By John Peters
Editor
Littleton Police Chief Mike Suggs found himself faced with every police officer’s worst fear – he was in a standoff with a recent prison parolee who told the chief he would rather be shot and killed than return to prison.
Then the situation turned worse.
“If you don’t shoot and kill me, I’ll shoot and kill you,” Suggs recalled the man saying.
Thanks to a recent purchase by the Littleton Town Council, Suggs had an alternative to pulling his pistol and firing. He took aim and felled the man with a single shot from the department’s new taser.
The weapon looks like a hand gun, but rather than shooting a bullet, it shoots a pair of metal probes, which embed in a person’s body, or clothing, and send a single 50,000-volt charge through the person. That is enough electricity to temporary incapacitate the person, yet the taser causes no permanent injuries.
Suggs said in this case, the man had recently been released from prison after serving 20 years, but he had violated provisions of his parole and was on the run. Suggs found the man, who is from Goldsboro, asleep in a car here in Littleton.
“He told me he wanted me to kill him,” Suggs said. “He told me he didn’t want to go back to jail.”
Then the man sped away, and wrecked as Suggs gave chase.
“He climbed out of the car, said he had a gun inside,” Suggs said. When the man turned to reach inside the vehicle, Suggs shot him with the taser. “He became cooperative,” the chief said, a wry grin on his face.
Though the chief can make light of the taser’s effectiveness two weeks after the incident, he is deadly serious when he talks of the weapon’s ability to forestall using deadly force. He also said it keeps his officers safe during more routine arrests.
“Before, we could pepper spray someone,” the chief said. “Sometimes that would incapacitate a person, but not always. Every one reacts differently to the pepper spray. Some people can still fight. Even the ones who it does affect, they can still wrestle around, the officer has to tussle with them to get the handcuffs on them.”
In addition to using the tasers at some distance, Suggs said the firing unit can also be used as a stun gun in hand-to-hand situations.
It can also defuse more serious threats to an officer.
“If someone had a knife or a 2 x 4,” he said an officer would be faced with using pepper spray, or pulling a pistol and possibly having to shoot. “With pepper spray, we had to be within five feet to be effective,” he said. Now, they can effectively disable such a person within 20 feet of them without having to resort to a firearm. “That’s a real luxury for us,” he said.
In the case where the chief used the taser, he said the case could have been much more troubling had he been forced to shoot with a conventional weapon. Because the man had threatened the chief, and had told him he had a gun, Suggs said he would have been forced to shoot when the man reached back into the car. But, what the chief didn’t know was the man had no weapon.
“He looked like he was serious,” the chief said.
In the aftermath of the incident, which happened just two weeks after the Littleton Police Department received the taser it ordered at the beginning of June, Suggs said the town commission authorized the purchase of more tasers.
“Now, every officer carries one,” he said. Though the cost might be steep – each taser costs $805, and each firing cartridge osts $25 – he said the benefits definitely outweigh the expense.
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