Bright spark cops plan shock for town ruffians

Lincolnshire Police will soon be adding a whole new meaning to the time honoured phrase .... "a man has been charged."
Our cash strapped force has just received £275,000 from the Home Office to buy three hundred ... yes, three hundred, tasers.
These handy little gadgets, you may recall, look like guns and fire needle-tipped darts up to 21ft to deliver a disabling, 50,000-volt shock, which means that police can flatten suspects without needing to go anywhere near them. At the moment, the cops have only 90 of these gadgets, and increasing the stock by a further 300 means that stun guns are theoretically available to one in three officers - so be careful not to cross a few pen pushers as well as the boys on the beat....there are that many to go around.
Lincolnshire Police are constantly telling us what a good job they do, and how the real worry in our big sky county is the fear of crime rather than the reality.
Yet in the announcement of this latest windfall, we are told: "The nature of policing means that we are constantly dealing with conflict situations, and tasers help us to resolve these quickly and effectively, protecting officers and the public."

This many tasers, in the hands of people in "conflict situations" is a recipe for disaster, no matter how well trained the users are.
The problem is that remote restraint is easier than wasting time trying to talk people into calming down, which is what we would prefer the police to do.
And we question whether Lincolnshire really requires this sort of sledgehammer to crack the nut of public disorder and the Friday night domestic argument.

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