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Less Lethal Weapons
Edited by Professor Robert Kaminski
The use of force by police has been the subject of empirical inquiry for more than 40 years. In that time, much has been learned about the nature and extent of the force used by police and the conditions and correlates that affect its application. Among the most important issues that have received attention from use-of-force researchers over the years are those involving injuries to officers and suspects. Almost half a century later, however, much of the research on injuries remains descriptive in nature or contains substantial data and analytic limitations that prevent the research from being used optimally to make policy or training decisions at the agency level. Furthermore, with the proliferation in recent years of conducted energy devices (CEDs) such as the Taser® and Stinger® , questions have arisen regarding the safety of such weapons and what their impact has been on injuries and in-custody deaths ([6] Amnesty International, 2004). The lack of independent research on CEDs and injuries has again left law enforcement agencies without the information they need to make sound policy decisions or to respond to inquiries from citizens, special interest groups, and policy-makers, some of whom question whether CEDs are an appropriate less-lethal alternative for general police use.
In the early to mid-1990s, police found themselves in a similar position with respect to oleoresin capsicum (OC) or pepper spray. In those days, OC was spreading rapidly among US police forces and concerns were being raised concerning its misuse and safety ([7] Amnesty International, 1997). The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded a variety of studies on the safety and effectiveness of OC ([18] Edwards et al. , 1997; [26] Granfield et al. , 1994; [57] Petty, 2004), and several other researchers examined its incapacitative effects and the relationship between OC use and officer and suspect injuries ([42], [41] Kaminski et al. , 1998, 1999; [56] Morabito and Doerner, 1997; [67] Smith and Alpert, 2000; [51] Lumb and Friday, 1997).
Illustrative of the limitations associated with most of the injury-related research from that era is [39] Kaminski and Sorensen's (1995) study of 1,550 non-lethal assaults on police in Baltimore County, Maryland. They were primarily interested in identifying variables that predicted...