Move to arm Jersey cops with Tasers

Thursday 13 February 2014

Tasers could be issued to police officers in Jersey by the summer after Home Affairs Minister Ian le Marquand formally asked States Members to authorise their use.

He says that they would only be issued to officers under the same strict controls under which firearms are currently deployed, so they would only be issued in specific situations, to qualified officers and only under the authorisation of an officer at the rank of Inspector or above. Senator Le Marquand said that issuing Tasers would provide a less-lethal option to officers where currently their only option for dealing with armed and dangerous criminals was with full firearms.

He said: “We have a gap in our capability which means that we are currently deploying guns without deploying Tasers. We would like to deploy Tasers because they are less likely to kill people.”

Politicians will have to give a green-light to the proposals in a debate in April, but the police have been pushing for their introduction for some time. Although Police Chief Mike Bowron would not comment on the proposals until they had been dealt with by politicians, he told a Scrutiny review in 2012 that he felt they would fill a tactical gap in the police’s armoury.

Referring to an incident in Guernsey where a Taser had been used on a man wielding a samurai sword in a public place, he said: “You cannot just say we are a safe Island as though nothing is ever going to happen. Nobody would have predicted in Guernsey, another very safe place that somebody is going to walk down the street with a samurai sword.

“People occasionally flip, I am afraid, and when this happens you rely on us to go and deal with it. What I am seeking for is a full suite of tools and we will start by talking and work up appropriately if they do not want to talk.”

At the same hearing he said that any use of Tasers would be publicly recorded in the police’s annual report. Although the States of Jersey Police occasionally deploy trained firearms officers in response to specific threats, they have never yet had to actually fire a shot.