Durham County approves $100,000 to buy sheriff’s office new Tasers

The Durham County commissioners this week unanimously approved a Sheriff’s Office request for new Tasers.

The county will spend about $100,000 to buy Tasers from Arizona-based Axon Enterprise. The purchase will replace 100 existing Tasers and add 43 more.

Although none of the five commissioners discussed the item in at a meeting Monday night, Chair Brenda Howerton said all spending requests are reviewed by the interim county manager’s office, the county attorney and county finance staff, which prepare materials for the commissioners to review.

“Regarding the taser request, the current tasers used by the Sheriff’s Office are reaching the end of their life cycle and the manufacturer is discontinuing the model currently used by the Sheriff’s Office,” Howerton wrote in an email to The News & Observer on Wednesday.

Replacement parts, including taser cartridges, will eventually be unavailable for purchase, she added, and the new models the county will be getting come with more safety features and training models.

The Durham County Sheriff’s Office has used Axon Taser products for 10 years.

In 2021 deputies deployed Tasers nine times, Sheriff’s Office spokesperson AnnMarie Breen said in an email. In 2020, they deployed them eight times.

“It is the sentiment of members of the Board of County Commissioners that the use of tasers is a far better option than guns in responding to confrontations with citizens,” Howerton wrote in the email.

Some in Durham feel otherwise.

“Tasers are just yet another weapon police are using to harm people,” said Tyler Whittenberg, a Durham resident and the deputy director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization. “They were initially modeled to reduce incidents of killing people, but it is just another means of excessive force and people are still getting killed.”

“This is about priority setting, and I think that money could be used to better support our youth in Durham,” he said.

Dawn Blagrove, executive director of Emancipate NC, called the new tasers “unnecessary” after Raleigh police tased and fatally shot a man following a crash on Interstate 440.

Emancipate NC, a nonprofit previously known as the Carolina Justice Policy Center, works to shift policies largely affecting people who have been previously incarcerated and to address structural racism.

“Instead of buying Tasers to escalate and incite violence on behalf of law enforcement — in situations where very often it’s not needed or warranted — this money could be invested in de-escalation trainings,” Blagrove said.

The N&O previously reported that police responding to the Raleigh crash found 43-year-old Daniel Turcios carrying a knife that he refused to drop. As he walked away, an officer deployed a Taser “to try to defuse the situation” and another officer shot and killed Turcios after he “swung a knife at officers,” according to a police report.

“Too often, especially when it comes to Black and brown people, we see that law enforcement thinks that the only recourse for them is the use of brute force,” Blagrove said. “But if they did not have these tools of brute force, they would be forced to deal with people through their humanity and condition. And we would see much more favorable outcomes.”

In September 2020, the Durham Police Department also asked for new Tasers. The N&O reported that nearly half of the department’s 450 tasers were unusable, and of the 238 tasers deployed on the street, more than 70 of them had exceeded their five-year shelf life.

Four council members at that time — Jillian Johnson, Charlie Reece, Javiera Caballero and Pierce Freelon — voted to delay a decision for further discussion. The N&O was unable to find out Wednesday whether the city eventually approved the request.

This story was originally published February 17, 2022 at 5:50 AM.