Crime Tasers Used on Children under 11 in U.K, UNICEF says

[tom_mai78101]

The use of Tasers and spit hoods on children should be banned in the U.K., according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The agency said that they were being disproportionately used on children of color and that their continued use went against international children's rights standards. UNICEF called for the use of Tasers on children under the age of 18 to be banned.

It also criticized inhumane practices such as spit hoods which it says are also disproportionately used on children of color. A spit-hood is a bag made out of mesh, which is placed over the head of a detained person by a police officer to stop them spitting or biting.

According to the report, "A Rights-Based Analysis of Youth Justice in the United Kingdom", data gathered from 29 police forces reveals that 51 percent of children who had Tasers used on them in England were from a BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) background.


Read more here. (Newsweek)

 

[Ghan]

disproportionately used on children of color

Is that because they are disproportionately engaged in criminal behavior? I'm assuming most police don't taze or hood someone just for the fun of it. All the article cites are number of cases vs the overall population of those ethnic groups, but that's not sufficient to warrant this accusation. If an ethnic group makes up 15% of the population, but they commit crimes at double the rate of the rest of the population, then it would make sense that those numbers are out of line.

 

[Varine]

Is that because they are disproportionately engaged in criminal behavior? I'm assuming most police don't taze or hood someone just for the fun of it. All the article cites are number of cases vs the overall population of those ethnic groups, but that's not sufficient to warrant this accusation. If an ethnic group makes up 15% of the population, but they commit crimes at double the rate of the rest of the population, then it would make sense that those numbers are out of line.

That's really hard to quantify things like this as simply as that, because we also have to consider the actual level of crimes being committed and the action taken in similar cases, which these articles pretty rarely do. If a system has a tendency for racial biases, it's not a far leap of logic to then assume that the actual crime rates might be similar, but minority arrest and prosecution gets prioritized and skews the apparent rates to favor, and so you can't just use the argument "blacks commit more crimes than whites" to justify disproportionate incarceration or brutality rates as the end all statement to the concern, which tends to ultimately be an issue of bias in the use of force, rather than the use of force itself.

 

[Ghan]

That's really hard to quantify things like this as simply as that, because we also have to consider the actual level of crimes being committed and the action taken in similar cases, which these articles pretty rarely do. If a system has a tendency for racial biases, it's not a far leap of logic to then assume that the actual crime rates might be similar, but minority arrest and prosecution gets prioritized and skews the apparent rates to favor, and so you can't just use the argument "blacks commit more crimes than whites" to justify disproportionate incarceration or brutality rates as the end all statement to the concern, which tends to ultimately be an issue of bias in the use of force, rather than the use of force itself.

Exactly, that's what I'm saying. We don't know just from this one piece of data what the root cause is, but the article's unstated premise is that just because the numbers don't align here, it means there's a systemic race problem.
The data doesn't support such a conclusion. At least not yet. It also doesn't support the denial of such a conclusion.