After Eight Months of Anticipation...Taser and OC Day!

You can't really see much here, but my right eyelid is quite swollen/inflamed some 1 1/2 to 2 hours after first being sprayed.

First of all, "OC" stands for Oleoresin Capsicum, which describes the active agent in peppers that makes them hot! So according to the powerpoint training presentation, the OC spray we use is only .18% OC, and the rest is water and other stuff. Let me tell you, that is more than enough to get the job done. But alas, I'm getting ahead of myself...

So we started the day at the Idaho State Police facility in Meridian where we went through the whole training presentation from the CD that is included with every new Taser. Our instructor was one of our defensive tactics instructors who also happens to be a Taser certified instructor. He went through the whole thing with us for about six hours, with our "volunteer" training experience worked in around the three hour mark. Before I get to that, here are a couple of the interesting things I learned about Tasers:

- While an electric outlet in a house uses only 110 V, and the Taser carries 50,000 V (though it only transfers between 1,200 and 2,500 per firing, depending on the model, and a static shock from walking on your carpet is 30,000 V), the electric outlet in a house is much more dangerous due to the amperage that it uses. An electrical outlet uses 16 amps, while a Taser uses only 0.004 amps. (When I was talking about the Taser to Walker Ford, who has a degree in Electrical Engineering, he immediately asked about the amps rather than the volts, so there you go.)

- Taser is one of the most extensively studied less-lethal instruments available. There have been over 1,500 studies conducted and over 100,000 people have been tested with zero fatalities.

- It would take 35x the electrical output (amps, I think) used by the Taser to cause a 200 lb. person to go into fibrillation. It would take 15-20x the electrical output used by the Taser to interfere with a pacemaker.

Anyway, there was some other interesting stuff in there, but I'm sure you are probably most interested in hearing whether or not I got tased. Well, I did. Just so you know, I didn't totally cave-in to peer pressure. I went in undecided as to whether I would do it or not. In the end, it was a combination of curiosity/having a memorable experience, peer pressure, and a desire to "take it like a man" that I ended up doing it. When the instructor asked us who was going to volunteer, everyone's hands shot up with the exception of mine and the real small girl in class. When she raised her hand after a few seconds, that sealed the deal for me. I felt like Gimli when Legolas headed into the Paths of the Dead before he did - "This is just unheard of. Will an elf go underground and a dwarf dare not. I'd never hear the end of it."

So we all got up and the assistant instructor shot a live taser cartridge into a target so we could see it in action. He then took the probes out of the target and hooked them to the shirt and pants of the first volunteer - our own 6'3" 285 lb MMA fighter. Two of the other trainees held him under the arms and the instructor asked how long he wanted to go for, with four seconds being the maximum for a training exercise. He took the full four. I could tell he was determined to fight through it and try to move forward or something, but when the assistant pulled that trigger, he locked up like the tin man after a rainstorm. However, he still managed to say, "Boy, that hurts good," through gritted teeth. That gave us a good laugh. Once it was over he had a dazed smile on his face and it was someone else's turn. The instructor was video recording the whole thing for purposes of documentation and so that they can show it at our graduation from the academy. I think that they give us each a copy too so I'll have to post the highlights when I get it. It's surprisingly funny to watch - not the actual tasing, but the look on people's faces afterwards and what they do and say once the juice stops. Most people describe feeling like they just ran a marathon or hiked a mountain in four seconds. This makes sense when you understand that the taser works by overloading your motor nerves by causing rapid muscle contractions to the tune of 19 per second. This jams the normal input from your brain, and as soon as it stops, you regain control.

I was the last one in the group to go. I wussed out and said I only wanted 2 seconds and made sure that the spread of the prongs wasn't too large (the larger the spread, the more muscle groups are affected). He hooked the top prong onto my shirt about two inches above my belt and the bottom prong onto my pants about two inches below my belt - both on the right side. Then he let'er rip!

An X26 Police Taser minus the probe cartridge that attaches to the front. When used like this the Taser doesn't cause much muscle dysfunction, but it sure gets your attention.

It was much worse, and not nearly as bad as I had imagined. Having been jolted before a time or two - 7th grade science class and the electric generator come to mind - it wasn't much different quality-wise, but the quantity was much greater. It was a terribly uncomfortable experience. I looked down at the prongs while I was being jolted and could see blue sparks from both of them passing through my clothes. That two seconds seemed like it went on forever, and yet when it was over, it didn't seem that bad. Then, to our astonishment, Mr. Lincoln, the first volunteer of the group requested a second round. Apparently he was feeling the same way I was - that once it was over it didn't seem like that big of a deal. They hooked him up again and he said that this time he really was going to walk through it, now that he knew what to expect. They jolted him and after about a second he yelled, "Stop! Stop! I'm done!" and that was that. He said that he felt like he had to know whether someone of his dimensions and background could fight through the taser if they were determined enough. After that second "refresher" round, he felt satisfied that he'd gotten the answer.

Later that afternoon was OC training. The OC powerpoint was only about an hour long and there wasn't a whole lot to it. The next thing we knew we were warming up and heading outside for our OC certification test. We had to get our duty belt on, including our plastic practice side-arm, and then we had to pass two tests. First, the instructor sprayed us right in the face and then told us to open our eyes and wait for five seconds. After that, he turned us loose to fight the "redman" - another officer earning overtime pay by dressing up in a bunch of red pads and trying to grab the gun of the sprayed officers while they wrastled him to the ground. Once the redman was judged to be satisfactorily controlled, we headed over to another station where we had to shoot two shots with an airsoft gun on a target about 15 yards away.

This, my friends, was an awful experience. Now, they tell you that OC spray is 30% physical and 70% psychological, and I actually do agree with them. But boy, oh boy, that 30% is an absolute monster! I've really been trying to come up with a good metaphor to describe the feeling, but it really is indescribable. Here's the best I've come up with so far:

Imagine that someone throwing boiling water in your face, which causes you to instinctively squint your eyes closed, and then when you open your eyes, your poor, tender eyeballs are exposed repeatedly to the mouth of an active blowtorch. This is a bit misleading because when they first spray you it doesn't really feel like anything - it just kind of smells funny, like Tabasco sauce with extra vinegar. Then, after about five seconds, it's like the pain is a drag racer, revving its engine at the line waiting for the green light and then BLAMO! It's off like a shot and there's no turning back. Yeah, so after that five seconds of limbo, all of a sudden it feels like some small, clawed animal is trying to rip your eyeballs from their sockets while your face starts to burn like you've fallen asleep face-down on a cooking griddle next to sizzling bacon and eggs.

Anyway, it's terrible. You have to force your eyes open to see where the redman is, and then you close them tight and charge forward. I had my eyes closed the whole time I was fighting him, and eventually I managed to get him in a vertical arm-bar which allowed me to move on to the next stage. Then I had to force my eyes open again to see where the heck I was supposed to run to. Opening your eyes is SO PAINFUL! Like I said, while having your eyes closed is no picnic (your face is still on FIRE!), opening them is the worst thing someone could ever ask you to do. It's like your eyelids are all that are protecting your poor eyeballs from the firey flames of the blowtorch, or the razor claws of those vicious animals. I imagine that the "firey flames of the blowtorch" were the feeling created by the liquid portion of the spray used to carry the tiny fragments of burning pepper plant, which produced the "razor claws" feeling as they were moved across the surface of my eyes by the motion of my eyelids.

I stumbled over to the station, opened my eyes just enough to grab the gun, and then again just enough to see where the target was, and then I fired with my eyes closed. Fortunately, I landed the two hits and they sent me off to "decontaminate." The paramedic grabbed my arm and escorted me to the hose. My eyes were closed tight and I was coughing and spitting, and when I grabbed the hose I thrust the stream onto my eyes and rubbed to get the residue off of my face as quickly and thoroughly as possible. I ended up spraying my wide-open eyes with the stream in desperation, as the water seemed to have little effect. The instructors kept telling us that once we rinsed the residue off of our faces that we should leave the hose for the "best decontaminant" which was fresh air according to them. Every instinct linked to your blazing face and eyes is telling you to run to water, and they're telling you to just walk around and wait for it to go away.

Now at this point, in spite of the intense pain and terrible discomfort, I was actually laughing a bit and trying to lighten up the mood created by ten people wandering about the grassy area between dorm buildings groaning, screaming, coughing, drooling, hacking, crying, spitting, and burping (a humorous side-effect of the respiratory impairment caused by the spray). It took a good 30-45 minutes before I could keep one eye open voluntarily for more than 30 seconds. I was the second to the last to be sprayed but was one of the first to "recover." I found that if I forced my eyes open until the tears carrying the toxic spray with them filled my eyes, I could then squint and dab the liquid out of my eyes and do it again. After about 20 minutes of doing this I had improved significantly. However, I then noticed the other effects of the spray which had taken a far back seat to the burning of my eyes - like the burning of my skin.

Anyway, once I could keep my eyes open voluntarily for a good amount of time they cleared me to drive home. They told us not to shower that night because water would reactivate any residue that remained. Time, apparently, is the only foolproof decontaminant. Consequently, I slept with a shirt wrapped around my head to keep from contaminating my pillow and getting an unpleasant surprise down the road. The next morning in the shower, sure enough, after about one or two minutes, my face was on fire once again, but fortunately my eyes were only mildly upset.


There you have it ladies and gentlemen. I have been dreading this day ever since someone in our ward told me that if I got the job I would have to go through this stuff - and that was back in February when I first started the application process. I'm glad I had the experience, and I feel especially tough since the two ex-military people in our group said that the tear gas training soldiers go through in basic training is a cake-walk compared to OC training. Sweet.