Life Saved Through Use Of Taser

On March 27th, the Kane County Sheriff’s Office asked the park for assistance in dealing with a 23-year-old man armed with a sword. When rangers arrived on scene, they were advised that the man had been involved in a dispute with his father. The rangers could see him through an open front door and noted that he was holding what proved to be a three-and-a-half foot long katana-style sword (a curved, slender blade often referred to as a ‘samurai sword’). The man threatened both the rangers and a Big Water marshal who was also on scene. The man was ordered to put the sword down, but refused to do so. The rangers and marshal negotiated with him and he eventually dropped the blade, then turned and began to walk away, ignoring commands from the rangers to stop. The man then reached toward an obvious bulge in his right front pocket. While one ranger provided cover with his rifle, a second employed his taser to incapacitate the man. He was then taken into custody. A search revealed that the bulge was a five-inch-long, fixed-blade hunting knife. Custody of the prisoner was transferred to the Kane County Sheriff’s office. This use of a taser, or electronic control device (ECD), resulted in the third instance of a life saved in a potentially lethal confrontation in the past seven months by NPS rangers. Previously, rangers from Mammoth Cave used a taser against a knife-wielding man and a New River Gorge ranger used a taser to keep a woman from jumping off the New River Gorge Bridge. A “life saved” incident is any incident in which a taser is used to prevent someone from taking his/her own life or the life of another or when deadly force by an officer would otherwise be justified. The ECD program began in 2001, when rangers in several parks began carrying tasers as alternate intermediate weapons. These parks had great success with tasers, which immediately reduced the number of injuries to both protection rangers and those they were confronting. By 2006, about 20 parks were utilizing tasers. In September of that year, a national ECD policy was adopted following a Washington Office review to ensure consistency in policy throughout the NPS. Since that time, the number of parks with ECD programs has risen to 115, with about 1100 trained users. Information on ECD’s can be found on InsideNPS at  http://inside.nps.gov/waso/waso.cfm?lv=3&prg=801 . Anyone with questions about ECDs should contact Sarah Davis-Reynolds, NPS lead ECD instructor, at 304-671-9083.