and the UK Home Office standards.
‘The training is annually renewed to ensure officers stay up to date,’ the spokesman said.
In the UK, the National Police Chiefs Council has noted that just carrying a Taser could calm a situation. In 86% of cases the threat of its use alone helped resolve an incident and calm an agitator, without it being fired.
In the UK between April 2020 and March 2021 Tasers and plastic bullet weapons – referred to as ‘less lethal weapons’ in the Home Office report – were connected with 35,000 incidents. But this does not mean they were used in every incident.
This compares with 160,000 incidents where unarmed skills were used, and more than half a millions incidents where restraint tactics were used.
