A blind pensioner who was tasered when an officer mistook his white stick for a Samurai sword says people do not understand what the experience is like.
Colin Farmer said: “People refer to them as a stun gun, almost like you’re keeping the sheep away from a fence. This is 50,000 volts it’s not just in your body, it goes through every organ, it goes through your head, so, in my case, I was thinking, every nanosecond, this is killing me, I’m going to die, there was no way I could survive.
“It’s not what you think. You see somebody shot and it bounces off them it’s not like that.”
He told ITV1’s Daybreak programme that he had not known there were any police in the area.
“It was an empty side road, there wasn’t even a car in the car park. They never spoke to me. They watched me walk 300 yards in front of them, tapping away.”
Deputy Chief Constable Simon Chesterman, the Association of Chief Police Officers’ spokesman on armed policing, told the same programme: “The most important point to make is that police officers on a daily basis are out there putting themselves in harm’s way to protect the public. They need the right tools to protect members of the public, and they need the right tools to protect themselves, so we have extended the roll out of Taser, but, even so, just over 11% of officers are armed with the weapon.”
He said the training was among the most comprehensive and indepth in the world.
“In other countries it’s one day, we do three days of training,” he said. “You’ve got to remember that the officers are already experienced police officers, so they are selected for the role, they are already experienced in the use of force, and then we put them through a very comprehensive package, so it is recognised as among the best training in the world.”
Solicitor Sophie Khan said what happened to Mr Farmer “shouldn’t have happened at all”.
“There should have been an assessment done by officers at the scene to see whether there is a weapon involved before deploying the Taser, or even restraining anyone, and that wasn’t done, and I think it is down to the training, the lack of training.”
She added: “Three days, and one day refresher per year, firearms officers get training every six months, with a certification, so that’s something I’m asking for, Taser training to be very similar to the firearms training, because there’s a risk of innocent people being tasered and seriously injured.”