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Two state lawmakers in Mississippi have introduced bills to restrict the use of Tasers by police following an investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times that revealed lax oversight and dangerous use of the weapons across the state.
The bills, both sponsored by Democrats, are likely to face pushback from law enforcement officials and significant hurdles in a legislature controlled by Republicans.
One, House Bill 1596, proposed by Rep. Omeria Scott of Laurel, would ban police in Mississippi from using Tasers. The other, Senate Bill 2317, introduced by Sen. Bradford Blackmon of Canton, would allow Taser use only in circumstances where deadly force by police officers is justifiable. It would also bar officers from shocking people who are elderly, pregnant, mentally ill or intoxicated.
Sen. Blackmon said he drafted his bill after learning from recent reporting by Mississippi Today and The Times that there are no statewide guidelines for how law enforcement officers use Tasers.
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The news organizations found that departments in Mississippi have developed a patchwork of outdated Taser policies that often do not address whether officers can shock children or people with known medical conditions. Most do not bar officers from using Tasers against someone in handcuffs.
Few departments aggressively monitor Taser use, even though the devices keep an electronic log of every activation. Reporters used those logs, gathered from departments across the state, to uncover hundreds of suspicious Taser incidents, including some where the person was shocked for far longer than experts consider safe.
In 2023, one of the state’s most extreme examples of Taser abuse was uncovered when Mississippi Today and Tthe New York Times found that a group of sheriff’s deputies in Rankin County, some of whom called themselves the Goon Squad, used their Tasers for years to torture people they suspected of using drugs.
Blackmon said that similar abuses could be prevented by his bill, which requires officers to receive additional training and provide detailed reports of the circumstances that led to each Taser deployment.
“That type of activity could be erased,” Blackmon said. “Or at least caught a whole lot earlier than after you terrorize a whole county for as long as they did.”
After six former officers associated with the Goon Squad were sentenced to decades in prison for torturing three men last year, the Justice Department announced it was investigating a possible pattern of civil rights abuses at the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department.
However, the new leadership of the Justice Department under President Donald Trump has circulated a memo, obtained by the New York Times, pausing new civil rights investigations into law enforcement agencies, raising doubts about whether the case will proceed.
Scott said that because Mississippi has neglected to create safety standards around officer Taser use for so long, she drafted a bill that would take the weapon away.
Developing a standard is “the least that should be done,” Scott said. “We’ve had people tortured at the hands of law enforcement using these weapons.”
Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell said that Tasers are critical tools that help prevent injuries to the public and police.
“I just think an outright ban would not be good policy,” Tindell said, adding that limiting Taser use to deadly force encounters or banning their use on potentially vulnerable groups would put undue pressure on officers making split-second decisions with limited information.
However, requiring officers throughout the state to report their Taser use and mandating additional training were ideas Tindell said he thought were worth discussing.
Tindell plans to address the issue at the next meeting of the state’s Board on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Training. He said that if Mississippi law enforcement leaders and community stakeholders thought a statewide Taser standard could be beneficial, he would consider what rules would be helpful to establish.
Pearl Police Chief Nick McLendon rejected the idea of banning the weapon, saying “Tasers have been one of the best advances in technology in modern-day policing.”
But he noted that some statewide reforms could be helpful, including requiring all departments to document when their officers use Tasers and providing cadets at the state’s law enforcement academy with Taser training, which individual agencies currently must provide.
Beverly Padgett, whose son died after being shocked by Simpson County sheriff’s deputies, said she supports measures to bring more accountability to Taser use by law enforcement.
In 2023, her 34-year-old son, Jared Padgett, said he was hallucinating, so the family called the Simpson County Sheriff’s Department to help transport him to the hospital. Beverly said that rather than helping Jared, who was unarmed and following commands, one deputy shot him with a Taser, causing Jared to flee.
Taser logs show deputies deployed their Tasers 17 times for 94 seconds during the incident, which ended in Jared Padgett being fatally shot by police after he drove off in an officer’s vehicle.
“I hope the bills pass,” Beverly Padgett said. “You can’t just repeatedly put someone through that amount of pain and not help them. Their job is to protect and serve, not to hurt people.”
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