In 1961, in response to the “I was just following orders” defense of Holocaust logistician Adolf Eichmann, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram devised a series of experiments in which volunteers were led to believe they were administering progressively stronger electric shocks to a fellow volunteer on the order of an authority figure conducting the experiment. In each of the experiments, Dr. Milgram found 60-65 percent of the subjects willing to obey directions and administer even what they thought were excruciating jolts of electricity, despite the screams and pleas of the “victim” to stop the experiment.
Dr. Milgram offered two potential explanations for the results of his experiments. One is the power of conformism: that in an unfamiliar situation, an individual will leave decision-making up to the group or hierarchy, in this case, the person posing as the experiment director. The second, or “agentic state theory” holds that the volunteers who complied with the order to administer the powerful shocks saw themselves as merely following orders of a superior and therefore not responsible for their actions – the same defense Eichmann used in his trial.
Dr. Milgram died in 1984, so he can’t call his office. That’s too bad, because I wonder what his response would be to the nation-wide “Milgram experiment” we’ve been conducting with police officers and electroshock weapons, most commonly known by the trade name “Taser.”
Tasers are famous again this week after campus police at the University of Florida used one on a student who was deemed obstreperous when asking questions of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA).
Electroshock weapons are advertised as additions to police officers’ firearms. Their advocates claim the weapons save lives by giving police a non-lethal option for subduing criminals. These weapons use a high-voltage, low-current electrical discharge to override the body’s muscle-triggering mechanisms.
The problem with this argument is that it’s unlikely anyone who witnessed the UF incident in person or via YouTube would argue that the student in question should have been shot. So in that case, the use of the Taser was not a “less-lethal alternative” for subduing the student; it was a “more-brutal alternative” for gaining compliance from a rude youth. There were at least five police officers on the student when he was shocked. He was, from all accounts, neither high on drugs nor mentally deranged at the time of the incident, so extraordinary measures should not have been required. So the answer, at least in this case, to the question: “Why do police use Tasers?” seems to be: “Because they can.”
A Wednesday afternoon scan of Google News for the word “Taser” returns – on the first screen – several accounts of the UF incident as well as the use of a Taser Monday on an autistic 15-year-old boy in Orange County, California and news of a lawsuit filed by the family of a mentally-ill woman who died after being electroshocked by police in Florida in April 2006. Non-lethal, indeed.
Scrolling further, one sees numerous accounts of police using Tasers on protesters, students and other people who were not behaving violently or posing a threat to themselves or others.
The real attraction of Tasers and weapons like it is not that they are non-lethal alternative to guns, it’s that they are an alternative to riot sticks that don’t leave blood, bruises or broken bones. No permanent scars or damage (unless, like the Florida woman, the Taser’s target dies). This is eerily reminiscent of the Bush administration’s torture policy: if it doesn’t result in death or organ failure, it’s OK.
Another aspect of this is just laziness – Tasers are the law enforcement equivalent of a microwave oven. Why bother to have police officers learn a skill – like de-escalating a situation with words – when they can just zap anyone who annoys them?
The use of Tasers in America is yet another weary example of how our technical contrivance has outstripped our ethical evolution and the price our civil liberties pay as a result.
In a 1974 article on his experiments, Dr. Milgram wrote:
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”
Stanley Milgram, Call Your Office
In 1961, in response to the “I was just following orders” defense of Holocaust logistician Adolf Eichmann, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram devised a series of experiments in which volunteers were led to believe they were administering progressively stronger electric shocks to a fellow volunteer on the order of an authority figure conducting the experiment. In each of the experiments, Dr. Milgram found 60-65 percent of the subjects willing to obey directions and administer even what they thought were excruciating jolts of electricity, despite the screams and pleas of the “victim” to stop the experiment.
Dr. Milgram offered two potential explanations for the results of his experiments. One is the power of conformism: that in an unfamiliar situation, an individual will leave decision-making up to the group or hierarchy, in this case, the person posing as the experiment director. The second, or “agentic state theory” holds that the volunteers who complied with the order to administer the powerful shocks saw themselves as merely following orders of a superior and therefore not responsible for their actions – the same defense Eichmann used in his trial.
Dr. Milgram died in 1984, so he can’t call his office. That’s too bad, because I wonder what his response would be to the nation-wide “Milgram experiment” we’ve been conducting with police officers and electroshock weapons, most commonly known by the trade name “Taser.”
Tasers are famous again this week after campus police at the University of Florida used one on a student who was deemed obstreperous when asking questions of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA).
Electroshock weapons are advertised as additions to police officers’ firearms. Their advocates claim the weapons save lives by giving police a non-lethal option for subduing criminals. These weapons use a high-voltage, low-current electrical discharge to override the body’s muscle-triggering mechanisms.
The problem with this argument is that it’s unlikely anyone who witnessed the UF incident in person or via YouTube would argue that the student in question should have been shot. So in that case, the use of the Taser was not a “less-lethal alternative” for subduing the student; it was a “more-brutal alternative” for gaining compliance from a rude youth. There were at least five police officers on the student when he was shocked. He was, from all accounts, neither high on drugs nor mentally deranged at the time of the incident, so extraordinary measures should not have been required. So the answer, at least in this case, to the question: “Why do police use Tasers?” seems to be: “Because they can.”
A Wednesday afternoon scan of Google News for the word “Taser” returns – on the first screen – several accounts of the UF incident as well as the use of a Taser Monday on an autistic 15-year-old boy in Orange County, California and news of a lawsuit filed by the family of a mentally-ill woman who died after being electroshocked by police in Florida in April 2006. Non-lethal, indeed.
Scrolling further, one sees numerous accounts of police using Tasers on protesters, students and other people who were not behaving violently or posing a threat to themselves or others.
The real attraction of Tasers and weapons like it is not that they are non-lethal alternative to guns, it’s that they are an alternative to riot sticks that don’t leave blood, bruises or broken bones. No permanent scars or damage (unless, like the Florida woman, the Taser’s target dies). This is eerily reminiscent of the Bush administration’s torture policy: if it doesn’t result in death or organ failure, it’s OK.
Another aspect of this is just laziness – Tasers are the law enforcement equivalent of a microwave oven. Why bother to have police officers learn a skill – like de-escalating a situation with words – when they can just zap anyone who annoys them?
The use of Tasers in America is yet another weary example of how our technical contrivance has outstripped our ethical evolution and the price our civil liberties pay as a result.
In a 1974 article on his experiments, Dr. Milgram wrote:
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”
© Mark Floegel, 2007