Just ask MY nephew who's a captain with a major metropolitan Sheriff's Dept. ,what he thinks of Tasers ,after he stops laughing !.
Well, a captain, especially in a major metropolitan law enforcement agency, is an administrator, and in my experience, most folks who aspire to promote past sergeant don't have much in the way of recent patrol experience on the streets, so I take the opinions of anyone higher than a lieutenant with a grain of salt. Of course, I was an Axon-certified TASER instructor, and of any less-lethal devices in our inventory, I'd prefer a TASER over OC every day of the week (at least on anyone not wearing a puffy jacket, snowmobile suit or dressed for elk season. TASERs work quite well in Southern California, Florida, Arizona, for example... and in prisons.
The "documented failure rate of the TASER" is very misleading. TASERs do fail, regularly, but
it's not the device itself,
it's a failure of the application. Unless you've been out on the streets fighting, you don't know the effects of adrenaline, fear, extreme physical movements, rapidly evolving situations and fatigue, so getting the darts to deploy correctly (solved with the last couple versions with good laser) and hit the right muscle groups with good spacing is the challenge. Also, before going out on patrol/shift, you need to verify your device is charged -- I cannot tell you how many times I've seen officers fail to do this. Or that the cartridge(s) are probably loaded.
One of my old course books had this blurb: Analyzed 504 use-of-force incidents in large police agency wherein OC spray or TASER energy weapons were used, and found TASER energy weapons were substantially more effective than OC spray, with energy weapons effective 90.2% of the time and OC spray effective only 73.8% of the time.
Never had to use bear spray on an actual bear, but having used OC on multiple (maybe 30 or 40) occasions over the years, I've seen OC be quite effective on human subjects (especially on me).
My point is, there are probably no good ways to quantify the effectiveness of some of these devices because every situation is different and there are so many variables and external, environmental factors that come in to play. However, the new devices have nice, downloadable event logs and video, so the evidence should be building up.
The only thing we ever worried about is how we're gonna write up the use-of-force reports and whether we get to the end of watch and can go home with no one getting seriously injured or killed.
