Nassau OKs $5M purchase of Taser model other police departments find obsolete

Nassau lawmakers this week approved a $5 million contract for police department Tasers that major law enforcement agencies nationwide are phasing out in favor of newer models.

Nassau’s legislative Rules Committee voted unanimously on Monday to outfit the county's roughly 2,500 officers force with a single-shot Taser model that requires officers to manually replace the cartridge before shooting again. Nassau has relied on the X26P model since 2013, and switching to a newer model would require officials to retrain officers, according to the contract. 

The purchase puts Nassau technologically behind most large police departments, including Suffolk and the NYPD, which equip their officers with upgraded multi-shot Tasers. The one-shot model leaves Nassau officers with few options when it comes to subduing threats from a safe distance, experts told Newsday. 

"If you have a one-shot Taser and it doesn’t work, now what do you do?" said David Sarni, a retired NYPD detective and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "Pepper spray or a firearm. That’s what you’re limited to."

The contract did not disclose how many Tasers would be covered by the $5 million. The X26P model is manufactured by Axon, an Arizona-based company that holds a global monopoly on Tasers.

Police officers typically use Tasers to subdue suspects or someone experiencing a mental health crisis, experts say. The gun-shaped devices — which rely on prongs attached to wires that shoot out and deliver an electric shock — fail up to 40% of the time, according to investigative reports and the NYPD's own data. If the prongs don’t attach to the person’s body, or can’t penetrate thick clothing, the Taser doesn’t work, Sarni said.

In recent years, law enforcement agencies nationwide have phased out the X26P model, calling it "soon to be obsolete" in government documents. Several police departments published reports explaining that Axon would provide limited maintenance and replacement parts for the devices.

One Wisconsin police department wrote, "Continuing to rely on outdated equipment long term is not sustainable from either a safety or risk-management perspective." 

In 2019, the Atlanta and Baltimore police departments purchased the newer Taser 7 model, as did the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Houston Police Department.

In 2023, the Los Angeles police chief wrote that the newer Axon models had longer deployment ranges, up to 45 feet, giving officers more space from suspects. That allowed for "enhanced time for decision-making," he wrote.

Axon did not respond to multiple requests from Newsday asking what kind of support the company provides for the Taser X26P, and whether it recommends newer models for large police departments.

The Suffolk County Police Department began transitioning to the Axon 7 model in 2020, phasing out the X26P Tasers, and its predecessor, the X26.

The new model was "significantly more effective," then-Chief of Department Stuart Cameron told Suffolk lawmakers at the time.

"The darts are a little heavier, they fly straighter and with a little greater kinetic energy. So, for example, if you’re shooting somebody that has loose clothing on, it improves the aim of the darts and it makes it more likely that they penetrate the skin so they’ll be effective," he told legislators at a November 2020 meeting.

"The taser now has a second dart capability, so if the first shot is ineffective you can fire the taser a second time," Cameron added. 

With $1.2 billion, Nassau’s police department accounts for more than a quarter of the county's total operating budget. Representatives for the police department did not respond to questions about why the department wasn’t upgrading to the newer models like its department peers, or how much it would cost to do so.

"Maybe it was like, ‘Hey, it’s going to be much cheaper. Let’s just buy them now and see what happens,’ " said Ed Tobayashi, deputy sheriff for the Modoc County Sheriff’s Office in California and a longtime use-of-force training expert for law enforcement agencies nationwide.

"But sooner or later when they switch it out, they’re going to have to go through that training anyway."