As part of a pilot program, some Bloomington Police Officers will start carrying electronic control weapons, known as tasers.
Bloomington Police Chief Mike Diekhoff presented the program to the city’s board of public safety this summer. He told them that not providing officers with tasers was causing issues with recruitment.
In June, the department had 20 open positions, and service calls were up about 40 percent month by month from 2022.
"We’ve been down this many people for a long time, and before our calls were relatively low," he said. "But we are seeing this trend of huge increases in the calls for service. It’s going to get to the point where we’ll have to say ‘we can’t come, we don’t have anyone to show up.’”
Diekhoff said BPD is working to implement recommendations from former President Barrack Obama’s 2015 Task Force on 21st Century Policing final report, which includes use of tasers “to decrease the number of fatal police interventions.”
Normally officer presence and verbal de-escalation are enough to avoid use-of-force, according to Vice President of the local Fraternal Order of Police Jeffrey Rodgers. Tasers are a less-lethal tool for officers to use in situations that require force.
A man, James Borden from Lawrence County, died in the Monroe County Jail in 2003 after officers used a taser on him, Rodgers said.
"So because of that, within Bloomington, the use of tasers has been a subject that nobody really wants to talk about," Rodgers said.
Other less lethal measures include OC spray and hard impact weapons like batons, Rodgers said. But batons have their own issues:
"That is a hard object that a few strikes in a sensitive area such as the head, the groin, or even in the body; that can be a be created to a deadly force situation," Rodgers said. "So that isn't something that is utilized very often."
BPD is the the only law enforcement entity in the county, excluding school resource officers, that doesn't have its officers carry tasers.
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The department will train officers on proper taser use once its order from the manufacturer comes in, according to a release from the BPD.
