Why are so many people like Max – 25, but with the comprehension of a seven-year-old – being shot with stun guns by UK police?
Sat 16 Feb 2019 09.00 GMT
at around 2pm, Margaret, a manager for a marketing company, received a phone call about her son. She was travelling for work in Wiltshire. Max, then 25, had assaulted a police officer, she was told. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, what has happened now?’” she says.
Margaret drove to the flat near Bristol where Max had been living for four months. It’s a self-contained part of The Maples, a residential building for adults with moderate to severe learning disabilities and mental health problems. Max has the reading age of a 12-year-old and the comprehension of a seven-year-old. He is autistic and has difficulty telling the time.
The manager of The Maples told Margaret he had called the police because Max was drunk and had broken a window. When the police came, Max was in front of the building, in the driveway. This is where the alleged assault took place, after which he was taken into custody. But there was worse news to come: Max had been shot with a Taser by the police as he tried to run away. “I was shocked,” says Margaret. “It seemed off the scale.”
***
That day, Max became part of a disturbing statistic – one of the disproportionate number of people with learning disabilities, autism and mental health issues who are Tasered by police every year. Recent Home Office statistics on police “use of force” show that people perceived as having a “mental disability” are more likely to be subjected to a Taser (or similar device) than other forms of force, such as handcuffing, restraint or pepper spray. The report, based on data from 43 police forces in England and Wales, showed that from April 2017 to March 2018, there were 18,000 incidents involving a Taser (this includes police removing a Taser from the holster, as well as pointing it or actually firing it). Of these, 2,400 incidents involved people with mental disabilities – about 13%, which is a far higher proportion than the 2% of the population who have learning difficulties. (The same figures also show that black people were more likely to have force used against them by police officers; they experienced 20% of Tasering incidents in 2017-18, despite accounting for 3.3% of the population, according to the 2011 census.)
Tasers were introduced to the UK in 2003, initially only for authorised firearm-trained officers, as a way to resolve a crisis without having to resort to a gun. But in 2008, after a 12-month Home Office field trial, Tasers were gradually rolled out to forces across the country. They are termed “less lethal weapons” and can only be used when “mitigating a threat of violence”, according to a House of Commons briefing document.
“Clearly, as time has gone on, their use has grown beyond their original intention,” says Gary Wedge, who trains police officers in Taser use. “But unarmed officers face many dangers and providing them with a Taser helps to mitigate those risks.”
Human rights campaigners and mental health charities feel Tasers are overused. “We’ve got serious concerns about Tasers becoming the norm for day-to-day policing,” says Oliver Feeley-Sprague, police and security programme director, Amnesty International UK. “We’re particularly concerned at the alarming rise in overuse against vulnerable and minority groups, including on people with mental health issues and BAME people.” He argues that police officers need specialist training: “We’d like to see police officers better trained to recognise the likely behaviours of a person with a mental illness in a highly stressful situation. Overall, we’d like to see police officers being more prepared to use a range of de-escalation techniques.”
The Taser was invented by Jack Cover, an American aerospace engineer, in the late 1960s. It was partly inspired by Tom Swift And His Electric Rifle, a book he had read as a child, about a boy who invents a gun that fires bolts of electricity. Cover adapted the title to come up with the acronym Taser. But it was Rick Smith, a business graduate, and his brother Thomas, who took Taser worldwide, founding Taser International in Arizona in 1993 (recently renamed Axon).
A Taser looks like a Glock pistol and works by firing two live wires charged with 50,000 volts, each topped with barbed darts. When the barbs hook on to a target they create a charged circuit, causing muscles to contract painfully. Subjects are unable to control their bodies and fall to the floor. For the police, the advantages of a Taser are that it can reach a person 21ft away; it produces immediate incapacitation, no matter how big or strong the subject; and its effects wear off in seconds, leaving little trace.
But as Taser use has escalated, so have reports of deaths. In the UK there have been at least 18 fatalities linked to the use of a Taser since 2003. Marc Cole, 30, a father of two with a recent history of mental illness, died in hospital last May, after being Tasered by police in Falmouth, Cornwall. His death is currently under investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). An inquest is also due to be held, but no date is set.
The IOPC made a rare judgment against the police in connection with the killing of Jordan Begley, 23, who died of cardiac arrest two hours after being shot by a Taser on 19 July 2013. Greater Manchester police were initially cleared of any wrongdoing, but the IOPC identified improper use in a second investigation last year. They found that Begley had been fired at for over eight seconds, which they described as “not reasonable” (a Taser delivers its electrical charge in automatic bursts of five-second cycles).
In August 2016, police in Telford fired a Taser at Dalian Atkinson, 48, a former Premier League footballer, outside his father’s house in the early hours of the morning. A pre-inquest hearing heard how Atkinson became “unresponsive shortly after being shot with a stun gun”. He was taken to Princess Royal hospital, in Telford, where he died. Atkinson had been suffering from depression, his brother told a newspaper at the time, and “was in a manic state, out of his mind and ranting”. After a lengthy investigation, the IOPC has referred the case to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider whether two police constables should face criminal charges. A pre-inquest review is due to take place in Shrewsbury this year.
***
I meet Margaret at her mother’s house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Bristol. Max isn’t here, but is happy for her to speak on his behalf, she tells me. A smartly dressed woman with short, stylish hair, she is meticulously organised. Her habit of keeping documents and letters has proved crucial, she says, because “people remember things differently”.
She tells me about Max. He can be dogged in his thinking, she says, and often talks repetitively about specific subjects at length, especially when he is anxious. And yet Max, who was educated at mainstream schools, is adept at cloaking his differences and fitting in. All of this means “people pick up much less than they should”.
She shows me the witness statements from the two policemen (referred to as officer A and officer B) who arrested Max that day. In his statement, officer A described Max as “intoxicated” and “swaying on his feet”. He said that when he attempted to arrest him, he believed that Max “was going to run or try to fight us”. He said that he not only resisted being handcuffed by his colleague, he “pushed [him] in the chest”. He decided to Taser Max, rather than use his baton or CS spray because officer B had already been “assaulted”: he didn’t know if Max had a weapon and what he would do to “effect his escape”. Wrestling him to the ground was not an option, he said, because Max was taller and heavier than the officers. “Due to the danger I felt [we] were in I pulled the trigger of my Taser.” He shouted “Taser Taser” according to the protocol. Max “fell to the floor”. In his statement, officer B confirmed Max’s “combative stance”. He concluded that Max was in “full fight-or-flight mode” and his intention “was to shove me out of the way so he could escape”.
Margaret brings out a portable DVD player to show me the CCTV footage of the Tasering incident. On the day Max was charged, she asked the manager of The Maples for a copy of its surveillance camera footage. Margaret methodically makes her way through the film, stopping and rewinding whenever she sees something that catches her eye.
The three men stand near the doorway for a while. “This is Max talking to the police officers,” she says. Both are in full uniform and what one of the officers described in the statement as a “state of ‘ties off’ due to the hot weather”. Max is not wearing a top because of the heat.
Max is talking nonstop, according to officer B’s statement, “just repeating the same things over and over again” – further evidence, he suggests, of Max’s inebriation. But repeating things, talking incessantly, standing too close (“the male repeatedly came in my personal space,” said officer B) are also symptoms of autism (and how Max behaves even when he isn’t drunk).
The action happens within just a few moments. Margaret points to the screen. “Did you see that?” She rewinds. The video appears to show a very different sequence of events from that described in the officers’ statements. Max has both arms up, hands above his head in apparent surrender. “I can’t see him push anyone,” Margaret says. “He puts his hands down to be handcuffed and then he suddenly gets scared and decides to run away.” She slows down the footage. “It happens very quickly, but can you see the police officer pushes Max in the chest?” The video shows Max losing his balance and falling to the floor. As he struggles to get up, officer A fires the Taser. One barb landed in the back of Max’s neck, the other in his upper back.
“It is a home for people with learning disabilities and mental health issues,” says Margaret. ‘You don’t go around Tasering vulnerable people as your first option. That should be your last option.”
***
“If you are vulnerable in any way, you’re more likely to be Tasered because of the officer not understanding what’s going on,” says Sophie Khan, a solicitor advocate who specialises in Taser-related injuries. In other words, a police officer may see the combative behaviour – not obeying commands, or aggression – and not the underlying cause behind it: a learning disability, perhaps, or mental breakdown.
In situations where people are posing a risk to themselves and others, a Taser might be the least worst option
The government-appointed body that oversees Taser use, the Scientific Advisory Committee on the Medical Implications of Less-Lethal Weapons (SACMILL) has acknowledged that certain people may be at risk of being Tasered simply because of who they are. In a statement published in 2012, the list is long. Mental health conditions, learning difficulties and neurodevelopmental or neurobehavioural conditions (for example, cerebral palsy and autistic spectrum disorders) may “negatively influence how affected individuals interact with the police”. The point might be: “Don’t be different”.
Police say this is misleading. “Yes, a Taser is more likely to be used on vulnerable people, but in the majority of incidents the device isn’t fired,” says Michael Brown, a mental health coordinator at the College of Policing and for the National Police Chiefs’ Council. A Taser is described as being “used”, even if the gun is drawn but not fired. Merely taking aim, says Brown, is a very effective deterrent. He argues that Tasers can save lives. “If somebody is posing a risk, the police have to police that, regardless of whether the risk comes from straightforward criminality or whether it’s from drugs and alcohol use, learning disability or mental illness. By the time the police are crisis-managing risk situations where people are self-harming, non-communicative and posing a risk to themselves or others, it might – just might – be the least worst option available.”
***
On 3 February 2013, Talhat Rehman, now 58, a halal butcher from London, jumped the barricades outside Buckingham Palace, where crowds had gathered to watch the changing of the guard. He had two large kitchen knives, which he waved in an aggressive manner, according to police, and went on to hold one knife to his own throat.
“The disturbance obviously caused a great deal of alarm to members of the public,” observed Peter Zinner, the prosecutor in the trial at Southwark crown court on 27 March 2013. “The police had no option but to deploy Tasers.” Rehman fell to the floor and officers retrieved the knives. He was taken into police custody and charged with affray and two counts of possession of a knife in a public place.
18,000 The number of police incidents involving a Taser between April 2017 and March 2018
2,400 of those (13%) involved people with ‘mental disabilities’, according to figures supplied by 43 forces
2% of the population have learning difficulties
20% of Tasering incidents in that period involved black people
Rehman was sectioned. When he was considered well enough to be tried, he pleaded guilty to the two counts of having a knife in a public place (the charge of affray was dropped after Rehman’s barrister said there was no evidence that he wanted to hurt others, only himself). His son, Kassum Raja, one of Rehman’s five children, explained in court that his father had lost £170,000 in a financial scam. The episode, in his view, was the culmination of months of worry and anguish. On 17 May, Rehman was sentenced to a 12-month community order, including mental health treatment and a supervision order.
Rehman lives with his wife, his son’s family and his parents. When I visit Abdul, his father, 86, a trustee of Brent mosque, he explains that Talhat is in Pakistan seeing family. We talk about the Tasering and he confirms that his son had been “disturbed mentally” by money worries at the time; he had gone to Buckingham Palace to get help from the Queen. “He loves the Queen. We all love the Queen. He must have thought she’d help him out.”
The first he knew of the incident was when he saw it on the news: “We were very hurt and surprised.” But Abdul is not entirely critical of the police. “They are professional people, obviously they know what they are doing. But we thought it was wrong when they Tasered him. The knife, you know, was just there” – he points to his throat – “he could have fallen on the knife and hurt himself.”
However, Abdul says the experience further unsettled his son and that it wasn’t an appropriate use of force for someone with mental health problems. “He was very affected by it – it upset him a lot.”
In November 2013 Talhat Rehman contacted Sophie Kahn. “The entire episode had traumatised him,” Khan says. “He said he used to have flashbacks about being Tasered, and being dragged to the floor and handcuffed. They were quite rough with him at the scene.”
In her view, Rehman should never have been Tasered. “Had he been thrusting the knives at the police officers I would have understood – they’ve got to protect themselves, but both knives were pointed to his body.”
Even if Tasering Rehman was justified, Khan says, the situation should never have got to that point. She discovered that police had known about his unstable mental health for at least two years before the incident. They had visited his home to discuss letters he had sent to the BBC, the Queen and the Metropolitan Police commissioner, threatening suicide outside Buckingham Palace. Five months prior to being Tasered, he was arrested outside the Palace of Westminster. He was stopped, searched and found to have a knife. Police had been tipped off – by Rehman himself. “He contacted Brent Mental Health Service and the police to notify them of his plan,” Khan says. Rehman was sectioned and taken to a secure hospital.
In Khan’s view, the case demonstrates how the police could have averted the situation. “The police knew he wasn’t well. Why didn’t they do something? They could have referred him to a team who could have come up with a care plan – then he would have been in regular contact with mental health services.”
Almost a year after he was Tasered, Rehman wrote a letter of complaint to the police. He argued that the restraint was “unlawful” and that “police had failed to safeguard his welfare prior to the incident”. He received a response on 26 February 2015. They said that in their opinion there was “insufficient evidence” that the restraint against him “was unlawful”.
In the view of Michael Brown, the police mental health coordinator, the case is a textbook example of Taser use; one that is likely to be used in training. “He was presenting a threat, which means you wouldn’t want to get close to him in case he hurt you with a knife.” Officers “managed to mitigate that risk” by using the Taser. The incident “also had the benefit of being videoed at close range [by bystanders] so there’s perfect footage of it”. Of course, he adds, Rehman’s previous contact with the police is significant. But “the fact that the police knew something doesn’t mean the officers on the ground knew something”.
***
Spencer Beynon was born in Llanelli, south Wales in 1972. His father, Chris, 75, was a double-glazing salesman, and his mother, Margaret, 73, a housewife. He grew up a very happy, rugby-playing boy who had plenty of friends and was close to his family. He met his wife at 23, after a seven-year stint in the army. Ellen, now 40, was a hairdresser in Llanelli. “He and his friends used to come in and go on the sunbeds,” she remembers, “He was a charmer.” They had two children, Victoria, now 19, and Jacob, now 15, but separated after four years of marriage. “We just drifted apart, but we were friends always.”
In 2005, Beynon decided to go back into the army, and wanted to prove he could still make it at 33 by joining the elite Parachute Regiment (the Paras). “He said, ‘If I’m not fit enough for the Paras – the fittest of them all – I’m not fit to go back into the army,’” his father says. “He worked himself very hard.”
After successfully completing the training, Beynon transferred back to his old regiment – the 2nd Battalion, The Royal Welsh. He was deployed to Iraq and then Afghanistan, where several deeply traumatising events changed the course of his life.
Three months after arriving in Iraq, Beynon witnessed the death of his childhood friend, Ryan, when his vehicle was hit during a night operation. Beynon, who was in the vehicle behind, retrieved his friend’s body from the wreckage. “It was a policy with the boys, an unwritten law, get them out,” his father explains. “What they see out there, we haven’t got a clue.”
There were other pivotal events: the death of a baby during a search-and-recovery operation in Basra; the fatal injury of another army colleague in Helmand, Afghanistan. “Spencer and the nurse stayed with him for an hour and a half waiting for the helicopter to come. It was absolutely horrific. And people ask, ‘Why did he have post-traumatic stress disorder?’” his father says.
In December 2011, Beynon found out that Ryan’s mother, Alison, had died from cancer before Beynon had a chance to speak to her. Deeply affected by her death, he left the army and moved back home with his parents in Llanelli. “Alison’s death did something to his head,” his mother says. “I’d hear him in the night screaming.” He’d take a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and sit by Ryan’s grave. “He was totally obsessed with Ryan’s death,” his mother says. “He’d lie in his bedroom for days and wouldn’t wash – and my son was immaculate,” she says. He tried to escape into cannabis and alcohol. When his mother complained, “he’d say, ‘Leave me alone. It’s the only thing that takes the memories away.’”
On 14 June 2016, at around 7pm, neighbours contacted police to say Beynon was acting strangely. He was by now living in a cul-de-sac near the seafront, about a 15-minute drive from his parents’ house. His great love was Ganesh, a Boston terrier. “The dog kept him alive,” says his father. “If it hadn’t been for the dog, he would have taken his own life years ago.”
According to witnesses, two officers from Dyfed-Powys police arrived at the scene at around 7.30pm. They found Beynon slumped on the pavement with a self-inflicted cut to his throat. He was bleeding heavily. He’d also turned on his dog, inflicting such severe injuries that he had to be put down. Within minutes of the officers arriving, Beynon was Tasered. He died soon afterwards. He was 43.
Three years later, Beynon’s family are yet to receive answers about why police used a Taser, and whether that contributed to his death. Since August 2017, there have been five pre-inquest hearings. In one, last June, Sophie Khan, who represents the family, told the court that the officer who fired the Taser described Beynon as getting up and “charging” at the officers, but none of the other witnesses described him getting up, including the other officer.
At the fourth hearing, last October, it was revealed that Beynon’s father, Chris, had called the police that morning asking to have his son sectioned under the Mental Health Act for his own safety; this call was not acted on. “When the police attended the scene and saw Spencer Beynon bleeding they had an obligation to provide him with first aid, to protect his life,” Khan told the pre-inquest. “That did not happen.”
The barrister representing Dyfed-Powys police said Beynon had died from the wound to his neck; that the Taser “played no part” in his death, adding: “Three experts are of the unanimous view that a Taser was not the cause of death.” This included Anthony Bleetman, a freelance consultant who advises on emergency medicine for SACMILL, and one of three expert witnesses appointed by the coroner to comment on Taser use in this case. In his view, Beynon had an “in-survivable neck wound” and was beyond saving.
But Khan raised another concern at the hearing: conflict of interest. Not only had Bleetman been instructed by the IOPC as part of its investigation into Beynon’s death (“the coroner should appoint its own experts,” she said) Bleetman has an ongoing professional relationship with the police, providing advice and training in the use of force for two decades. “He can’t be classified as an independent expert,” she stated. Bleetman also has a prior relationship with Taser International. He was paid by them to write a literature review of Taser-related injuries in 2001.
“We are talking about a very modest sum, going back 20 years, which was always declared,” he says when we speak. Is there a conflict of interest? “That is a matter for discussion, but my approach to these things is straightforward: every time I am asked to comment on a Taser case, the first thing I do is alert the chair of SACMILL. His response has always been ‘Just declare everything’. It’s up to the courts to determine whether they consider my evidence to be truly independent or not.”
Bleetman defends the use of the Taser on Beynon. “We are talking about an individual who cut his own throat. Who did what he did to the dog. And in the cool light of day after the event, we say, ‘Well, why didn’t you talk to him? Why didn’t you guide him away?’”
A date has yet to be set for the inquest, but it’s unlikely to be this year. “For the family who have lost someone in tragic, complicated and distressing circumstances, the lack of clarity around what happened and why is only adding to their distress,” Khan says.
“We just want to get justice for Spencer,” says Ellen. “We want to get answers so we can move on.”
***
On 30 November 2015, Max, his family and legal team went to Bristol magistrates court for a hearing. Before the hearing, Max’s solicitor met the prosecution barrister and showed him the CCTV footage of the Tasering. The case was dropped.
“If Margaret hadn’t had the CCTV, Max could have gone to prison for something he hadn’t done,” says Lorne Wilkinson, a former police officer and the litigator on Max’s case. The sentence for assaulting a police officer is up to six months in prison or a £5,000 fine. “It would have been sending someone with the understanding of a seven-year-old into a man’s prison.”
On 4 December 2015, Margaret submitted a complaint to the IOPC. She received a response on 6 October 2017. The IOPC found “inaccuracies” in the officers’ accounts, but did not find evidence of any misconduct. In a statement, Avon and Somerset police said: “The IOPC found there was no case to answer for misconduct for any of the officers involved. The report stated both the arrest and use of Taser were reasonable in the circumstances”. “I was stunned,” Margaret says. “I feel really let down.”
Today, she campaigns for autisminjustice.org, an organisation that challenges the criminalisation of autistic people. She says she replays in her mind over and over the images of Max being Tasered. “This could have put Max in prison. That is how close we came.”
• Max’s name has been changed. Margaret and Max’s story features in Out Of The Shadows: The Untold Story Of People With Autism Or Learning Disabilities, by Polly Braden and Sally Williams, produced by Multistory and published by Dewi Lewis Publishing at £20. Source of figures: Home Office, based on information supplied by 43 forces
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/16/last-option-not-first-rise-tasering
