To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many individuals have been tasered by the police in England since 2012 and what protected diversity characteristics applied to each individual.
Answered on
16 September 2016
The Home Office publish police use of TASER ® X26 statistics annually on GOV.UK. These releases contain statistics on police use of TASER ® X26 from the 43 Home Office police forces in England and Wales up to 2015. Protected diversity characteristics do not form part of this collection. The table below shows total police use of TASER ® X26 across England and Wales since 2012.
2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | Total use of TASER ® X26 since 2012 | |
Number of times TASER ® X26 was used | 8,161 | 10,380 | 10,095 | 10,401 | 39,037 |
Source: Home Office
Following the former Chief Constable David Shaw Use of Force Data review, published in July 2016, a new data collection is being implemented by the police which will allow for some protected characteristic data from 2016. We expect the data collected to be published locally by police forces and a sub-set of the data to be included in the mandatory annual data return for forces in 2017/18 for publication as Official Statistics. The current TASER publications can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/use-of-taser-statistics