Editorial: Taser roll-out good for a safer country

OPINION: The announcement that New Zealand Police plan to roll out tasers to frontline officers around the country barely caused a ripple.

Compare that to the noise and controversy that emanated from opposition groups when it was announced that the weapons would be trialled.

That's because tasers have shown their effectiveness during the trial period. All the hoopla about the possible health issues that taser victims could suffer appear to have come to nothing.

There have not been cases of people having heart attacks or any other affliction.

One of the best outcomes from the trial is that the mere threat of the weapon has even proved effective.

It seems that if an offender sees the taser, (most likely) he or she has a tendency to think about what could happen and then give themselves up or stop what they are doing.

The thought of a 50,000 volt current running through your body has the tendency to do that.

In one Hamilton case last year, a taser had to be flown in from Auckland (they weren't being trialled in the Waikato), and within minutes the offender in question – who was carrying a weapon – had given himself up.

Even as recently as Friday night, police safely used a taser to apprehend a man on a Wellington flight bound for Napier.

But it's the statistics over time that prove the case.

Since their introduction in late 2008, in selected regions, police say the stun guns had been drawn 132 times. In more than 90 per cent of those cases, the matter was successfully resolved without the weapon being fired. There were concerns the introduction would be the start of the slippery slope to arming the country's police with guns.

Those fears appear unfounded. Police have done the right thing with the trial. They now have the facts to back up their case to allow officers to have access to them.

Officers around the country will start their training and the tasers, about 700 of them, will be close at hand. And that's a good thing.

People want a safer community and allowing police to carry tasers works towards that goal.

The other upside is that situations that may otherwise have escalated into serious injury or death, during a police incident, are less likely to happen.

The sculpture outside the Palmerston North Convention Centre has been up for a couple of weeks and, like all good art, it's got people talking, some liking it, others not. And some are indifferent towards it. Our manawatustandard.co.nz poll showed that. When we asked what people thought about it, opinions were rather evenly split. Thirty two per cent said it's awesome, 37 per cent said it's hideous while the remainder said they could take it or leave it.

Now, if only the sculpture had a name.

- © Fairfax NZ News