Archive of Tyler Wall

A 2012 Amnesty International study found that between 2001 and 2012 more than 500 people had been killed by police in the United States and Canada after being Tasered. In nearly all cases, Tasers were used against unarmed people as a pain compliance tactic.

One of the most insidious problems of police reform is how police departments that have been subjected to reform measures, usually by a federal consent decree, are actually rewarded for their misconduct. Reform is a windfall of more money from new grants to hire more cops and purchase more weaponry, technology, training and education.

Body-worn cameras are tools organized, controlled and deployed by police. How should they be used? When should they be used? Where should they be used? These are all questions answered exclusively by police. Any police reform demand that includes a call for all police to wear body cameras is a call to invest total oversight authority of police with police.

At least since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Los Angeles and New York police departments used and justified chokehold techniques, while at the same time banning and sanctioning some versions of the technique. In a five-year period in the 1980s, LAPD officers killed sixteen people with a chokehold, and fourteen of these deaths were of Black people.