For nearly 20 years, a group of deputies at the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department in Mississippi used Tasers to torture people they suspected of using and dealing drugs. The group of officers — known as the Goon Squad — would raid homes, accuse those inside of crimes and shock them until they offered information or confessed.
The behavior had gone unnoticed, partly because the department had failed to thoroughly monitor its deputies’ Taser use.
We brought the brutality to light in a 2023 investigation published through The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship. But our reporting left us wondering: How were other law enforcement agencies in the state keeping tabs on their Taser use?
A Taser automatically logs every time it is triggered, and for how long. Though these logs by themselves do not show definitive abuse, they can help police departments determine whether excessive Taser use has occurred. But if departments do not review them, the logs are of little use.
To our knowledge, reporters had never collected Taser logs at a large scale to examine how the weapons were used. For an investigation published this month, we decided to try.
It was easier said than done.
With the help of Mukta Joshi, Chelsea Long and Steph Quinn, our reporting partners at Mississippi Today, we requested Taser logs from nearly 100 Mississippi law enforcement agencies.
Many ignored our requests. Some demanded enormous fees — more than $42,000 in one case — to pay their staffs to retrieve and review the logs we requested. Other departments said they did not know how to download the logs, or did not possess a cable required to do so. So we bought a cable from eBay for about $134 and drove it around Mississippi, showing some departments how to use it.
After hundreds of phone calls and emails, we had amassed logs from 36 departments, which contained more than 100,000 Taser activations. Many had never been reviewed.
Hidden in the logs, we found a story of excessive Taser use in Mississippi that had gone unnoticed for years.
Officers are supposed to avoid shocking anyone for longer than 15 seconds during an encounter, according to standards published by the Justice Department and the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank. Sarah Cohen and Justin Mayo, data reporters for Big Local News at Stanford University, spent weeks combing the logs for Taser deployments that had lasted longer than 15 seconds, weeding out incidents that were likely to have been tests and training sessions.
They found 611 instances over the past four years in which officers in Mississippi had triggered their Tasers for more than 15 seconds in a short period.
In one of those cases, three officers in Pearl, Miss., triggered their Tasers for a combined 136 seconds — more than nine times as long as what experts say is safe — when arresting Skylor Pruitt, a former Army medic. (Mr. Pruitt, though hospitalized for self-inflicted head wounds, was not seriously injured by officers. The department did not investigate the incident.)
The logs also revealed 16 cases when officers had failed to accurately report Taser use in arrest reports. After reading dozens of departmental policies, we realized that most Mississippi agencies did not check their Taser logs. The widespread Taser abuse we uncovered was the result of a statewide failure to monitor the weapons.
We spent months poring over the logs, reviewing thousands of pages of police and court records, and interviewing people who had been shocked. But even with all the data, it was difficult to comprehend what being shocked was like for those who had endured it.
So Brian attended a training session where he fired a Taser and allowed a deputy to shock him for five seconds. He briefly lost control of his limbs as two electrified darts pierced his back, causing severe pain.
Brian’s experience was less extreme than it would have been during a violent arrest. But it helped us contextualize the trauma many people who had been shocked by officers described.
In addition to the extreme Taser use cases we linked to arrests, we found hundreds of Taser deployments we could not explain because the departments could not provide corresponding incident reports.
Before we published our article, we sent more than two dozen agencies lists of these unexplained Taser deployments and asked them to help us understand what they represented. Many never responded. The departments that replied said that some cases had been Taser training or testing.
Some agencies wrote off the remaining Taser deployments as perhaps representing officers shocking one another as a joke, or fiddling with Tasers out of boredom; they couldn’t say for sure.
Representatives for at least two departments expressed concern about what we had shown them. And sheriff’s department representatives in George and Forrest Counties said they planned to change their Taser oversight policies.
As we shared our findings with Denis Borges, the chief of police in the small town of Magee, he interrupted our interview to type out changes to his department’s policies on the spot.
“What you just said opened my mind up,” he said.
The post In Taser Logs, a Practice That Long Went Unnoticed Is Revealed appeared first on New York Times.
