TASERING. A new descriptive for failing social policy? The reaching for an inappropriate or disproportionate response when others already exist?

Let’s be clear what we are considering here. Tasers are not merely another piece of kit that will help the police do their job more efficiently; they are the latest symbol of how policy makers’ misplaced awe of technology is changing the relationship between citizen and state.

Emotive words, perhaps, but this is the week that saw the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust publish a report, The Database State, claiming that most of Britain’s big brother databases may be illegal, including the controversial ContactPoint, soon to hold details of all our children. This is also the week that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 obliges your internet service provider to keep records of all your emails. Yes, that should be happening right now.

When Robert Peel, as part of Lord Liverpool’s government, incidentally, introduced the first British police force nearly 200 years ago, he did it because, like now, there was an underlying worry about social disorder fuelled by population growth and urban development. In doing so, however, he laid down what became known as Peel’s Principles, the primary one being that “the public are the police and the police are the public”. This meant that the police were only members of the public who were paid to give full-time attention to “duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence”. In other words, the police are paid so that they have the time to act on our behalf to deal with anti-social behaviour.

How they went about that was counterbalanced by another of Peel’s principles, “the degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.” And this should be at the heart of the debate. Are things like Tasers a disproportionate response to anti-social behaviour? Or are there other ways of dealing with it, like curbing alcohol sales and increased education around hard drug use, perhaps hand-in- hand with decriminalisation?

Old chestnuts, perhaps, but if we want to cling on to Peel’s Principle of “the public are the police and the police are the public” let’s be absolutely transparent about what we are, in effect, giving permission for. For instance, Tasering is like slaughtering whales. To deliver the non-lethal shock, two barbed harpoons are fired into a person’s skin that can only then be removed surgically. That seems a bit, well, barbaric? Even for a non-lethal weapon?

Next week, let’s consider more of Peel’s Principles, as well as the tool kit already available to our beat Bobbies including, interestingly, a chemical weapon, CS Spray, that our troops in Afghanistan are banned from using.

Then let’s consider legalised thumping, gassing or Tasering.