Mississippi Police Use Tasers Freely, and Injuries Follow

Last summer, a Mississippi police officer approached Vivian Burks as she sat in her car at a local park reading the Bible.

He was cordial at first, offering to help Ms. Burks replace her expired tags with the new ones she had in her car. But the encounter changed quickly after the officer, Blaine Musgrove, said he smelled marijuana and a second Carthage police officer demanded to search the vehicle.

When Ms. Burks, a 65-year-old great-grandmother with no criminal record, tried to get back into her car, the officers grabbed her and ordered her to place her hands behind her back, body camera footage shows. When she did not immediately comply, Officer Musgrove pressed his Taser into her back and shocked her, sending her to the ground in a heap.

Over the next 30 seconds, the video shows, Officer Musgrove shocked her three more times as she twisted her hands to avoid being handcuffed and begged the officers to stop, repeatedly shouting, “I’m sick!” The officers called an ambulance and then left her moaning for help until the paramedics arrived.

“I couldn’t breathe,” Ms. Burks told reporters in an interview. “I just thought that they were going to kill me.”

In many places across the nation, the repeated shocking of Ms. Burks — who was not acting aggressively and was largely under the officers’ control — would be considered an improper and dangerous use of a Taser by the police.

Not in Mississippi.

Here, police agencies set their own rules about Taser use, and many departments have held on to vague, outdated policies that allow officers to shock virtually anyone, for any behavior they see as threatening, with little fear of repercussions. As a result, cases like Ms. Burks’s have occurred all over the state without raising alarms, an investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today found.

Under national standards widely embraced in other states, officers are told to use Tasers only against people who are an imminent threat. To reduce the chance of causing injury or death, they are advised to avoid shocking people who are elderly or who have heart conditions and to avoid shocking anyone for more than 15 seconds over the course of an encounter.

Tasers are designed to make it easy for departments to monitor when officers violate rules like these. Each device electronically logs when it is triggered and for how long, creating a digital trail that can be used to flag excessive Taser use.

But dozens of departments across Mississippi remain in the dark about whether officers use the weapons properly because they do not examine their Taser logs, the news organizations found.

Several Mississippi agencies said they did not know they had access to the logs; at least six did not have the cable needed to extract data from a Taser, until The Times purchased a cable so those departments could provide reporters with copies of the logs.

The Times and Mississippi Today spent months gathering logs from across the state to do what these departments had not — a systematic review to identify excessive Taser incidents. Reporters analyzed more than 100,000 Taser log entries from 36 departments.

The logs alone do not show definitive cases of abuse, but they reveal serious red flags that departments could use to determine when officers fire their Tasers for longer than is considered safe. Over the past four years, Tasers across the state recorded more than 15 seconds of shock at least 600 times.

The logs, combined with thousands of pages of police and court records and interviews with nearly 30 people who were shocked by the police, also revealed dozens of instances where officers shocked people in ways that violated widely accepted Taser use standards.

Some were lying on the ground or sitting in their cars at the time. At least 11 people have accused officers of shocking them while they were pinned down or handcuffed. None of them were armed.

Officers fired their Tasers — sometimes more than 10 times — at people who were slow to follow orders or who argued about why they were being arrested. They shocked at least 12 people who were in the midst of a mental health crisis and who had become irrational or unresponsive.

Often, the people they shocked had been accused of petty crimes, including trespassing and traffic violations.

In 2021, Leake County deputies shocked 49-year-old Kevin Turner for refusing to put his hands behind his back even after he warned them that he had a defibrillator installed in his heart. He was arrested for disturbing the peace, a charge that was later dismissed.

The same year in Lee County, home to Tupelo, sheriff’s deputies fired their Tasers for more than two minutes in total while they arrested Christopher Thomas, who was hallucinating and fighting with deputies.

Keith Murriel died in 2022 after Jackson police officers shocked him at least 40 times while they were trying to arrest him because he refused to leave a motel parking lot. He is one of at least 22 people to die in Mississippi shortly after being shocked by the police, according to news reports and state investigative records. It is unclear whether Tasers caused most of these deaths.

The actual number of excessive Taser activations is almost certainly far greater than The Times and Mississippi Today could tally. Dozens of agencies ignored public records requests for their logs or said they could not provide them. Among them were two of the state’s largest policing agencies — the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol and the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department, which includes Jackson.

In the absence of regular monitoring of the logs, many police agencies must trust accounts given by their officers.

As in many states, Mississippi law enforcement agencies generally require officers to file paperwork describing the details of any encounter where they use force. Many administrators said they do not compare those reports with the officers’ Taser logs to ensure their accuracy.

This lack of oversight has led to serious abuse by some officers. The Times and Mississippi Today reported in 2023 that a group of Rankin County sheriff’s deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad used their Tasers to torture suspected drug users for decades.

Several former Rankin County deputies said that all they needed to do to keep their Taser use secret was to leave it out of their official reports. Department supervisors almost never compared the details in their reports to Taser logs, they said.

This lack of scrutiny also allowed deputies to invent false justifications for using their stun guns and to downplay how many times they shocked people without fear of being caught, according to the deputies.

“Nothing has ever been said to me about a Taser log, and I have never heard of anyone else being questioned about one,” said Christian Dedmon, a former deputy at the department who participated in many Goon Squad raids before being charged with the torture of two Black men in 2023.

Mr. Dedmon was one of six officers sent to prison for shocking the two men with Tasers, beating them and shooting one of them in the mouth. He said departments could prevent similar abuses by randomly auditing their officers’ Taser logs.

Using the logs, reporters found at least 16 incidents at nine other departments where officers failed to accurately report their Taser use.

After reporters shared what they found in the logs with agencies across the state, officials in several departments said they would reconsider how they monitor Taser use. In Magee, Chief Denis Borges updated his department’s policies to require Taser log audits every six months.

Top officials in many other departments, including Chief Billy McMillan of the Carthage police, whose officers shocked Ms. Burks, did not respond to requests for comment or said they were unable to explain their officers’ Taser deployments.

Some guessed that excessive Taser incidents could be officers fiddling with the weapons out of boredom or sparking them as a practical joke. Other department representatives said deputies had shocked aggressive dogs without filing a report. One deputy in Attala County said he used his Taser to kill spiders.

Rick Myers, former executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a professional organization for law enforcement leaders, said a department’s reluctance to track Taser use leaves it vulnerable to excessive force claims and misuse by officers.

“This is a massive leadership failure,” Mr. Myers said.

Taser’s Promise

Tasers were first marketed to police departments thirty years ago as a tool that would revolutionize law enforcement. They promised to allow officers to subdue a suspect without injury, at the touch of a button.

The devices use pressurized gas to fire two small darts connected to wires that deliver an excruciating shock that debilitates most people.

“It feels like fire running across your body,” said Seth Stoughton, a law enforcement instructor and former officer who has been voluntarily shocked by a Taser.

Taser International, which later changed its name to Axon Enterprise Inc., has become a global force in law enforcement equipment and is valued at nearly $50 billion. Today, Axon says that close to 20,000 police agencies around the world use its Tasers. The company promotes its line of weapons as a critical way to reduce deadly police encounters and has claimed credit for saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

But as police agencies adopted Tasers in huge numbers in the early 2000s, doubts emerged about whether the devices were as safe as the company had claimed.

Several medical studies determined that repeated Taser shocks or shocks near the heart could cause cardiac arrest and other life-threatening conditions. Journalists found that a growing number of people were dying after being shocked, and human rights groups raised concerns that the weapons could be used for torture. Because Tasers can cause a person’s muscles to spasm uncontrollably, there is also a risk of injuries caused by falling.

In response, Axon advised police agencies in 2009 to avoid aiming at people’s chests. Two years later, the Justice Department and the Police Executive Research Forum, an influential law enforcement policy group, published more extensive recommendations for safer use.

The guidelines said officers should avoid shocking anyone who is not an immediate threat. They also advised officers to avoid shocking children and people who are elderly, pregnant or have a known heart condition.

Although the recommendations are not binding, law enforcement agencies across the country have incorporated them into their Taser policies. Federal courts in some parts of the United States have ruled that shocking someone who is not a clear threat can be a civil rights violation.

Many department policies across the country say that Tasers should be used only to incapacitate dangerous people so officers can quickly handcuff them while they’re down, and that officers should avoid shocking people for longer than 15 seconds over the course of an entire incident.

Unsafe Taser use occurs in many places, but Mississippi has fallen behind because many police agencies in the state have not adopted these guidelines, and because its courts have been less stringent. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, whose rulings govern Mississippi, contradicted rulings handed down by other courts and decided that officers can shock someone simply for walking away against an officer’s orders.

The Scale of Abuse

What happened to Vivian Burks is exactly the kind of incident that law enforcement officers are supposed to avoid.

Two experts who reviewed the encounter said that when Ms. Burks — an unarmed woman suspected of nonviolent offenses — did not put her hands behind her back, officers should not have escalated the confrontation, especially after she said she was ill.

“Because the Taser is a relatively high-level use of force, it has to correspond with a relatively significant threat or significant interference with a law enforcement objective,” said Ashley Heiberger, a former officer and use of force expert.

Mr. Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s Excellence in Policing & Public Safety Program, said that when Ms. Burks tried to climb into her car, the officers may have been concerned about her grabbing a weapon, but they should have stopped shocking her once she was on the ground.